My Traffic Sources Report

How to drive traffic. I am always on the lookout for new traffic sources – especially free ones.

The problem with free traffic sources is you normally have to trade time for money. It can be a lot of work writing and posting articles and comments on various blog networks or content sites. The other drawback with free traffic, is the difficulty to scale up when you have

traffic that is converting. (I am not including creating and ranking YouTube videos or learning SEO and ranking your blog posts/website to generate free traffic in this discussion – that's a whole new rabbit hole…)

Cheap Traffic Sources

There is no shortage of cheap traffic sources online and you will see tons of adverts for cheap traffic if you do a search. The drawback here, is you need to wade through a lot of junk traffic to find the rare gems amongst them. Learning how to drive traffic to your website, blog, store or affiliate offer is critical to your success online.

Here are some of the realities. Cheap traffic sources typically provide low-quality traffic. A lot of the traffic will be bot traffic and not real people. A large amount of the traffic will also be tier 3 traffic which means most don't have credit cards and are less likely to make purchases online. Some of the traffic will be tier 1 and 2, but you will need to test and check that, Now, it is a manual and time-intensive process, but when you are starting out, or are on a tight budget, you may have more time than money available and just need cheap traffic to get some conversions and generate some seed money for paid ads or even just to test your offer and sales funnel.

The only way to know what type of traffic you are really getting, is to track your traffic source with your own link tracking software. I personally use and recommend ClickMagick for all my tracking.

I know you may not want to spend money on tracking software when you are trying to get cheap traffic, but you can get a free 14 day trial and a starter plan then costs $12 pm (2016) – now $69 pm (2024) – they have added a lot more features now and I still find them the best to use in 2024.

Tracking software will save you money and is the only way you can test and track your results from different traffic sources. ClickMagick will not only tell you what the traffic is like and track your conversions, they will also filter out all the bot traffic and multiple clicks from the same source. (I will be making use of screenshots from ClickMagick in the examples of traffic sources below). 

Now, before just diving into a new traffic source and putting in the hours to figure out how they operate and spend your traffic nest egg, it may be wise to pause for a moment and think about your offer and the audience you are looking to tap into.

You need to match the offer to the audience or you will be wasting your time and money!

Also, consider creating a special bridge page to transition the traffic from their current mindset to your offer.

For example, if you are driving traffic from Facebook which is a social network where people are connecting with friends, socializing and surfing with no buyer intent, you need to transition them to a purchasing mindset to get conversions (using a bridge page).

Compare this to when they are searching for a product or a solution on Google – a search engine not a social network. Now they are already in a purchasing mindset – they are simply researching – looking for reviews, comparing prices and features before purchasing. 

Look at the traffic source and try to gauge the mindset of the person or their current circumstances when they see your offer and think about how to transition them from the current platform and mindset to your conversion goal.

You may even need to create a strategy that starts with a free offer (give lots of value), upsells to a $1 to @$7 product to qualify them as having a credit card and getting them to trust you (again over-deliver with lots of value) before moving them to your main (higher priced) offer and then using a follow-up email sequence to convert them if they don't buy immediately.

You will often get more conversions with your email follow-up sequence as they were not ready to buy at that moment, but a 7-day follow-up sequence gives you many more opportunities to get the conversion.

Also, every contact or interaction you have with your prospect builds your relationship and warms them up to you.

Tested Cheap Traffic Sources

Here are some examples from cheap traffic sources I tested at the time of this post. Some of these sites may no longer be active but you will still see how ClickMagick gives you the data you need to decide if the traffic is worthwhile. Hope I help you get some ideas on how to drive traffic using cheap traffic sources.

NOTE: Always test new traffic sources with a minimal budget first – use ClickMagick to gauge the quality of traffic before purchasing a larger advertising package with vendors. They will attempt to entice you with larger traffic packages at large discounts, but if the traffic is not going to convert for you, you are wasting the money.

IBOToolBox

A = Total Clicks on your advertised link

B = Total Unique Clicks (only clicks that really count)

C = Total Filtered Clicks – how many bots/false clicks were filtered out by ClickMagick

D = How many were Tier 1 clicks (some Tier 2 is also OK)

E = ClickMagick's overall traffic quality guage