Today I’m going to talk about Free Traffic System, which touts itself as being able to give people “free targeted website traffic in any niche”.

Well first of all, as you probably found out when you were 5 years old, nothing in the world is entirely free (except bad advice and in some cities drinks for ladies on Tuesdays).  So although this site does offer a free service, they also encourage you to become a Pro Member and get additional benefits and features.

That being said…this is what the Free Traffic System is all about:

Article Submission

1. You write a unique article (at least 450 words) that isn’t plagiarized or already posted word-for-word on your own site.
2. You SPIN it, which involves putting [spin][/spin] around synonyms throughout your article.
   • Here’s an example sentence: One day I [spin]went|drove|walked|ran[/spin] to the [spin]store|market|grocery store|drug store|shopping center[/spin].
   • So as you can see, because I spun a phrase 4x and another 5x, that creates 20 (4×5) possible sentences out of a single sentence
   • If you do that once or twice in each paragraph throughout your article, you have turned your single unique article into many unique articles.
3. You determine appropriate keywords for your article (preferably ones you’re targeting in your marketing campaign)
4. You determine appropriate URLs for the keywords which you’ve embedded in your article
5. You enter everything above into Free Traffic System
6. You type in category keywords to find blogs that would be suitable for your article
7. You select 30 of these blogs
8. Over the course of the next few days, your article is automatically submitted to these 30 blogs!
9. The entire process typically takes me about half an hour

Article Reception

Now this is functionality you could use if you want your niche WordPress blog to run on auto-pilot.   It’s basically the inverse of the Article Submission functionality that I described above.  Note that it’s completely optional and my guess is that most folks just do the article submission.

1. You create a new WordPress user that has the “AUTHOR” role
2. You enter details into Free Traffic System about your blog, such as:
   • Title
   • Category
   • URL
   • Username
   • Password
3. You sit back and wait while new articles get posted to your blog on a regular basis (I find the frequency depends on how unique your “Category” / niche is)

Pros of Free Traffic System

• Easy to use once you figure out how spinning and keywords work (they do provide an instructional video)
• A single article gets unique-ifide (yes, that’s definitely a word!) and submitted to 30 blogs for FREE!
• Great for getting traffic
• Great for getting one-way backlinks to your site with anchor-text keywords (in other words…SEO crystal meth)
• Great for getting unique content, on auto-pilot, posted to your blog

Cons of Free Traffic System

• Could be a bit confusing at first
• Article Reception functionality doesn’t allow you to specific WordPress categories for the posts (I’ve had to manually move posts between categories)

Overall, as far as cost/benefit analysis goes, I highly, highly recommend Free Traffic System.  It sure aint perfect, but…come on…it’s FREE!  Plus I don’t know of any other way to get articles unique-ified and submitted to so many blogs without a whole lot of effort.

The more I learn about this new service being developed by StumbleUpon, the more psyched I get.

If you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon, they are one of many social bookmarking websites, but they are unique in the fact that they offer users the ability to just browse or “stumble” through a never-ending list of sites recommended by other users.  Pretty cool idea.

I read about their new product, called SU.PR (pronounced “super”), from the blog of Tim Ferriss (the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”).

Well apparently SU.PR will allow users to do the following:

• Submit their content to StumbleUpon’s 7.9 million users with each post
• Have their best content showcased in a right-hand sidebar for each page that’s linked to (here’s an example)
• Get suggestions for optimal posting times:  get more traffic per post
• Schedule as many tweets or posts as they want, for any time
• See their click-through statistics in real-time
• See retweets for each post, including the biggest influencers (with rankings)
• Post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, with more platforms to come…
• Use their own short URL (i.e. www.mysite.com/abc123) instead of something like bit.ly

Dang, that sounds pretty bad-ass.  Apparently Tim said while testing SU.PR he started receiving up to 10% of his unique traffic from it, and got 24,000 visits to a single post in 24 hours.  Holy smokes!

Here’s a sample of the SU.PR dashboard:

Well if you’re excited and want to get in on the action ASAP, they’re giving out free beta testing accounts for the next few weeks.  Here’s how to get one:

1. Go here http://su.pr/
2. Click “request one” if you don’t have an “invite code”
3. Follow StumbleUpon on Twitter to get the code when they periodically release new ones

I’m not gonna lie to ya – when I first found out about Twitter I wasn’t impressed.

I’m the guy who has NEVER (no lie) set his FaceBook “status” because I didn’t want all my friends knowing where I was or what I was doing 24 hours a day.  As far as I could tell, Twitter was just like a stand-alone verion of the FaceBook “status” functionality.

Lately I’ve started to realize that Twitter can be an incredibly powerful internet marketing tool.  I also feel bad for people who want to use it for its original intention (micro-blogging), but are being bombarded by IM-centric messages and users.

Here’s why I think it can be such a useful marketing tool:

Finding people with similar interests

• The search functionality is great for finding other users with similar interests
• If you have a site centered around a specific niche (say iPod Nanos), it’s easy to find other people with the same interests
• Simply follow someone and there’s a good chance they’ll follow you back

Learning about your niche

• If you aren’t sure about something, just Tweet and ask a question; there’s a good chance you’ll get a response

Promoting products & getting TRAFFIC

• This is probably the best part of Twitter…for people doing IM
• If you just wrote an article on your site with an affiliate link, simply send a Tweet to your followers with the URL to let them know
• Most likely you’ll see immediate traffic (depending on your methods for tracking traffic)
• If you have hundreds or even thousands of followers, your web server better be able to handle it!

This is what I use for submitting my sites to website directories.  I know there’s a debate about how useful “directories” are for improving search engine ranking, but it’s hard to argue with the benefits of getting a bunch of 1-way backlinks for free.

Some people complain that directories are a waste of time because “they’re sooooo 1999″ (ie. Web 1.0) and not hip and trendy like social bookmarking sites.  I don’t subscribe to that jazz.

Here’s the features that I like about Directory Submitter:

• Ability to see and sort by Google PageRank in the list of available directories (there’s 350!).  I only choose the ones with PR of 4 or higher.
• Can create a “project” for each of your sites and submit them all
• Tracking of which directory you’ve submitted each site to

This is the shit that annoys me:

• When you delete a directory it re-appears in the list the next time the app opens
• No way to just sit back and let the submissions happen automatically; you have to manually change between directories and projects

The complaints above may simply be because I’m too much of a cheap-ass to buy the full version so I’m stuck with limited functionality.  Anyways, I haven’t found anything better yet, but if you have let me know!