“How to Get Free Online Traffic” Series Lecture Lesson 5
（(Note: (The following content is based on some highlights of the Lecture held by Zhang Jin in a business management salon in Shanshu Academy in December 10,2020)
Free traffic isn’t necessarily cheaper than advertising, so how can we save money?
1. Save costs with a sound marketing department
It’s cheaper to do free traffic for enterprises with a sound marketing department. For example, EIDI company has a sound marketing department (including: copywriter, art designer, marketing personnel). So it is effective once we do free marketing. Statistics shows that no consultation came from free traffic before EIDI company did network marketing. Since starting online promotion, 10%, 20%, 30% and even 50% last year came from free consultation. The company’s personnel costs have not increased, but the number of free consultations is getting bigger.
2. Save costs with a paid promotion basis
If the business has never done promotion, it is wrong to start straight with free natural ranking. Because it has no accumulated time cost. For example, a solenoid valve manufacturer in Shanghai spent half a year to get the word to baidu home page, but it didn’t bring any consultation later. They spent another half year to get another word “electromagnetic valve” on the home page but still, there was no consultation. He did the natural ranking in a wrong way, leading to high time cost of trial and error. The right way is to do paid advertising first, because it has one of the biggest characteristics: fast! We can get a lot of search data about keywords and customers’ regular search terms. It only makes sense if we do free promotion based on these keywords.
It save costs with a paid promotion basis, especially time cost.
3. Saves costs with multiple online marketing techniques.
If there are two enterprises, one enterprise decides to promote through paid advertising, and the other enterprise promotes through natural ranking. The former one is called SEM doing paid advertising while the latter one is called SEO doing natural ranking. Paid advertising is certainly more expensive because there should be constant investment in advertisement. On the other hand, the natural ranking costs less except for buying external links and increasing costs. Whether through paid advertising or natural ranking, these two enterprises need to provide beautiful and informative content in order to attract and retain customers. So copywriters and art designers are compulsory. These are the fixed costs of the enterprise, which will not vary a lot between SEM and SEO.br />
Now the third companies has the same labor cost as those two. But it does natural ranking as well as paid advertising. The same cost can result in double effects. It can generate more traffic. In other words, only by means of multiple marketing techniques, free traffic can bring incredible benefits to enterprises.
Paid advertising directs the way for third-party free promotion while the third-party free promotion platform increases the weight for the official website. When we publish free information on some third-party platforms, we can add the original link. For instance, we can link the website of the official website to cite the original source at the bottom of Toutiao, as shown below:
When customers want to discover more, they can click to our website, as shown below. It is like voting for our website, improving the weight value of our website.
Distributing free information on third-party platforms is tedious and beyond the reach of many companies, but we know it means a lot to the success of network marketing. First, we need to register ourselves on various third-party free platforms online. Basically, we will not post any information right after registration. Instead, we leave our website on the company information or contact information, as shown below:
And on some platforms, we can add links to increase the weight value of our own website, as shown below.
Small orders can bring massive sale volumes to e-commerce platforms. Internet marketing enterprises will always receive orders of which 90% are from small and micro customers while only 10 percent or even less is from high quality customers. In this case, we can use a different way to make the deal. For example, if the customer gets to know us through paid advertising or natural ranking, we can tell him to go to our e-shop your shop to complete the order of a small amount. This actually guarantee interests of both parties, and what’s more, this increases the sales of e-shops.
At least 10 percent of the 90 percent of your customers can makes deals on the e-commerce platform, which will improve sales. It will also greatly improve the ranking on the e-commerce platform, and then it will bring you natural traffic, or even orders, which forms a virtuous circle.
Some platforms rank shops based on sales volumes. We can use this and complete the transaction of small orders on the e-commerce platform.
We have to launch multiple marketing campaigns to acquire free traffic. Doing each alone will not make a great difference. Doing them together can even bring us big clients from the e-commerce platform one day.
Free traffic is a relative concept since it is free just to a certain degree. If you’re starting from scratch, we recommend both paid and free promotion, and if you’ve already done it, then free traffic can yield unusually brilliant results.
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Search Engine Marketing in a Broad Sense: Keys to Acquisition of Free Traffic
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