Promotional Traffic - How do we get it?

[Peter]

There are a few ways to get promotion traffic to your web site.

Free methods:

Submission to SE's and directories
Article marketing
Email campaign
Forums, blogs and board postings
Social Bookmarking
etc.

Premium methods: (Requires a budget)

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Targetted Link backs
Professional SEO services
Ad spaces
Offline campaigns
etc.Another great way of targetting your desired audience is through forum posting on similar niche with your link on your signature.

The question of the day is: What methods do you use to draw traffic to your site? Random and targetted alike.

Maybe we can all learn a thing or two from existing ILancers :)

[magneticmg]

Linking with 'Like Minded' sites is Extremely important. Something the community (iLance) community may want to think about.

Maybe iLance members with an Alexa ranking of say 500,000 or less should consider exchanging links. Couldn't hurt IMO...

Anybody want to weigh in?

cam

[magneticmg]

:pHa... Targeted Linkback... but my question still stands...

[dakz]

Hi guys I can´t join magneticmg´s initiative because I run my marketplace in a different language. :(

I am concentrating in promoting the site using different techniques and I think its paying off now :)
This is a screenshot of my admincp taken today

[magneticmg]

That seems like a great return to me! Way to go...
If your willing to share your techniques I am all ears!;)

magneticmg

[dakz]

Hmmmm... check your PM :)

[Imago]

I have set up a server for exchanging text banners.

[chensta]

Good post peter, the techniques you use I think will be largely dependant on the type of site you run, is it freelance? (online based ie. the transaction takes place online) or something more like domystuff, where the transactions are more physical.

Some general tips are (which applies to all kinds of businesses, not just with ilance) is start small, take a niche, in other words, estabilish a beachhead, and then work your way from there. What I mean is, instead of having say 20 categories, with 18 of them empty, why not start with the few industries your familiar with? Or if its physical based, instead of going nationwide, and have 1/2 a job in each state, why dont you start it local first, because the last thing you want is for the user to click through 10 categories and find no jobs, or do 5 postcode searchs and only find 1 job...which they arnt interested in.

There is quite many things you can do, that is slightly out of the box (by box i mean conventional advertising, banners, posters etc), you can have prizes setup for monthly top referers, a $200ipod competition will get you ALOT more users, than say a $200 advertising in a newspaper. A fundamental concept here is, if your out of ideas, give incentive to other people, and they will think of ideas for you =)

Anyway Ill stop at that for now, I hope this helps somebody, if you guys want more tips, ill be happy to post more.

Will