Yes, it’s true some methods take anywhere from 3 days to 90 days to take root, and that advertising can be faster. (We already went over the fact that you cannot get fast, cheap/free and good countless times, so I’m not going to go into that).

No, it is not true that all free traffic methods take forever to start working. Almost every method has a fast-track, you just have to find it. Is that fast track as good as building a system? No. But for fast, free and okay? Can’t be beat.

Let’s get right to it.

#1 – Choose the Right Traffic Methods.

We went over the Avalanche and the Blizzard the other day. Why?

Because with every traffic method you have to ask yourself, am I going to get immediate results with a short term burst, or am I going to patiently build a system that will bring me long-term results?

If you know what you’re doing, you can get social media, social networking, article marketing, expertise marketing, affiliate/referral marketing, and organic search results within the first 24 hours.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, go find someone who knows and ask them to do it.

Picking the wrong system will crush you. If you want immediate traffic, rather than a traffic system, starting a blog isn’t the best strategy. Blogs will bring you traffic forever. But the momentum doesn’t start until it’s up. If you’re not technically inclined, you may not have a blog up today.

If you don’t know what to say in blog comments, you might not be able to start the traffic train this afternoon. If you don’t know what to put in the ping section, it could be a day or so before the notification sites list you.

Picking the right system is critical.

#2 – Employ the Method Efficiently & Immediately, Even if It Means Getting Help

Here’s one example. I defy you to try this, right now, today and if you don’t get results by tomorrow, come back, leave a response to this thread, and I’ll look at your link and tell you exactly what you did wrong.

Turn every single distraction off. Do not open your email, answer your phone, text anyone, go to Twitter, or respond to questions or even look at your staff members until this is done.

Go write a top ten article. If you can write a grocery list, even if you’re completely inept at writing an email, you can manage a good top ten article.

Send it to a submissions service to post it online. Article Marketer will let you sample their service for free.

Publish the article on your site.

Set up a Google Alerts on the title of the article.

If you did nothing else but that, you should be done in a couple of hours max. It’s not that the activity takes forever. It’s that we’re all so paralyzed in wondering if we’re doing it right, and busy doing non-work that we don’t finish.

And you know what else? If you didn’t like your article, if you hate your results? Outsource it. The whole thing. Have someone else write the article, and give you the rights. Have someone else do the submissions and hand you a report.

Not free anymore but it’s done, and still faster than most ads go up. Yes, 24 hours is sometimes faster than it takes for advertising to show up in an ezine.

Tomorrow your article should start appearing on various sites. Today if you like, you can start posting it to sites online yourself.

#3 Do It Again. Learn from mistakes and do it better.

Here’s a simple concept.

Do something.

If you get any measure of success?

Do it again.

Then.

Do it again.

Then. Keep doing it. Ask our good friend Mr. Joyner about his Integrated Marketing system if that confuses you.

For now, just know that when you hit on that great traffic builder? Your first job is to see if you can duplicate your success and for how long. If it keeps bringing you traffic, and better traffic at that, turn it into a system. If it only brings you a lot of traffic once in a while, then obviously that’s one of the avalanches you can only use a few times.

Digg traffic? Is an avalanche. For some sites, they’re lucky if they can get on the front page once a year, some get on the front page once a day, but it’s just not a source of traffic that helps lay a foundation you can build on forever.

StumbleUpon traffic? Is a blizzard. No, it’s not going to covert to sales. Anyone who discounts it because of that, is, quite frankly, a dumb ass. That’s like saying water sucks because it doesn’t turn into soda in your mouth.

SU isn’t for that. Networking and gaining leads? Sure. First-visit sales? Don’t be silly.

Wrapping It Up

Does that mean don’t pay for traffic?

Heck no. If you’ve got the money, spend on advertising, but track and test. Spend as wisely as you can. Speed is a wise expenditure – you can get advertising to show up on Google in 15 minutes. If I don’t want to stand in line, I go to 7-11 and pay almost double.

If saving the time a- makes sense for YOU and b- you can now, and know you’ll continue to afford it, then that’s all that matters.

Just remember that an ad doesn’t get you expert status, links, or make it easier to convert sales. Nor can you get more of it with less if you fall on hard economic times.

Trust me, when you have your last dollar in hand is the WORST time to try and find out whether you can get customers in a place other than advertising.

Still, I’ll be the first person to tell you that when you find a good paid advertising source keep using it, forever if you can.

But especially while you ramp up the traffic from free or inexpensive sources. To paraphrase John Reese in the original Traffic Secrets promotion, the only way to know if your product sells well enough to rely on free traffic – test it on paid traffic.

At the same time, passing up effective, no-cost marketing strategies is like flushing your money down the toilet.

There are two types of traffic campaigns. One brings you a huge burst of short term traffic. The down side to it is that it’s hard to maintain that pace of traffic, marketing and publicity, even if you have a whole department dedicated to just that. You run out of resources of some type eventually.

The other may or may not bring you short term gains, but it builds on its own momentum, and thus, will last forever once it’s started. You would have to abandon it entirely for a year or more to shut it down. The downside to it is that it takes 60 to 90 days for it to fully kick in, and if you don’t know how to attack it a little at a time each day, you won’t have the patience to see it through.

Tactic One: A Single Avalanche 

Avalanches are isolated incidents, relatively rare when compared with blizzards. They happen only once in a while, and can be fairly unpredictable. But what you know for sure – there’s gonna be a LOT of snow, and it’s gonna fall right on top of you, in a short amount of time.

Now, let’s pretend snow represents traffic. Now you can understand the name “Avalanche”. You can build one huge ramp-up campaign that’s a huge blast of traffic that dumps hoards of people in one direction in a short amount of time with a traffic avalanche.

The trouble is, while that’s great for a quick injection of traffic, it is NOT sustainable.

Eventually you run out of resources. That could mean sources of JV partners that are willing to mail for you.

Or in the case of advertising, you run out of inventory.

Or in the case of time, you’re so busy filling orders that you don’t have time to keep up with your traffic method, yet haven’t made enough to constantly pay someone else to do it.

Avalanches are finite. You get a big dump of snow on top of you, and you are under it until the snow melts or you decide to dig your way out. It accumulates on top of existing snow, but it’s not going to constantly build on top of new snow because by nature, it’s a once in a while event.

If someone is talking about how they got 20K new membership subscribers in a month, chances are, they had an avalanche. It’s a good place to start for traffic, but what happens next month? What if you want membership to increase to 200K, then what?

You can’t just do avalanches over and over again. You can’t just start a new blog every time you want traffic to your main product. Once it is built, what sustains that momentum.

A Blizzard. That’s what. Which we’ll talk about next.

Mostly, I was ignoring the recession. I’m just not having a recession-like experience. Mostly by design, but in general, I simply refuse to do it. You have the same choice, though you may not know it.

Why? Because you can choose to have a life that doesn’t correlate to the things that cause recession panics.

The entire market is based on two things, fear and credit.

Why did the stock market plummet? It’s quite literally a public expression of fear by potential investors. I’m no expert there, but look it up. It’s quite fascinating. If you don’t live on a credit basis and you don’t have fear about money, you’re not in a recession. That’s why I’m not in one.

To start with, I changed my life to run on a cash basis this time last year. So either I have cash now, or cash is on the way. I don’t worry about things like credit because I don’t need credit to live.

It can be volatile, sure. Last month, I had a $10K a month account and we stopped working together in a fairly amicable split. This month I will still make about the same amount of money, just from other means. It can be worry-some if you’re not on top of your expenditures, but I don’t live like a miser either. It’s no less stressful than having a 9 to 5 job or a business that relies on credit.

(For disclosure’s sake, I will say much of my money each month is currently sucked up in health costs and paying down two year old business debt. But I live simply so my bills are miniscule. When I have the desire to buy something or take a vacation, I work, market or advertise more, when I’m up to it. But I digress.)

What about fear? If anything the traffic, marketing and publicity business booms in recession because people want to get more out of the dollars they have. Even though it’s lucky that I picked such an area to work in, even if you’re not in industry where recessions cause booms, there’s so many things you can do to survive and even thrive in these times.

But I’m finding more and more that I’m not the only person who came to this knowledge late in the game.

So I’m now paying attention to the recession – because people I care about are paying attention to it.

People like you.

People like my customers.

People like my family and friends.

Notice I said paying attention to it, not worrying about it. For my own situation, and even the fate of the nation, and the world, I refuse to worry. It can’t cause change. I think about what DOES cause change and then I do that.

And all I can think about now is what I can do to change people’s experience of the current financial condition of the world into the type of experience I’m having. Or better, ideally.

So I started to do research. I found something excellent that matched my positive attitude about things. That was Darren’s post about How to Recession-Proof Your Blog. And I realized what I want to do with my “retirement”.

I’m going to refocus my other business blog on businesses that are booming during this time of uncertainty, and point out what they’re doing right.

I’m also going to start the how-to resource on traffic I’ve spoken so much about, likely next week. It took me this long because honestly, all of the knowledge I have will never fit into just one book or even a series of book. It HAS to be a membership site. And I knew I wouldn’t have time to sustain one of this size until I retired from consulting and the internet marketing game.

The site will be focused on two things.

First, I’m going to teach you how to quickly inject massive traffic into your site at first for short term gains.

If it’s one thing I keep hearing, it’s that everyone needs traffic Right Now. Because traffic online is money in its potential form. It’s as taboo to talk about traffic as it is to talk about money. But as you can see, that doesn’t shut me up, and I have lots more to say than I do here.

Secondly, I’ll give you how-to steps for building your own traffic SYSTEM, far beyond what I cover in the Evergreen Traffic System. (Though if you start with that, you’ll have an incredible head start, one that you can get up and running quickly.)

One reason I’ll be doing both is to show what most of us experts on marketing and promotion fail to tell you. I would say the biggest problem I’ve had is in exposing this little known fact. In truth it’s something I assumed everyone knows.

But then I worked with a few people who I thought knew EVERYTHING. And you know what?

Almost no one knows about this. Then there’s a couple of people who think they do, but make one HUGE critical mistake that throws their entire campaigns off.

If you’ve ever suddenly had a traffic drop and can’t figure out what happened, this could be really important for you.

Here’s a quote about the germinating idea:

The fact is, no matter what you’re learning about generating visitors, every traffic method falls under one of these two headings, the Avalanche or the Blizzard.

It’s really important that you know which traffic tactic to target for and how to get the most out of each. If you can’t identify which one you’re using, you will have no idea how to tell if it’s working or going to work, how long it should take, and whether the effects will be short term or long term.

I’m going to talk about the Avalanche and the Blizzard next, and then end with 8 or so things you can do Today to increase your visitors for free. We’ll move the discussion over to the other blog in coming days, and discuss both long and short term tactics for promoting yourself and your business, on and offline.

When I give you the address to the other blog in the next few days, make SURE you sign up. All the information there will be free and may give you ideas of what to do for your business, whether it’s online or not.

Twice upon a time, a very recent time ago, I was making a big mistake with my consulting business. It was such a big mistake that when I discovered it, I decided to never take on new clients, and when the time was right, to drop the two I had.

I’ll tell you what the mistake was in a minute, and why it was so huge that I totally changed my business and as far as how most people know me, retired. First you need to know a little background about me.

You see, I have a reputation as a bit of a rainmaker. I put the proverbial butts in the proverbial seats, and I can do so in droves.

I’m not saying that to brag – I love to brag, but if I was going to I’d be way more specific with graphs and charts and links to proof and stuff. But you can Google that on your own if you like, or look on the site or on my various sales page.

The reason I’m bringing it up is because when you get a reputation for being the go-to person, you get a lot of business related to your expertise or because someone heard about you. And when they hear about you, they want you to do what you did for the other person.

The problem is, what you may be able to do for one type of site, is not necessarily duplicatable for another. Or, in what has been happening to me, I have been hired on to build traffic systems, when most people actually want me to do a marketing blitz or traffic blast.

Once I realized that most folks want a traffic blast I decided to hang up my spurs permanently. Not only do I not have the staff or the time to do hectic traffic blasts each month for the same set of businesses, I hate doing them! The hectic intensity is too much for my lazy nature — and most importantly is 100% wrong for most businesses to do more than once a year.

It was a HUGE mistake to believe that people know the difference between building a traffic system and doing a quick, short blast of traffic.

So I came to an epiphany. Why don’t I show people how to do both? Which came with the issue that first you’d have to know what I was talking about. So here goes.

Stay Tuned.