Free traffic is great.

I’m a big fan of it – articles, videos, forum posts, Facebook posts, Tweets, podcasts, document shares, photo shares, LinkedIn groups, guest posts.

The list isn’t endless but it’s certainly not short either.

The problem is that it’s getting expensive.

The main expense is time.

A forum post may get an immediate “hit” of traffic. Or it may not, depending on how big the forum is and how popular the topic is.

Tweets are like wisps of cloud – difficult to grasp and gone before you know it.

Facebook posts scroll off your timeline like they’re on a conveyor belt on a game show.

More permanent things like videos and articles can hang around longer.

But they often take a long time to get indexed and work their way onto the first page of the results for anything with more than a handful of searches a month. And even long tail keywords (my favourites) are taking longer to show up in the search results.

Then it’s a bit like climbing Mount Everest to get from the bottom of the first page of results to one of the top 3 positions, which is where almost all the clicks are for long tail results because there are so few searches.

YouTube videos are maybe the only exception to that – they can show up in the results fast and the thumbnail helps them stand out even if they’re not in the top few results.

Some search engine experts are now saying that Google has introduced an extra delay factor into their algorithm to their help fight against the spammers.

So if you’ve got a fairly new site and it’s not particularly large, it takes longer for them to put your new pages into their index and then longer still for them to show up in the results.

I’ve certainly noticed that on this site – Google used to crawl round and index new posts almost as soon as I put them on site, now I have to go into Webmaster Tools and specifically ask for the page to get crawled now rather than “whenever”.

Maybe they’re just picking on me, but I doubt it.

Run a check next time you post something new on your site.

Give it an hour or two or maybe a day.

Then check whether or not it’s been indexed (search for site: immediately followed by the full url of the post).

If not, go into Webmaster tools and fill in the form that requests a crawl of that page.

But there’s only so many times you can create content and watch it gather dust whilst you wait for Google to deign to show it in the results.

If you’ve got the budget and the likely return on investment is sufficiently high, there’s AdWords.

Always assuming you’re still in Google’s good books and they’ll take your money – not a given and they have a nasty habit of changing the rules and applying those changes retrospectively so there’s no guarantee that even if they take your money now they’ll continue to do so.

Plus the bid prices on Google are scarily high.

I just checked one where I get a commission of around $5 to $8 per sale and they were quoting 70p (about $1.16) per click.

The product is a one-off sale – no list building potential as it’s solving a specific problem – so I’d need to make one sale every 5 or 6 clicks to break even. Which wouldn’t happen even in my wildest dreams.

Bing is better.

For that same phrase, they quoted me 5p per click (about 8 cents) so I’d break even at around 1 sale every 60 to 100 clicks. Borderline but with a good advert and decent copy once they reached the page I’d stand a good chance of making some money.

Of course, I should really look around for a higher commission product if I was tackling that.

There are some on Clickbank and the commission is nearer $27. Which would make the Bing ad nicely profitable but still makes the Google one almost impossible to make money with.

And, of course, I should be selling something that gives me the potential to build a list so that the front end sale roughly breaks even, building my list for free.

If you’re selling anything, you need to do the same kind of calculation.

And, ideally, build a list as well.

Because that makes a very big difference to your longer term profitability.

Another way of building a list is with Facebook ads.

They are much more targeted than Google or Bing ads.

Because Facebook know a lot more about you than Google or Bing do.

You voluntarily gave them a lot of information when you completed your profile.

And every time you like something or post something or look at something on Facebook, they track you.

The kind of surveillance that George Orwell’s 1984 was too timid to even dream about.

It’s an advertisers dream.

Laser targeted adverts – I’ve seen products that suggest you can narrow down the selection so small that although you’re theoretically targeting a few hundred people, you’re really only targeting the one person who actually meets your ad criteria. I’ve not tried that but it wouldn’t surprise me – you could put in a few things about me and I’d be one of only a handful of people in my town that met every single one of those things.

In my experience, clicks on Facebook aren’t overly cheap.

Closer to a Google price than a Bing price.

But the extra precision makes them worthwhile. And you can always test and tweak to reduce the cost over time.

Of course, that assumes you know what to do with the clicks once you’ve got them.

Unless you’re collecting subscribers as a hobby, you need to interact with them and monetise your list.

Facebook is a different medium and people are in a different frame of mind when they use it.

You go to Amazon to buy stuff.

You go to Google to hunt down information.

You go to Facebook to find out what your friends are doing.

So it’s closer to meeting up for a meal or a drink than it is to being at work.

That mindset difference can mean that list subscribers you found on Facebook don’t react the same way as other subscribers.

You need to approach them differently – almost sneak up on them.

Because they’re in a different frame of mind when they sign up and, consciously or subconsciously, they stay close to that state of mind once they’re on your list.

Think about it: if you first met someone at work, you treat them differently than someone you met in the shopping mall coffee shop or when you joined a sports team or a social club.

The same happens with email lists.

We need to segment them in our minds otherwise we get confused.

Experiment with your Facebook leads.

Go through your outbox or your Facebook messages or even the “sent” texts on your phone.

Then tweak your emails accordingly.

It’s not free traffic because you have to pay for it initially.

But, treated right, you can make it pay for itself almost immediately.

Back in the days of mail order, this was called a self liquidating offer. One that was nominally free but either had an upsell or a postage and packing charge that covered the cost of the product as well as the postage.

It’s the same on the web.

Work at making your paid adverts at least break even.

Then you’ve got essentially free traffic and a free list.

And a big grin on your face as well as your internet marketing starts to turn a profit.

If you’d like some more help with turning a profit from your traffic, take a look at these resources:

• Facebook conversions – how to profitably convert your Facebook ads
• Solo ads – how to build up your subscriber list and recoup your up front cost fast
• Video creation – how to create YouTube videos quickly and easily
• Tube Dynamite – a little bit old but so long as you ignore anything about buying views, still a good introduction to YouTube videos