Paid Traffic or Free Traffic? (20)
I am actually sort of new to affiliate marketing. I have a real newbie question.
Is paid traffic a must? I know the pros but is it what almost everyone here (I mean, who do this for a living) go for?
Or, can you do the same with free traffic? Is there someone killing it with free traffic? If so, how?
If my question is confusing, pardon me.
Hey,
good question, thanks for asking!
I believe most of us here on the forum does affiliate marketing with paid traffic -> Facebook, Push, Native, Adult ... it's kinda the fastest way to get traffic, but also more risky as you have to pay for it.
That's the most challenging part, but once you master it, you can scale into some interesting numbers that are way harder to achieve with free traffic.
When it comes to free traffic, it's mostly all about SEO.
I know many people who are doing good with SEO, they mostly build websites - magazines and review sites where they review different kind of products and services.
Here you try to rank your site in Google and get "FREE" traffic this way.
But it also costs money in the end as you have to pay for the content writers, backlinks, tools etc.
I wrote about this exact same topic some time ago on my blog, you can take a look: Free Traffic Isn’t Free (Or, Why I’d Rather Pay for Traffic)
Bots, viral sharing, uploading YouTube videos, chat traffic, comment spam, Instagram, classifieds just to name few.
There are people who are making real good money running sweeps on FB with viral sharing.
Or people doing ewhoring for dating websites.
YT or Insta to promote game cheats and use content locking to make money.
In your blog post you are right that FREE is not always FREE.
Often you have the situation FREE in terms of money but then you have to pay with your time.
Or you buy software to do the job and automate the stuff, then the initial cost (and maybe following cost for proxies etc) isn´t free but you don´t have to pay for the traffic as you would do in paid advertising.
I also ran free traffic for years and made 6 figures from it (see HERE) and the only cost I had was about $10 per month for VPN.
Later I also had another $15/month or so for a Windows VPS.
But in the end I could have done all the stuff really for free.
As you can read in the post the time also wasn´t an issue for me, was only an hour or so work per month.
I know that this is probably an extreme example but I just want to show that there really is free stuff possible.
I guess the biggest advantage of running paid traffic is that you more or less know what to expect for your money and that you have much more control over your campaigns.
And you often see much faster results compared to different kinds of free traffic.
The main difference between using paid and free traffic is the time needed to see results. With paid traffic, you can see results in a few hours, with free traffic (especially SEO) it can take months.
So to answer your question, paid traffic is not a must, but it delivers faster results. And as Erik mentioned already, it's not really possible to reach the same volumes with free traffic, unless you really hit some special market and manage to totally dominate it or launch a new service that happens to get massively popular.
Working with free (organic) traffic can be very rewarding though and as twinaxe mentioned, there are quite a few ways to work with traffic that you do not have to directly pay for.
I think we should talk more about organic traffic here on the forum... it's true that most of us are media buyers, but I'm sure there are quite a few SEOers among us as well. And on top of that, building a site with healthy organic user base can equal to owning a very precious asset. These sites can also be more stable than a property that relies on paid advertising ... there quite a few positives to this approach to be honest 
Originally Posted by twinaxe
I almost forgot about these spammy & blackhat methods as I'm not following them much lately (used to follow these on BHW years ago) and I'm not sure how well they work these days.
But yeah, these can work as well, if you are good with programming and scripting I'm sure there are lot of ways to get some free traffic, thanks for bringing this up!
Getting free traffic is quite time-consuming. While with the paid traffic you'll see the first results faster, which means you could faster optimize your campaign to make it more profitable
Originally Posted by twinaxe
In this post, you talked about viral sharing on Facebook. How do I create a viral share on FB? I mean, I can share it in groups or via messenger I guess. You mean, I should create a referral program?
Originally Posted by matuloo
So to answer your question, paid traffic is not a must, but it delivers faster results. And as Erik mentioned already, it's not really possible to reach the same volumes with free traffic, unless you really hit some special market and manage to totally dominate it or launch a new service that happens to get massively popular.
Working with free (organic) traffic can be very rewarding though and as twinaxe mentioned, there are quite a few ways to work with traffic that you do not have to directly pay for.
I think we should talk more about organic traffic here on the forum... it's true that most of us are media buyers, but I'm sure there are quite a few SEOers among us as well. And on top of that, building a site with healthy organic user base can equal to owning a very precious asset. These sites can also be more stable than a property that relies on paid advertising ... there quite a few positives to this approach to be honest
They can be rather time-consuming though, if not automated.
Would love to learn more about it.
Originally Posted by erikgyepes
Now since I am just starting out in this field. I wanted to get an idea how the masters are doing it.
Seems paid advertising is the way to go.
BTW read your blog post. Yes, backlinks, domains and above all, TIME equal to a lot in monetary times, I agree.
Originally Posted by alessaboss1212
Some affiliates let users share their landing page on FB or send it via message on WhatsApp.
Example: you run sweepstakes and one of the rules to qualify to win is to share the offer with 10 of your friends and ONLY after that you can proceed to redeem your prize.
If done properly something like this can have a snowball effect and grow pretty fast.
Yes, that was my first idea. To get them to share the offer with their connections. Thanks for confirming that.
Maybe @twinaxe will add a few more ideas to it since he is pretty big on bots and all.
Originally Posted by erikgyepes
But for some time already I think about blowing the dust from my Zennoposter and get some new bots done.
Probably more for entertainment but it´s really fun when you crack a platform for automation.
Btw, I also still have a Jr VIP account with more than 800 posts on BW but didn´t use it for many years anymore.
Originally Posted by alessaboss1212
About the viral sharing, probably you have seen the "competitions" on FB where users have to comment a post and then like and share a fangpage.
This can create a giant flood of traffic when done right.
The pages usually don´t last for long but when you can get enough traffic from it before it´s taken down it can be worth it.
The hardest part is to get the initial traffic, when it starts rolling it´s like an avalange and hard to stop.
For such things I have a script that you can setup on a website/landing page where users have to share the website X times before they can continue to the "prize" or whatever.
The original script wrote the IP to a database and sets a cookie.
When a user visits through your ref link the count is increased and when it reaches the number of users you set the content will be released.
I modified the script a bit so that it rather uses a random number instead of IP because in my opinion this is better for some stuff.
Originally Posted by alessaboss1212
I am not pretty big on bots but I always enjoyed doing such stuff and created some (I would say) pretty cool bots like YT comment spammer, Mass PM bots for YT and Pinterest, some uploaders for websites.
You could also easily create bots for online contests to vote and such stuff.
When there is enough interest I can try to write a bit about these things.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
But for some time already I think about blowing the dust from my Zennoposter and get some new bots done.
Probably more for entertainment but it´s really fun when you crack a platform for automation.
Btw, I also still have a Jr VIP account with more than 800 posts on BW but didn´t use it for many years anymore.
Glad that you liked it
About the viral sharing, probably you have seen the "competitions" on FB where users have to comment a post and then like and share a fangpage.
This can create a giant flood of traffic when done right.
The pages usually don´t last for long but when you can get enough traffic from it before it´s taken down it can be worth it.
The hardest part is to get the initial traffic, when it starts rolling it´s like an avalange and hard to stop.
For such things I have a script that you can setup on a website/landing page where users have to share the website X times before they can continue to the "prize" or whatever.
The original script wrote the IP to a database and sets a cookie.
When a user visits through your ref link the count is increased and when it reaches the number of users you set the content will be released.
I modified the script a bit so that it rather uses a random number instead of IP because in my opinion this is better for some stuff.
Haha, don´t get me wrong.
I am not pretty big on bots but I always enjoyed doing such stuff and created some (I would say) pretty cool bots like YT comment spammer, Mass PM bots for YT and Pinterest, some uploaders for websites.
You could also easily create bots for online contests to vote and such stuff.
When there is enough interest I can try to write a bit about these things.
I recently started using a bot on Instagram. To be honest, I got my account banned like a couple of times.
I was also curious, does the torrent method still work? If it does, can you do the same with ebooks over there? Do they get as many installs? I think torrenting method works well with games and video stuff (especially movies), right?
This question all boils down to the universal catch 22 of time and money. (Time is money, it takes time to make money, if you have money you can invest less time etc).
So to the question:
1) if you have $, go with paid traffic.
2) if you have time but no money, go with free traffic. You'll either have to invest a lot of time building a sustainable system (seo), or spend a lot of time brainstorming ultra creative ways to get free traffic QUICKLY.
3) If you have neither, you're in trouble. But it's highly unlikely you'd be on this forum if you had neither, so this one is a moot point .
Big fan of paid traffic here, I way prefer faster results and leveraging the buying power of traffic and scaling when something is good. I did however start with free traffic and some basic SEO but it was very short lived and moved into paid fast.
... Definitely not against free traffic in terms of building up an asset or some passive on the side income, but paid traffic for me has always been numero uno by a long mile
Guess it depends on your budget and stuff too, quite a few affiliates started to dabble in the free traffic game (SEO harder now though) and moved onto harnessing some traffic sources
A really important counter question which I can see havent been asked.
Whats your goal?
Do you want to make hundreds of dollars, even thousands? over night? <-- Yes, then paid traffic is most likely your way to go.
If you're just looking to test out things without spending much, then you could go with some free traffic methods looking to score a conversion or two.
A great tip could be finding a higher paid trial offer for nutra and then pursway people one by one into actually making a conversion.
Apart from SEO there's literally hundreds of different ways to drag "free" traffic to offers, they are all similar(ish) in their core but also include a lot of effort to avoid constant bans. You would be surprised how high quality of those clicks can be but ofc that depends also on the quality of traffic source. Huge volume = low quality, lower volumes = hq that sounds somewhat logically. And that has nothing to do with media buying it's more like retarded media buying, mostly automation, no planning at all and pretty much blind in the beginning till you figure out what works and what's not. I didn't wanted to underestimate this type of traffic so I have experimented last couple of months solely for educational purposes and come to conclusion that this type of traffic is working amazing especially in horny guy vertical. On rev share along with review sites gotta say it has potential. What you need is time to crack the code and learn what's working on different platforms in order to avoid bans and stay under the radar, so if you don't consider your time as money than yes you can call that free traffic. I have made couple of grands during this summer but I didn't work a lot at all and I met and I know guys who make serious money with this approach. I think both free and paid traffic have their own pros and cons. Personally I would stick with paid traffic bc it's much more scalable but ofc if you don't have budget than learning how to drive free clicks can benefit both financially and educationally and these days no one can ignore knowing different ways to earn couple of bucks.
Originally Posted by roifreak
So to the question:
1) if you have $, go with paid traffic.
2) if you have time but no money, go with free traffic. You'll either have to invest a lot of time building a sustainable system (seo), or spend a lot of time brainstorming ultra creative ways to get free traffic QUICKLY.
3) If you have neither, you're in trouble. But it's highly unlikely you'd be on this forum if you had neither, so this one is a moot point
. Originally Posted by ivan the terrible
Originally Posted by amboru
some more are listed here: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-ADULT-Traffic
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