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GBPackers said:
I would love to see your traffic data in a month. Specifically, USFreeAds referrals. I used them for awhile and I generated a lot of traffic…for USFreeAds. I got very few clickthrus.
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# 7 March 2008 at 11:23 am

Eric (author) said:
GB…first off, nothing beats organic natural traffic.
That being said, I use USFreeAds to #1 gain backlinks from a site that is CONSTANTLY crawled by Google….and #2 to drive a moderate amount of traffic.
For the sake of not giving up every niche I’m in, I won’t post any USFA’s here, but I will relay some of my stats I just looked at. According to my Hostgator cPanel, in the month of Feb UsFreeAds accounted for between 170-200 visitors to my BANS site. Of those, just ONE USFA accounted for 53 visiters.
You have to find a winner….and the way I did that was to go into you cpanel, find out what the top search phrases for your site and write a USFA using that phrase. I’ve done the best with those.
The other piece of advice I’ll say is to also find keyword phrases that have less than 500 competing pages (w/quotes).
If nothing else, USFreeAds is an inbound link that is getting crawled all the time, they’re easy to do once you get the hang of it…and they’re unlimited submissions.
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# 7 March 2008 at 2:55 pm

Cindy said:
GB,
Although I haven’t used USFA much myself, I’ve seen a technique that gives credence to using them. If you’ve seen any of the videos put out by Michael S Brown, there was one recently where he gave away his niche.
After doing a little bit of research, I was able to determine that on page 1 of Google for his well-searched-for term, he had a page from his own site, an article from ezinearticles, a USFA, and an AdWords ad. Now which of those generated him the most income, I don’t know. But what he was effectively doing was striving to dominate page 1 and using different methods to do so. By having so many top listings, he was bound to get more visitors to his site. Maybe the USFA didn’t earn him any money … but it kept someone else’s site from being in the top 10, thus increasing the likelihood that one of his other links would be clicked on.
At just $10/month, if you have 10 sites it is only costing you $1 per site per month. For that money, you can put up as many ads as you want, target as many keywords as you want, and capture a whole lot of spots.
As with any advertising method, it “works” better for some people than others. Whether they have refined their ads to be better or whether they pick better niches or long-talk keywords, who knows. And I certainly wouldn’t make USFA (or any other method) my only means of advertising. But for the price and the links, it can’t be beat.
I will be re-activating my account next week and see what kind of traffic and links I can add to what I’m already starting to get for my BANS sites.
Cindy
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# 7 March 2008 at 4:36 pm

Cindy said:
Eric,
Rochelle has done her usual awesome job of explaining how she sets up USFA for her sites. I’d be interested in knowing how you do things. Do you use one of her 2 methods or do you do something else?
I’ve read the long post over at the BANS forum but wasn’t clear on how best to do things. Rochelle’s directions helped tremendously but it’s always helpful to know how different people do things.
Thanks.
Cindy
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# 7 March 2008 at 4:39 pm

GBPackers said:
Aren’t USFA links nofollow? They may help with a backlink but they won’t help with indexing unless nofollow is a myth.
I had over 60 ads and some were getting quite a few views. I probably generated 1500 ad views in the 3 months I was a member and I think I got less than 50 referrals from USFA. I could have run an adwords campaign and gotten 250-300 targeted visitors for $30.
My ads may have been sub-optimal. I followed rochelle’s basic template and looked at how a few others were doing it (seb, edakehurst) and I didn’t see anything substantially different.
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# 7 March 2008 at 5:27 pm

Eric (author) said:
Cindy,
Not a problem….here goes:
First, I find a good term that has under 1K competing pages (w/quotes)…..under 500 is better….under 100 is phenominal!
I then write an add using that term as my Title…and then again as the first text of the add, and I assign it H1.
Then write about 100-150 words about your product, site, services.
I then include about 2 to 3 pictures in the add. I feel like that is important because it adds a visual.
Next, I follow up at the bottom with another 50-75 words of text and at the very, very bottom…I put the keyword phrase again and bold it.
That’s about all I do. Anytime I write a USFA, I make sure to include a link to #1 my main page, and #2 a couple product specific pages….I even make my images clickable and have them link to the product specific page on my site.
Also, I make sure I have a keyword density of one at the very top (H1), one at the very bottom, and 3-4 in the body of the ad.
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# 7 March 2008 at 5:31 pm

Cindy said:
Eric,
So are you then just targeting a category page instead of any particular product?
For example, would you find a long tail keyword (from WordTracker?) relating to the Browning hunting knife and then create an ad that took viewers to your Browning Hunting Knife page where they could then start shopping? And if you had 5 such keyword phrases, then you would create 5 ads all leading to the same page? Or am I misunderstanding your process?
Also, where are you getting your images from? Are they from actual auctions or are they more generic images from a merchant’s site or even royalty free graphics?
Thanks!
Cindy
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# 7 March 2008 at 5:48 pm

Eric (author) said:
I use images from actual auctions….since, the owner of the auction more than likely wouldn’t mind if I was promoting their listing.
I target any phrase that I know has under 500 competing results in Google…then, I point at least one link in the ad to my homepage….and at least one or two more links to product specific pages in my BANS store. I don’t point to actual auctions, if that’s what you’re asking. I think you’re understanding me just fine! :)
Some do better than others…just like anything else. I don’t know if the links are No-Follow….does anyone else have insight on this?…and even if they are, IMO it’s worth $9 per month to be a member. It drives targeted traffic….how much, is up to the user and how many ads he/she wants to write.
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# 7 March 2008 at 6:01 pm

Cindy said:
Thanks Eric!
Many of the posts I read in the BANS forum seemed to indicate they were using Rochelle’s first method which was linking to a specific auction which seems to be very time intensive.
Her second method, if done properly, could be one that requires regular (weekly or monthly) monitoring but not something that would need constant attention.
Your method would be pretty much hands off (my kind of advertising!) although not necessarily quite as specific as Rochelle’s.
I think using a combination of your method and Rochelle’s second method could be a good mix. It would be interesting/beneficial to be able to track them to see which method has better results.
I believe another post here (or on the BANS forum) indicated that Google uses no-follow on USFA but Yahoo and maybe MSN don’t. But if you get visitors and subsequently buyers from your ads, the link debate wouldn’t really be an issue.
Now to write some basic generic ads that can be tweaked with specific data.
Cindy
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# 7 March 2008 at 6:29 pm

Eric (author) said:
Cool!
Yeah, the way I do it I learned at Wealthy Affiliate ala Travis Sago’s methods of marketing. Seems to work pretty good…
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# 7 March 2008 at 6:37 pm

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