Case Study - Free Traffic

Monday, August 27th, 2007 • Category

I have to admit that when my mentor, Stephen Pierce, taught me 10 Free Web Traffic Generation Strategies, I felt skeptical and overwhelm. After all, although it was called free web traffic, actually it was not free: it used my own personal resources which were time and effort. Especially since he only told me what to do but not how to do it effectively.

Well, since he’s my mentor and I paid quite some amount of money for his coaching, I decided to believe him and gave it a try. It bombed big time! I didn’t get traffic at my first attempt and I felt frustrated. My thought was, “Damn, I paid for this and this is all I received? Do this. Do that. Do this again. Do that again.” Simply put, I was very upset.

Keep Trying

However I felt that I only wasted my money (for coaching fee) if I quited. So I kept doing these free web traffic generation strategies. But still no result.

So I changed my course of action. I researched the web, forums and blogs, and looked for information: How Internet marketers got their web traffic? I got the same piece of information: Stumbling, blog posting and commenting, forum marketing, article marketing, and so on. This convinced me that there was a missing piece of puzzle in generating free web traffic that I was not aware of.

Stumble Upon

Finally I got a fraction of that missing piece of puzzle and I made an experiment. Bang, I at least doubled my blog traffic using Stumble Upon during this experiment!

[image]
A snapshot of my Google Analytics’ traffic overview

[image] A snapshot of my traffic sources’ proportion

But what I did was still ineffective according to Hammer, fellow blogger.

This is a very ineffective way to use StumbleUpon and if you only got 193 unique visits you need to rethink your strategy. I consistently get a couple thousand hits a day from SU and have gotten as high as 10,000 hits in one day to certain posts. Continue reading â†’

At least there was a start. I could finally got a decent amount of free web traffic using Stumble Upon and I keep polishing my stumbling skills.

Social Bookmarks

To be honest, I still couldn’t get significant traffic using social bookmarks: Onlywire and Digg.

However recently I learned these interesting facts about:

Reddit (from my dear blogger friend, Jonathan C. Phillips)

As for Reddit, it’s actually quite like any other social networking sites, except it’s a meritocracy, which means even if 40% of people bury your story, it may still get to the front page. even votes down will count as “getting attention” good or bad. As with Netscape or other Social Networks, the more friends you have the better your chances are to make the frontpage.

Netvous
One of traffic generation videos that I watched mentioned that Netvous doesn’t have no-follow attribute. This means that URL submission to Netvous is indexed by search engines. This is great news because Netvous is PR 7!

Now I keep focusing on those two social bookmark sites.

Conclusion

I learned a lot from this experience and experiment.

Trust your mentor (if you have one). Your mentor’s teachings may have deeper meanings that you may not grasps its meaning yet at first. Keep trying and focus on getting great result. You’ll eventually attract your goals. Ask successful people how they do it. You’ll be amazed that they’ll answer your questions and help you. Welcome coopetition (a unique blend of cooperation and competition) by working together and helping each other. Apply Paretto’s rule. In whatever you, there’s always 20% action that gives you 80% results. Focus on this 20% action only.

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There Are 12 Comments. »

Comment by Judith on 27 August 2007:

I think the best way to get free traffic is to create a free ebook like you did (”The Untold Blog Secrets”) and, after that, creat another, then another, then another, and so on.

Just my 2 cents
Judith

Comment by James - Visualized.Feel.Abundance on 2 September 2007:

Hey Aldian,

Nice write up to share your experience. Mentoring is important and when we decide to get a mentor, we got to just believe in him

And I fully agree with Pareto’s Principle, I focus 80% of all my effort on 20% of my activities that generate 80% of my desired results.

Cheers
James

Comment by Aldian on 7 September 2007:

HI Judith, free ebook surely gets me traffic. But I still needed traffic first to be able to distribute my free ebook

Hey James, thanks for dropping by. Yes it’s very true. Mentoring can shortcut our success!

Paretto rule is also a must. Just keep focusing on what works the best for you and gives you the best result.

Pingback by Untwisted Vortex - Living in a Different Land on 19 September 2007:

over Windows. I receive the same newsletter he does and was appalled by Microsoft’s behavior. I’ve already been leaning to Linux as my next computer’s OS and that just about cinches it. Adian wrote about hiscase study of free traffic. An interesting read. The gist of the article points to the fact that you just need to keep trying. What works for others may not work for you, at least not in the same way. I didn’t know there were so many scammers in the oil industry, but as Daniel

Comment by Kerri on 28 September 2007:

Hi Aldian

Good info. I wasn’t really into Netvous but now that I read your comment, I’ll include it (through SocialMarker.com or OnlyWire.com).

I’d be interested in seeing an update if you’d like to share your figures now.

Comment by Aldian on 28 September 2007:

Hi Kerri,

My traffic result is still like a yo-yo because I haven’t focused in driving traffic to only one of my blog/site. Currently I split them between 2-3 sites. Yeah I know I must focus on one of them.

Plus, the current traffic generation effort hasn’t gone full throttle yet. It’ll beat my previous experiment once it goes full throttle!

I’ll definitely post an update when I get more stable result

Pingback by Stephen Pierce Fan Freebies on 29 September 2007:

without this group, I know I would not have learned as much as I have about social bookmarking and massively increased my traffic. How Aldian gets Free Traffic Aldian shares a case study he wrote about this free traffic, along with his traffic result.http://aldianprakoso.com/case-study-free-traffic/

Comment by Barry Cox - Scottsdale AZ Real Estate on 19 October 2007:

Good post. I’m just starting my research on social bookmarking sites and what they can do for me and my site. It seems like there are so many avenues to get traffic to your site. I guess I need to just focus on a couple and make a concentrated effort.

Comment by Aldian on 1 November 2007:

Thank you Barry.

Yes, you definitely need to focus and make a concentrated effort to get greater result.