David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing

SUMMARY: The Free Traffic System is NOT what the name sounds like. It is an effective platform to build editorial links on keyword-relevant pages across multiple domains of mixed quality. And it’s free.

Readers who know me well might be forgiven for raising their eyebrows at something called “Free Traffic System“. After all, I am probably the person you know who most vociferously opposes any SEO approach that involves automation. So I should lay to rest that I am not reviewing a “system” in the sense of what it might sound like. In fact, I think the word “platform” would be more appropriate.

Some of you surely still have your eyebrows raised because you know I put little stock in all those traffic machines that send huge swathes of untargeted traffic, which for most niches is pretty useless . The fact is that this “system” does not send any “traffic” directly. Traffic does result from the promotion it helps you do, but this really is a system – er, I mean … a “platform” for promotion of your website, your company, your credibility, your blog posts, etc.

If you’ve let down your eyebrows, get ready to raise them again, because this world-renowned cheapskate who avoids paying for any SEO or promotional tools he can possibly get away with, has just upgraded to the “Pro” version of the Free Traffic System, which is not cheap by anyone’s measure. However, after using the free version these past two months, I have been impressed enough that I am convinced it is worth paying (against my cheapskate instincts) for the even more effective Pro version. So, yes, technically it’s free (but no longer for me). But more importantly, it’s effective. And it’s even more effective (I’ll explain how later) when you upgrade to Pro.

(Complete disclosure at the end of this post.)

Free Traffic System could use a name change

So this really should not be called the Free Traffic System (I know a name like that sells in the Internet Marketing community, but it cheapens what is in fact a much more sophisicated approach); it should be called the Effective Promotion Platform. Right. I shall petition the owner for a name change. In the meantime, let me tell you…

• what FTS does
• how it works
• who can benefit most
• any downsides?
• the differences between the free and pro versions

Please keep in mind as you read this that the process is NOT automated. I might call it semi-automated, but really the only automated part is distribution. The really big time-saving is in searching for link-building opportunities. What FTS gives you is instant access, saving hundreds of hours of searching for linking opportunities.

In simplest terms, the Free Traffic System is a platform for spreading your content across multiple blogs run by multiple owners. It is a cross between article distribution and guest blogging. The basic steps are as follows.

1. You create content, much as you would for article distribution.
2. You fill in the forms, much as you would for article distribution.
3. You select the blogs you want your content to appear on.
4. The bloggers decide whether to accept your content.

Step #4 is a crucial step to keep in mind. You do get instant access to the blogs, saving hours of searching; you do not get guaranteed or automatic access. It means two things.

First, the bloggers are folks like you and me – a myriad of blog owners around the world, with a myriad of domains across a myriad of IP addresses. Take note, that is important for SEO.

Second, if you submit crap, they won’t accept your “guest post”, so it really is worth investing the time and/or money in creating good quality articles.

Detailed review of the Free Traffic System process

Let’s look at the process in more detail, because there are some elements built in that might seem small, but are nevertheless very important.

The first information that goes into the submission for are the URLs and the anchor text.

As you can see by the screenshot, you are allowed two links per submission in the free version of the Free Traffic System. That might be your home page and a link to a specific blog post or product in your eCommerce site.

Notice how both the fields have height? You can add as many keyword variations for each link as you want, and each one will become the anchor text for the link. What this means is that if you add 5 different “keywords”, one fifth of the blogs you submit to will feature each keyword as an anchor text. From an SEO perspective, this is great because we all know that anchor text variation at least to some degree is important. The one caveat is that all the variations have to fit into the same spot in the text of your article.

Even more interesting is that you can have multiple URLs for your two links. What this means is that if you add 2 different URLs for one of the links, half the blogs you submit to will feature each URL. This works only when the anchor text can be used interchangeably between the two URLs. For instance, we have a page about book writers and another page about ghost writers. We could put both of the URLs into the %LINK2% field, and include keywords that easily apply to both URLs. From an SEO perspective, this is great because we add variety and spread the deep-link love better across the domain.

The title is crucial

Next we enter the title of the post. From an SEO perspective, the title is important because it is often used for …

• The post title
• The page title <title>
• File name
• Internal linking anchor text
• Anchor text from external links

From a duplicate content perspective, then, it is crucial that each instance of the article have a different title. There is special code (easy as pie, don’t worry) to “spin” the title so that you have a different title on each blog you submit to. The image below shows a part of the code and some of the variations that are spun out of it.

Please note that you still have to use your brain to input the information, which is then automatically spun into multiple variations the information you input, not your brain).

The example above is what I would consider the lazy way to do it. The title is worth more effort than that, and in a future blog post I will share some advanced spinning tips. In the meantime, this works.

Content is truly king

The next step is to submit the content, the body of your article. What should you write about? If you are a blogger, take any of your recent blog posts and rewrite them. You need at least 450 words to qualify for both your links.

If you suck at writing, we can write a very high-quality post for you; please let me know. If you are even more of a cheapskate than I am, you can go to Freelancer.com for articles but be warned – quality counts if you want your article to be accepted, and when it comes to writing, you get what you pay for.

Now you are ready to submit…No, wait! Not yet. There are two things you need to do to your content before pasting it into the form.

First, you need to inset your two links. One of the really exciting things about the Free Traffic System is that your links are not consigned to a “resource box” after the end of your article. You can place your links wherever they fit. I strongly advise placing them at different parts of the text, at least one of them in the first half of your post. This sort of placement tends to be more valuable from an SEO perspective (these are often called “editorial links” – look it up).

Second, you would do well to spin your article or at least parts of it, so that you are not submitting identical content to 30 different blogs. There are automated spinners (Yuck!) that spew out, well, what you would expect a machine to spew out. FTS offers a convenient link to one of them. It does take time to manually spin an article (at least an hour the way I do it), but I believe this is highly valuable for long-term SEO value.

However, automatic spinning is better than no spinning at all – just double-check the quality. In a future blog post, as I mentioned above, I will share some advanced spinning tips.

Now you are ready to submit it and preview various versions of it. Each time you hit preview…

You will see different anchor text for your two links, and you will see different versions of your article if it has been spun.

Choose your tag(s)

Next, you get to enter one tag in the free version, so make it the most relevant keyword. If you know anything about blogs and tags, you will immediately understand the value of this from an SEO perspective. I won’t go into the explanation here.

Now comes the fun part (What, haven’t you been having fun yet?) OK, OK, you got me there. I love to write, so for me the fun part was actually up front. But we are now at the action part. You’ve written your content. You’ve filled in the form. Now it’s time for you to…

Select your blogs

This is done by entering keywords into the field…

The Free Traffic System will then spit out a list of blogs and categories within blogs that contain the words you listed. For instance, in the example they offer, you will get a list that includes every blog with “finance”, “money” or “loan” in its title OR with a category name that includes “finance”, “money” or “loan”. The image below gives an example for you.

A few things you can see right away. You get to see the titles of the blog and the titles of the categories, but that’s all. No eyeball test for quality (there is an obvious reason for that). No PageRank data (that would be a nice easy feature to integrate, but I suppose it would lead to too much clustering and it might actually be better this way).

Based on the titles, you can pretty much tell if a blog/category is appropriate for your article. You get to select one category in each blog, up to a maximum of 30 blogs in the free version. If you choose wide, sweeping terms (like “money” and “finance”, for example), you might end up with too many to choose from. If you choose terms that are too narrow (like “payday loans” and “cashflow”) you likely won’t have enough choice. Once you’ve played around with the system a bit, you’ll find the right balance.

Since you can’t tell what quality a blog is before you choose it, is it really worthwhile? Yes. If you have written good quality content and targeted the right blogs and the right categories effectively, your article will be accepted. I just took a look at my stats for an article I submitted12 days ago (while I was still using the free version). So far, 26 blogs accepted, there was one error in communication and three blogs are yet to be accounted for. Not bad. Plus, these are keyword relevant links on keyword relevant pages on keyword relevant (or at least topical) websites.

Once the article is live, you can search Google, Yahoo and Bing for it, and you can see the value of the various blogs. My experience is that there is a wide range of quality and PageRank, some cluttered with Google ads and some crisp and clean. Some that nobody reads, some that have an active community. Some that just sit there, and some that are promoted on Twitter and FaceBook.

And they are all worthwhile, because you want links from a variety of quality websites, not just from top-ranking ones. Read my counterintuitive post on why you want sucky links, too.

Who benefits most from the Free Traffic System?

The obvious answer is anyone who is building links. This is a nice addition into the mix, to keep getting a variety of different links from different websites on keyword-relevant pages. However, if you are a blogger or someone currently submiting to article directories, you can benefit even more, because you’ve already done the work of researching and writing, all you have to do is tweak the article and submit.

The other type of website that really benefits from this type of platform are hard-core commercial websites, such as eCommerce or brick-and-mortar companies with boring websites (you know, industrial services like machine tooling or sanitation or backhoes). These types of sites are hard to attract natural links (unless you are extemely clever about link-bait), so this makes a welcome addition to the link-building opportunities.

Are there any downsides to the Free Traffic System?

There are always downsides, and even a wonderful tool used improperly can be ineffective, possibly even dangerous. If you rely only on one link-building method, it is much less effective than a multi-facetted approach.

FTS should be part of your link-building strategy, not the whole thing or even the major part of it. You still need to create great content on your own site. You still need to attract links to that content. You should still submit to directories and comment on blogs. You should still exchange links with related, non-competing websites. You should still do social bookmarking and spread your content on Twitter and FaceBook. You should still post to forums and answer questions online.

If you don’t spin your content or spin it poorly, you might end up with a lot of duplicate content – probably not enough to get your website banned, but enough that it will probably drag down your rankings.

Why did I pay to upgrade to the Pro version?

There are many reasons to upgrade to the Pro version of Free Traffic System from the Free version, and as you might guess they are all on the website in a slick sales pitch. Don’t be fooled; there is only one reason, and that is mucho more links. Sure, they promise a bunch of future benefits. Nobody upgrades for that. They promise faster review and support, but my experience is that they give fantastic turn-around time even to free members.

No, there is one reason why someone would upgrade, and that’s for the extra links. Let’s do a little math. Here is a quick comparison of the three elements where Pro members get a better deal than Free members:

FREE: two links in each article
PRO: three links in each article

FREE: one tag for each article
PRO: five tags for each article

FREE: each article submitted to 30 blogs
PRO: each article submitted to 50 blogs

How does this all add up?

FREE:

Each article has two links. The article appears typically on its own page, a page in the main blogstream, a page for the tag you define, a page for the category you choose, and a monthly archive page. So that’s two links on five pages, for a total of 10 links. Let’s suppose your article gets picked up by all 30 blogs, each with 10 links …that equals 300 links across 30 domains. In real life, there will be errors. For instance, in my example above, I got 260 links across 26 domains. Not bad considering I paid nothing, it took me only a couple hours, and these are valuable one-way editorial links (including laser targeted deep links).

But check this out…

PRO:

Each article has three links. The article appears typically on its own page, a page in the main blogstream, one page for each of the five tags you define, a page for the category you choose, and a monthly archive page. So that’s three links on nine pages, for a total of 27 links. Let’s suppose your article gets picked up by all 50 blogs, each with 27 links …that equals 1350 links across 50 domains. From a single article. Wow! Of course, in real life, there will be errors. But for my money (and I did pay!), this is worth upgrading for. The funny thing is that on the Free Traffic System website, they claim that a Pro member can gain up to 900 links per article. Huh? Why are they underselling themselves?

I asked, and was granted, permission to embed their upgrade promo video on my blog, so here it is:

So in summation, I highly recommend this to webmasters, bloggers and link-builders. It is a quick and easy way to add a ton of one-way editorial backlinks with a very small amount of work.

My one BIG caveat is to not get seduced by how easy it is. Do it right, so that it really works for you. And keep doing other forms of link-building, even if this seems easier and more effective, because you want a great variety of different types of links.

Disclosure statement: The links to Free Traffic System in this post are affiliate links. That means that if you click through and sign up, I benefit. This in no way influenced my recommendation; I first decided to pay for the upgrade, then decided to add the affiliate links (I would be crazy not to!) You don’t have to use those links to sign up, but obviously I would be extremely grateful if you do. Thank you.