The pros and cons of conditionally free traffic sources

What is CFT in traffic arbitrage?

Conditional free traffic (CFT) is defined as traffic that occurs when users actively find your website or profile and click through to it via targeted links without you having to spend money on advertising or promotion. Such users are already somewhat interested in the topic or even in the product or service of the offer.

Webmasters don’t have to spend money on buying traffic, but in the case of CFT, they pay with their own time and hard work. It takes time to generate conditionally free traffic, sometimes it takes at least several months to wait for sufficient volumes, while paid traffic is provided by advertising networks immediately after payment. Free traffic can be used for almost any offer, depending on the source and target audience. However, you need to get the approval of the affiliate before you start. 

Usually, CFT sources are recommended for beginners when the budget does not allow them to go wild with paid sources.

Again, you will still have to pay a certain amount, because some tools and software greatly simplify the life of an arbitrageur (analytics systems, etc.), but these costs are much lower than the advertising budget of the campaign. The bonus is that free traffic, unlike paid traffic, will still come even with an interval approach and long pauses, although it will decrease significantly.

Sources of free traffic

Any platform where a webmaster can contact users can be used as a source of free traffic. We will list the most common ones.

Social networks

YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok you can develop your profile and attract a loyal audience anywhere. This is a long-term way, so you need a certain strategy to create your community:

• high-quality design and maximum informative content of the profile;
• testing different formats of content presentation, both textual and creative;
• monitoring of audience interests – you can periodically ask your followers directly what exactly they are interested in;
• frequency of posts – here you need to strike a golden mean, because overly active posting is more likely to annoy followers, while irregular posts gradually reduce interest in the profile. You should also choose the best time to post;
• active interaction with the audience – comments and answers to questions, participation in discussions;
• use of hashtags and geolocations also helps to attract new users.

Later, you just need to add a link that will take users to the offer page. Such links from social networks help the advertiser’s resource to rank better in search.

Blog

An equally successful format is your blog. It allows you to express yourself to the general public, and share your own experience or expert knowledge if the webmaster has a good hobby or relevant skills.

Thanks to social media and a blog, you can learn how to communicate with your target audience and analyze what approaches they respond to best.

Thematic forums

There are a lot of them online, and each forum is already a meeting place with the target audience. With the right approach, you can get a large reach and high lead conversion. What you need first of all:

• choose the right forum and register;
• communicate with forum members and talk about your own experience, supplementing it with photos and interesting information;
• Native advertising – in this case, it works best, you need to unobtrusively post information about the product, talk about promotions on the advertiser’s website, and support them with an affiliate link.

Publishing articles on external resources

If you have a certain knowledge base, you can try yourself as an expert on other websites or portals. This also provides a good opportunity for native advertising. Additional traffic to your resource comes through links in your profile or organic search. To do this, you need to:

• choose a platform for publications;
• request information about the audience and traffic on the resource;
• prepare and post unique material on a relevant topic;
• provide a link to your website or page or to relevant pages of the advertiser’s products and services (it is better not to provide a link to the main page if you wish, users will use the functionality of the customer’s website themselves).

Thus, you will receive referral traffic through links on websites. High-quality content that is published and meets SEO standards has a higher chance of being ranked highly in search engines and attracts more referral traffic. 

Email marketing

This method is usually actively used to attract a loyal audience to e-commerce sites.

Registered users or buyers are included in the mailing list, and their consent is required. Some websites use the “Subscribe to the newsletter” block to do this, in addition to specifying an email address during registration or purchase. 

How to proceed:

• prepare a template;
• study the requirements and restrictions when working with links – otherwise, the emails will end up in spam, so the effectiveness of the method will be significantly reduced;
• it is better to develop a content plan and create certain headings to make the newsletter regular and relevant, as well as to correspond to certain events. For example, greeting customers on holidays and informing them about promotions and discounts, announcing the release of expert materials or news digests work well for the advertiser’s image. The main thing is not to be intrusive so as not to make the user want to unsubscribe;

To track the results and analyze mass email campaigns, webmasters need to use paid services. However, their cost is not exorbitant, and their efficiency will greatly simplify the work, allowing you to conclude, and optimize the settings of your email campaigns.

As a result, webmasters receive additional high-quality traffic, as the conversion rate of leads attracted from a loyal audience is much higher.

Traffic from search engines

Organic traffic is a valuable source of stable and high-quality traffic. A competent approach makes it possible to attract a wide audience to your website that is initially interested.

For a user, everything looks very simple: they enter a query into a search engine and receive a list of web pages that best match their query.

However, a search engine performs several complex computational processes to rank a huge number of resources.

They are divided into the following:

1. Crawling – the search algorithm retrieves content from websites through their external and internal links.
2. Indexing – an indexing program generates a searchable index, a database that is used for further searches.
3. Ranking – a search engine provides search results for a query from the index and sorts them in a certain order, depending on the relevance of the query pages.

Therefore, the webmaster’s task is to make efforts to create such content so that the search engine sees the site as relevant to the query and ranks it at the top of the results.

What kind of content do you need to create:

• Commercial texts. They are placed on the pages of products and services, categories and subcategories, filter and tagging pages. Category pages have the highest demand, so you should start filling your site with content from them. Subcategory, filter, and tagging pages come next. Product pages are the last to be developed. The larger the selection of products on the resource, the better it ranks.
• Informational texts. This is a section on a blog and related content. Even well-known brands do not neglect to expand their audience by reading diverse articles. This fact once again emphasizes how important organic traffic is for advertisers.
• Other commercial texts. Here we are talking about FAQs and testimonials. FAQ is a section with the most frequently asked questions and answers to them. This section is created in collaboration with users, so the more complete and detailed the answers are, the more trustworthy the audience is.

To create relevant content that meets the needs of users:

1. Search for competitors’ websites to find relevant topics to cover.
2. Make a selection of topics based on high-frequency queries in the search engine service.

A creative and systematic approach will convert into high-quality organic traffic over time.

Advantages of search engine optimization

• Cost savings. Free traffic allows you to attract visitors without directly spending money on advertising or other marketing activities.
• Increase in traffic volume. Opening up new channels to attract your audience can lead to an increase in traffic to your website, which in turn has a positive impact on conversions and sales.
• Experimentation. Free traffic allows you to experiment with different marketing approaches and strategies without risking financial losses.

Disadvantages of traffic

• Poor traffic quality. Free traffic often has a low conversion rate, as visitors may be less interested in your product or service than those who come through paid channels.
• Dependence on algorithms. Free traffic often depends on search engines or social media algorithms, which can change and affect the volume and quality of traffic.
• Time costs. Attracting free traffic can require significant efforts in the form of content creation, social media activity, SEO optimization, and other actions.
• Limited scalability. Compared to paid traffic, scaling free traffic may be limited due to limited resources or capabilities.

Conclusion

To summarize: free traffic is definitely alive and well, and it is valued by advertisers, although it is more often used alongside paid traffic. Today, there are entire arbitrage teams that professionally earn money from organic traffic, but you don’t have to be a top pro or invest in hiring specialists to generate CFT. For beginners, using sources of conditionally free traffic is the best way to dive into arbitrage without the risk of draining a large budget and quickly becoming disappointed.