Bright Beginning! Make Money Online – Aldian Prakoso

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!

A snapshot of my Google Analytics’ traffic overview

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 19 Comments. »

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/
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 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.
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
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.
Comment by Dieta Personalizzata on 25 June 2008:

I love case studies.

Thanks for this one Aldian.

I’ve bookmarked your blog.

1000+ hits from stumbleupon?????

Man, am off to dust-up my SU account.

Roby

PS. you linked to the wrong Netvouz site in your post…
Its http://www.netvouz.com not http://www.netvous.com
Comment by plus size womens costumes on 6 September 2008:

StumbleUpon traffic are too spiky and not that reliable for conversion. I’m not sure if SU gives good backlink tho’.
Comment by internet marketing indonesia on 12 November 2008:

i once had 2700 visitor a day from stumbleupon, but most of them don’t last a minute or even 10sec in my site :’(
Comment by Hit Back on 12 March 2009:

Aldian this article “Case Study – Free Traffic” is a really nice eye-opener. It sounds like Traffic free or not equals exposure, exposure equals brand recognition, and brand recognition will equal sales or followers for ones articles.

The thing is to bring in the traffic to the our websites, and this article you wrote with the listed Free traffic sources and tests are a big help.

You rock,
Hit Back
Comment by May tinh xach tay on 16 March 2009:

Maybe it’s just me but Stumble Upon suck. Stumble Upon traffic are not that reliable.
Comment by WordWiz on 12 April 2009:

Hey Aldian

I haven’t used Stumble upon yet but I am going to now, I think any amount of free traffic is good so I’ll work on it. Thanks for the Info your site is jam-packed full of goodies and is now one of my bookmarks.

WordWiz
Comment by Facebook Tips and tutorial on 23 April 2009:

Already use Stumble upon but my visitor still low.

Suggestion please..
Comment by Cash on 26 May 2009:

The best method of getting traffic i have found is writing my own ebooks and distributing them for free.I also distribute free software created especially for me.

People love getting free stuff this gives me loads of traffic

all the best cash
Comment by online backup on 29 July 2009:

Spikes in traffic are all good. But I find that it’s much better just to focus exclusively on web readers that convert the best. We’ve gotten major PR that gave us massive boosts in traffic but didn’t convert as well as we thought it would.

Remember that easy traffic sources like Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, etc… have large pockets of non-committal users who just like to collect information without any commercial intent.

I’d say that repeating focused message in front of a highly focused segment of decision makers is more important than simply building traffic.
Comment by Beauty Thai Blog on 24 August 2009:

I am try to create traffic for visitor to my blog, but not much good.

I am Part Time Thai Model, I want more visitor so that I can do some marketing on the web, but not much visitor, less then 10 per day..very sad.

Marie