I say yes.

I had an interesting discussion on a popular online forum earlier today regarding free traffic. 

The gist of the conversation, for brevity purposes – was essentially that free traffic was MUCH too hard to generate, way over-rated for conversion purposes and was sort of a poor man’s version of building a REAL online business when it comes to making money.  ( as opposed to all PPC)

In some respects, I ALMOST agree with some of the points this putz was making…insofar as it pertains to social networking traffic ( I rarely bother) and even SOME natural, organic traffic efforts as well – as ANYONE who spends a ton on SEO will tell you ( I really don’t) that you can optimize your pages through the rafters, create GREAT content until your fingers bleed and your brain swells, but most folks are simply going to stop by, do a quick and cursory eye scan of your content, and be gone on the same out breath. 

I like to think a lot of the content I have created on this ( and many other) sites is good, helpful and very targetted to my audience, yet…..on natural traffic it’s still unsusual for people to actually READ the content that brought them here ( through the SERP’s anyway) as illuminated by the 70% or more of folks who don’t even stay long enough to notice my bright and cheery smile and unusually fashionable command of the English language. 

Which, to be totally honest, as a fragile minded meglomaniac, this perpetual pattern of early abandonment really hurts my feelings. 

If your driving traffic for opt in’s – on blog and organic traffic - the numbers are worse – the percentages can be aneemic ( especially in the online marketing space) and quite frankly, unless you have a TON of free time to create content, a good argument could be made to simply suck it up and spend the money on PPC.   (Where your opt in rates WILL go up exponentially with some decent copy and an attractive offer)

But, being cheap, resourceful and full of cafeine and ritalin, I refuse to take the path most traveled.

The simple truth is, and I hate to sound like a broken record, you CAN use simple article and press release submissions, for FREE, to build a MASSIVE list in one short month or less. 

And I’ve got a BIG project planned for the next month or so, that I anticpate will be a 7 figure business within the first 12-18 months, where I plan on proving it. 

Starting from scratch with no list.  No product.  And no site.   Just a simple and exciting vision, and a comittment to make it happen. 

And while I will be using a veritable avalanche of traffic generation techniques (including PPC to do it) a significant percentage of my blueprint will revolve around the very same FREE traffic techniques I’ve been preaching on here for a year or more. 

In the meantime – I do believe you can start today, and using NOTHING more than free traffic techniques, (NOT including social network traffic which for the most part should NOT be a huge part of your short term montization strategy in my view) generate anywhere from Five to Ten THOUSAND visitors a DAY to a brand new site.…in your very first week. 

You should be able to convert a significant percentage of those visitors to opt in’s (10% – 50% depending on your niche, copy, layout and offer) and with a half hearted follow up sequence, turn that into a 6 figure business in your first month. (extrapolated out over 12 months obviously)

Again – using a NEW site – and a very simple article marketing strategy, with only 6 articles over two days ( today is November 2, a Sunday – as you can see from the screen shot at the top of this article, these have only been live for 48 hours or so) these have generated multiple thousand views, several thousand URL clicks ( at a solid CTR of close to 30%) and over 500 opt in’s since yesterday. 

Total time invested was about 3 hours, and that includes registering the domain, laying out the opt in template, writing the content for directories and squeeze page, and 1 hour of Law and Order Special Victims Unit while doing all of the above. 

If this was a project I planned on sticking with (it’s not) as you can see, once you get the predictable part of the math down, ( average views per article, resource box conversion rate and landing page efficiency) you can scale this up and out to your little hearts content until your income goals are pretty much self fufilling.

The simple truth is whatever allows you to build a list, will allow you to build a REAL and enduring business you can count on.  And the EASIEST way to do it for FREE is the above. 

(Better than RSS subscribers, better than lots of comments on your blog and even better than a site with all kinds nice numbers on the google page rank totem pole of pointlessness.)

Plus if you are building sites to sell – there isn’t ANYTHING that is more attractive to a potential (smart) buyer than a site that comes with MORE than good content…..but a few thousand verified opt in’s to boot!  You can do that – for free, using these very methods, and without ever buying one more internet marketing course, seminar or silliness, be on your way to where you want to be in time for Obama’s swearing in speech at the latest…;-)