But even the best content is useless if you’ve got no members. And to get members, you need to have lots of traffic and visitors flooding your site. At this point, some marketers are worrying on how much money they have to shed out to promote their site.

But here’s the good news: You don’t need to spend hundred to thousands of dollars to give your website the massive exposure it needs to attract members. There are free traffic techniques that could produce similar – or even better – results than paid methods. And you might even find them easier and quicker to apply.

Here are 5 no-cost traffic-generating tactics that could bring an avalanche of targeted traffic to your website:

A) Joint Ventures/Affiliate Program

This is probably the most powerful way to leverage from other people’s assets. Just imagine if you could persuade even just one marketer who has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

If your sales copy converts at a high rate, you could have thousands of new customers from the drove of visitors from just one promotional email, allowing you (and your partner/affiliate) to earn a hefty passive income every month.

But how do you recruit joint venture partners or affiliates to promote your site? Here are some useful tips:

1. Invite everyone who joins as a member to earn money by promoting your website. 

2. Give them huge commissions (at least 50%).

3. Test, track, and improve your results to achieve the highest conversion rate possible. Most marketers base their decision to promote a site mostly on their conversion rate. 

4. Provide them with effective promotional and pre-selling tools such as solo ads, banners, brandable reports, articles, keywords for pay-per-click campaigns, classified ads/sponsor ads, signature lines, and more. Consider creating e-book or video guides that teach your partners/affiliates how to earn money by promoting your site. 

5. Attend seminars and networking sessions to build relationships with potential JV partners.

6. To recruit more people promoting your membership site, consider setting up a 2nd-tier affiliate program. This is where an initial affiliate refers another person to become an affiliate. The initial affiliate will get a percentage (usually smaller) of the commissions every time his affiliate referral makes a sale. This is a powerful method because the initial affiliate earns passive income from the efforts of his 2nd-tier affiliates.

B) Viral Reports

Using viral reports is a fantastic way to pre-sell your site. If the report is good enough, people will spread them around like (you guessed it) a virus!

Viral reports could be excerpts or sample chapters from the full products available inside your membership site.

One effective way to make your report spread like wildfire is to use the power of the Zeigarnik effect, based on Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik’s theory where she stated that that an incomplete or unfinished task creates “psychic tension” within us. This tension drives us to complete that unfinished task.

So what you need to do is give them the first few pages of a quality report. The report should end at a point where their curiosity is at its peak, and they are motivated to finish what they’ve started to read.

After creating your viral reports, the next step is to spread them around to as many places as possible. Here are some tips to get massive exposure for your reports:

1. Upload them in e-book directories like free-ebooks.net, ebookpalace.com, jogena.com and our own site at SureFireWealth.com

2. You could also upload them in a software promotion service, the most popular of which is upload.com. Even if your viral report is in pdf format, upload.com has a category for “Ebooks” or “Ebook Software” under the “Educational Software” main category, where you can post your viral reports. Upload.com gets high search engine rankings so your viral report could get a lot of downloads if you target the right keywords.
 
3. Within the report, tell the reader that they have giveaway or resell rights to the report. To give them more incentive, invite them to join your affiliate program and give them the ability to brand the report with their affiliate link.

4. Send the reports to your list (if you have one) or Twitter followers (more about Twitter later).

5. Ask your JV partners or affiliates to give away these reports branded with their own affiliate links to your membership site or product.

C) Article Marketing

Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to establish your credibility and endorse your sites. It allows you to give valuable information, and build trust and authority, before making any kind of promotion. 

Here are some tips to pack the most punch out of your article marketing efforts:

1. Come up with an eye-catching headline. Insert news value and reader benefits into the headline, so people would be more enticed to read it.

2. The first sentence should grab their attention and make them want to read further. Each sentence that follows must create anticipation for the next sentences and make people want to read the article until the end (Remember the Zeigarnik effect above?).

3. The Resource Box is probably the most important part of the article since this is the only portion where you get to promote your site. It should state the most attractive benefits to the reader.

Some writers come up with a resource box that sounds like an autobiography. But people are not interested to hear what your life experiences are; people want to know “what’s in it for them” or how they could benefit from what you’re offering.

4. Submit to the top article directories. Here’s a partial list of article directories with high page rank and alexa ranking:

ezinearticles.com
goarticles.com
searchwarp.com
articlecube.com
articlealley.com
articlesphere.com
amazines.com
articlebase.com
buzzle.com
articlecity.com
ideamarketers.com
articledashboard.com

and you can also submit articles at our own site at: SureFireWealth.com
 
D) Video Marketing

Videos are extremely powerful tools to promote your product or membership site. You could make an informative video, and inform the reader they could get better or more information from your product or membership site.

Here’s another idea which works like a charm. You could take them on a tour inside your product or membership area. Give them a peek of what they’ll be getting once they’ve become members. This will whet their appetite if you’ve got the right teasers. Use camtasia to record your actions as you login to your site and browse around for the viewer to see what’s inside.
 
After creating your videos, submit them to video-sharing sites like youtube, metacafe, revver, aol, google and yahoo videos. You could use tubemogul.com to simultaneously submit one video to a variety of video-sharing sites. However, take note that some of them prohibit any use of software or automatic mechanism to submit your videos, so read their terms of service and policy very carefully to make sure you’re adhering to the rules.

E) Twitter

Twitter has become one of the hottest commodities nowadays. The key to success with Twitter is to build a responsive list of followers and build a solid relationship with them.

Follow people in your niche or interest, and they’ll likely follow back. There’s a twitter tool called “Twittollower” that lets you bulk follow (or unfollow) a mass number of people all at once.

We use this ourselves and it’s pretty cool:
http://www.surefirewealth.com/recommends/Twittollower

While in the process of building relationships, you could even outsource some of your Twitter posts. You could hire someone to find quotes and interesting information related to your field, and then have them post them on your Twitter account. Tools such as Tweetlater.com or Hootsuite.com can be used to schedule time for posting, along with a host of other benefits.
 
Give your followers excerpts, articles or tips coming from your membership site. Once you get them hungry for more content, your membership site will accumulate members faster than you might think.

You can get lots of members with minimal (or even no) cash outlay. All you need are the right strategies to succeed with your product sales or membership site. Use the 5 free traffic methods in this article, and I’m confident your website earnings will improve.

To Your Success!

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
Follow us on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/SureFireWealth

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This marked it so it could be found again in the future. That was the old way to spread the word about the things that were new or exciting on the Internet. Now, there are some easier and much more effective social bookmarking tools you can use to get the word out about new things.

Social networking involves “tagging” a website of particular interest so that it can be easily accessed. The tag shows up in two places; one being the user’s profile or website, the second being the original homepage of the tagging bookmark. The tag can appear on a list of favorite websites posted on a blog or website, or it can be a special website designed specifically for these tags, called a bookmarking network. Examples of popular bookmarking networks are twitter, facebook, squidoo, flikr, and wetpaint.

Visitors to those sites can then rate the URL value according to how often a search occurs or that link is clicked on. Popular bookmarks remain at the top while less favorable links and spam are lost to new searches. Social bookmarking can be monitored for trends in the market and is used to introduce new and better products and ideas.

Many consumers, whether they realize it or not, use social bookmarking everyday to decide what products are worth investing in, where to shop, where to eat and other consumer decisions. This is because when they do a search online, the most popular searchable things that have had multiple tags come up first in the list. Tags can be a good way for consumers to gauge whether or not a product or company is legit by who manages the feeds and how often the website is tagged.

Here is a list of some great social bookmarking tools you can use today to boost your website visits and get the word out about new items of interest:

Twitter. Do you twitter? This seems like the most asked question recently by social networking people. This free social networking site works by people who become members and post short updates as they wish on anything in general. It’s advertised as a “service for family, friends and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick , frequent answers to the questions; What are you doing” (Twitter.com) The update feeds can then be posted on the person’s blogs, websites or anyplace else where they want people to know about what they’re doing and talking about. People often post their articles or other tidbits about their businesses with links included to get others to visit their website.

Facebook. This is an international social networking site whereby members sign up free and can post messages and updates whenever they wish. If they include links to their websites or other online items, members can go there to read more about them. Feeds are then available for adding to blogs or websites for real time updates. Facebook is growing in popularity among people who were typically participating in other social networking sites like MySpace, but its attracting more career- and business-oriented people.

Squidoo. This neat little social bookmarking site has nothing to do with sealife. In fact, not only is it a great way for people to interact and post updates, but it allows users to create simple websites called “lenses” for others to read about their special interests or topics. So if you are promoting a certain niche interest, an idea or something related to your business, you can create a page to promote this idea and include links back to your sites. Squidoo offers its members additional tools like forums to come up with ideas to promote their pages and highlights popular lenses all over the Internet.

Flikr. If you’re into sharing more than words and like to include images as part of your networking efforts, then you may like Flikr. This social bookmarking site allows users to post images for others to review. Users can also talk about their experiences by joining either private or public groups. So families can use Flikr to share personal photos, or public groups can share images and talk about things of interest. Each photo is assigned a tag which can be placed on user’s websites and blogs. Flikr rates images according to how many times they’ve been viewed and this list is posted on the community section for all to see.

Wetpaint. This is a Wiki format social bookmarking site that allows members to create a website about anything they are interested in or want to promote. It’s a similar concept to Squidoo, except that it is expanded to include the ability to integrate popular feeds into both your Wetpaint site and your blogs or other websites seamlessly. Wetpaint is supported by not only all the major search engines, but also by all primary news feeds and searches conducted by Internet users. This opens up the possibility that someone who may just be doing a general search will land on your Wetpaint site.

There are so many great tools out there that you can use to get the word out about your ideas and share your blogs and websites more effectively. In just a few minutes, you can be signed up and hooked into the best of what the Internet has to offer. Be sure to check out the above social bookmarking sites to get the most out of these services and increase your website’s searchability.

To Your Success!

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
Follow us on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/SureFireWealth

Bookmark It

Hide Sites