developers community

Sure, buying ads on the major search engines can generate traffic quickly, but it can also cost you a small fortune. With search engine ads for popular categories costing as much as $1, $5, even $10 or more per click, in today's competitive environment, you have to find cheaper, alternative ways to acquire customers.

The secret to getting high quality, free traffic is guerilla marketing. Guerilla marketing is a tactic employed by large brands with huge marketing budgets, but it can also be employed very successfully by the individual site owner.

First, write down a few topics you like to write about. Some of them can be directly related to the site you want to promote, while others can just be topics you find interesting – perhaps one of your hobbies, somewhere you've traveled, or another personal interest. For the site you want to promote, develop a set of related topics.

For example, if your site is about travel, write down a list of places you know something about, airlines you've flown, and web sites you use for travel planning. If your site is about computer equipment, make a list of all the electronics you own, highlighting items you've recently purchased and which things you liked and disliked. Now you have a bunch of topics of conversation to go to work with as you start your guerilla marketing effort.

The key to guerrilla marketing is to use a number of different tactics together. You can write articles and post them on web sites, but that alone isn't enough. Moreover, it's often time consuming and difficult to write a really compelling article. That's why posting in online forums can really pay off.

Instead of creating a one-way promotion for your web site as you do with an advertisement, by posting in forums, you generate interest via an on-going dialog and participation in an active community. You can generate more and more traffic simply by creating your own posts and then replying to the posts of other people.

Topics that solicit an opinion are often the best for driving interaction from other forum participants. Which digital camera do you like the best? Should I wait to install Windows Vista? Which is a better travel destination, Hawaii or Bermuda? All of these questions provide a topic for people to comment on and actively solicit their opinion. Remember to put a link to your site in your signature on each forum on which you participate.

In addition to a forum signature that promotes your web site, you can also promote your site directly. The way to do this is to find the site review category on a given forum and ask for feedback on your site. Forum participants will go to your site, try it out, and then write about it. All of this promotion drives traffic to your web site and creates discussion about what you're doing.

Of course, if you get tired of investing the time and effort required to post in forums on a regular basis, there's an easy solution. Read my next article to find out what it is!

Oh yes – the origin of there's no such thing as a free lunch? A newspaper writer's response to Henry Wallace back in the early 1940's, when, believe it or not, there really was a free lunch.