A Dozen Free Marketing Tactics that DON'T Work
Free marketing is a confusing issue, because of all the misinformation out there. Many people who are telling you it doesn't work are trying to persuade you to buy something. Many people who are telling you it does work still have something to gain from you. The following types of free marketing are losers, and won't benefit you in any way. Anyone who tells you they will, has something to gain for telling you that, because it isn't true.
Free Classifieds/FFA Submitting – Free Classified sites and Free For All Link sites won't do you any good. Your information won't stay there long enough to benefit you, nobody who wants what you have is looking for it there, and search engines won't pick up your link there. You will get lots of spam from it though. Free directories are a different thing, and have a real human approving all the listings, so they are not included in this category.
Traffic Exchanges – If you are madly clicking away on someone else's site, just so you can rack up points to get someone else to click on your site, what makes you think anyone clicking wants what you have? Traffic and income are not the same thing. These do NOT help your search engine rank, and they do not help you get customers or ad clickthroughs, so they are a waste of time that you could spend doing something that does work.
List Building Programs – In order to benefit from these, you have to promote the list. If you can do that successfully, you can promote your site directly, and more successfully. Prospects from these programs are also not high quality prospects.
Safelists – Same issue as traffic exchanges. People are there to SELL, not to buy. Your email gets deleted without being read, and you wasted your time writing it and sending it, and you wasted all that time you'll have to spend emptying your inbox.
Massive Link Trades – Links are only valuable if they are from good quality sites with something in common with your site. Trade with the wrong sites, and it can get your site banned if that site has been banned. Low pagerank is not a problem... Bad quality sites are.
Repeat Search Engine Submits – Once your site has been submitted, it gets rechecked by the search engines on a regular basis. Resubmitting is a waste of time, and can get you banned by the search engines for spamming them.
Submit All Pages to Search Eng – Submit JUST the home page. Any more than that is a waste of your time, and can be seen as spamming the search engines. The search engines will follow the links from your home page to all the other pages in your site.
SEO Black Hat Tactics – Anything you do to trick the search engines into giving you inaccurate or undeserved rankings is considered black hat. It will get you banned, and that would not help you get traffic at all!
Advertising on Forums – Participating in forums is a GOOD marketing tactic. Spamming them is bad. You have to be a real person, offer helpful information, and do more than just post an ad. Ads are forbidden on some forums – follow the rules. Most forums allow a signature link though, and if people like you, and think you have good sense and intelligence, they'll click the link.
Fast, Free Solutions – Anything advertised as “fast and free” is a scam. No exceptions, no equivocation. If its free, its slow (may be very powerful, but takes time to grow). If its fast, its costly.
MiniSites in Free Webspace – Some people say you can build a mini-site and stick it in free space, and link it back to your main site to get more traffic. Forget it. Search engines now check site ownership, and all you did is give yourself more things to promote, since new websites have no linking power for pagerank. Building all those sites is time consuming. In the time it takes for you to register an account with a free hosting service, you can post two high quality links to niche directories. In the time it takes to build one mini-site completely, you can get 10 high quality links and add a couple of pages of good quality content to your main site. Why waste your time getting fragmented? Focus on the real issue, which is promoting your site and updating it.
There are lots of other supposed shortcuts that take more time also. I hate seeing people get discouraged because they thought it did not work, when they were just doing the wrong things!
Written by Laura Wheeler – Mom to Eight, Owner of Bad Marketing Ideas. Check out her site for more information on how to market right, without getting burned. Laura is an expert in shoestring startups, and has been featured in several small business books. She writes, builds websites, homeschools her kids, and generally has a good time!