Free sources for media buying

Both professionals and beginners use sources of free traffic.  At the start of their careers, every beginner wants to find cheaper traffic and, best of all, free traffic. However, it’s a considerable risk for most partners starting out working with large budgets and traffic from paid channels.

Why do experienced media buyers primarily invest in advertising campaigns if free traffic channels exist? Let’s take a closer look.

Is it possible to do traffic media buying without investing?

The answer is more of a no than a yes. Traffic media buying without investing implies the use of shareware traffic. It really is free of charge, but to get it, you have to waste a lot of time. 

Moreover, before getting traffic from individual shareware sources, you have to buy accounts, domains, proxies, and other additional services. This makes free traffic sources sometimes not quite so tempting and profitable.

Features of free traffic media buying

Media buyers who want to work with free traffic have to go through a daily routine.

As a rule, you need to devote a lot of time to two things:

• creating a lot of content in all its formats – articles, posts, videos, and creative images;
• committing to mass registration on different sites and pumping up your accounts – leaving posts, corresponding with other users, and mailings.

If you’re using your own platform, social network community, or channel, you can promote any offer at your own discretion. If you’re using other people’s resources (forums, blogs, groups in social networks) as a source of free traffic, then you will have to avoid getting banned in every way possible. This will sooner or later “catch up” with you anyway.

Effectiveness of free traffic

Apart from the fact that shareware can test connections without investing, there are other advantages:

• generates income in the long run;
• shows good conversion;
• huge audience and involvement;
• If you make an effort, you can reach a high ROI.

It isn’t easy to define precisely the quality of free traffic for media buying. But if you don’t try, you won’t know. Many webmasters believe that the time costs are disproportionate to income. However, others try to combine paid and share-free traffic and find some excellent conversions.

In traffic media buying, channel choice depends on many factors. It’s important to consider the target audience and vertical, GEO, and KPI of the advertiser. For example, not all partners accept spam traffic. 

Check with your account manager to ensure all conversions are accounted for and to avoid any misunderstandings between the webmaster and the partner (or direct advertiser).

Where to Get Free Traffic

Free traffic sources and where to get them depend on how you work with them. If you want to monetize your site, then in theory, you can direct users from your own resource to offers from any vertical:

• eCommerce
• Nutra;
• gambling
• dating:
• betting;
• adult;
• crypto;
• finance, etc.

It’s important to note that your site’s subject is still important.

If you’re using someone else’s site to get free partner traffic, you need to meet their requirements. Yandex. Zen, for example, doesn’t produce many shows, and only “white” offers are allowed. So it’s not feasible to get free adult traffic here. The same can be said about Quora and bulletin boards. There’s not much point in promoting online casinos, microloans, sports betting, dating, and goods from the 18+ category here (although there are exceptions to this rule).

YouTube channels can be devoted to different offers. For example, you can choose any “white” offers for a long-term advertising campaign, while “grey” ones are suitable for a short-term campaign. 

Free traffic from newsletters and social networks is suitable for any GEO and verticals. Entertainment content is welcomed with social networks, and you can get free traffic for adult, betting, gambling, and dating.

When choosing an offer, you have to rely not just on good conversion. Choose a vertical where you can create high-quality content yourself. If your English isn’t good and you don’t know anything about online casinos, then don’t bother with the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the US with gambling offers. You will have to order content and creatives, which is no longer free media buying.

Where can you get partner traffic for free?

For a novice media buyer, free or cheap traffic is the best way to practice at no high cost. Beginners will be able to try their hand, and move on to more serious budgets. At the same time, you’re looking at where to get free traffic.

TOP 10 Sources of Free Traffic

1.Own Website

If you have your own website, then it can bring you income not only from direct sales. “Search engines” like it when the resource is filled with high-quality content. They get a good number of visits, and you can monetize your traffic successfully. As the owner of an advertising site, you set the rules yourself, and you aren’t worried about moderation. However, using aggressive advertising formats leads to pessimization or the site’s positioning falling in search results.

If you decide to create a media buying site from scratch, you first have to invest sufficiently in its development, content, purchase of hosting and domain, and SEO promotion.

2. Blogging

You don’t have to pay for a domain or hosting. It’s enough to register on a platform and get native offers from “white” verticals. Note that blogging platforms (YandexZen, Live Journal, Blogger.com, etc.) have strict rules; you’ll be irrevocably banned for promoting “black” offers. On the other hand, with the right approach to creating an advertising campaign, you’ll most likely be able to collect leads.

Before getting free traffic from your blog, it needs to be actively developed. To achieve this, you need to post at least 3 posts every week, monitor the number of views, build an audience and give people what they want to see.

3. Guest Posting

Crowd Marketing is another way to get traffic for media buying for free. The work consists of registering accounts on thematic forums, communities, blogs, and activity to avert suspicions of the administration and, finally, create topics, comments, or posts with a link to the offer. There is a risk of being blocked not only for advertising “forbidden” things but also for using legitimate verticals if the site rules don’t allow active links to other resources.

4. Social Networks

We could write a whole series of articles on this topic alone. However, we will try to focus on the main thing.

In theory, you can spam completely free of charge and create thematic groups and publications on Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, and Twitter. However, each platform has its own features: FB has stringent moderation; in TikTok, you have to follow trends; in Twitter, there are limits on the volume of characters in posts, and VKontakte will show a comment with a link only if it is specialized and useful.

When promoting offers on Instagram, it’s important to create high-quality visuals and sale-encouraging text. Most verticals here “go” well, including dating, Nutra, finance, etc. Note that the platform’s algorithms can now identify non-unique or duplicate content, so prepare original images or make them unique using editor software. Use mass likes and mass following while considering the daily limits. 

5. Sites with Questions and Answers

Before getting free traffic to the partner program from services like Yandex. Q, Replies Mail.ru, Quora, and others, you need to do the preparatory work. For example, earn a high rating and regularly show activity. You will need several accounts (one for creating the question, the other for the “responders”). Question and answer services are suitable for working with any verticals. To avoid being banned by the moderators, you need to use a proxy and an anti-detect browser.

If you write high-quality articles-answers on Quora, they can end up in recommendations or Google TOP. Remember that the target audience of this site is mainly solvent men from the UK, the USA, and India.

6. Notice Boards

Notice boards are a good traffic source because the audience here knows exactly what they want, so you don’t need to warm them up. Another plus is that search engines index many offers, so you can use SEO methods to promote offers. However, be prepared for frequent communication with the audience (for some offers — by phone). The most popular sites for placing ads are OLX, Tiu, Prom, Avito, Slando, where advertising campaigns without scaling can be created for free. 

7. Messengers

The volume of mobile traffic today is significantly greater than desktop. Telegram, Viber, WhatsApp, and other instant messengers are installed on almost every smartphone. It’s easy for people not only to communicate there but also to receive current offers. A few more advantages of the channel include creating content on any GEO and interacting with users directly. The audience in messengers is diverse, and the coverage is vast. Absolutely anything can be promoted here. You have to be tactful and sensitive when directing traffic to gambling or adult sites, or you might get blocked. Best to offer frequent bonuses, discounts, promotions – and leads will appear.

8. YouTube

To get free traffic from YouTube, create a channel (depending on the subject of the promoted offers) and then focus on developing it. To get your channel into the YouTube recommendations section, you have to achieve many views, reactions, and comments. You also need to optimize the content in terms of key searches, using the keys in the title, description, and video material. The “free” part ends here. 

To create high-quality videos, you have to invest. You’ll need equipment (camera, studio lighting, microphone, etc.), image processing software, and assistants. An alternative option is to use stock video and make it unique, but this requires a lot of work, and it’s difficult to predict the potential of such advertising campaigns. 

9. Doorways

Doorway sites focus on a certain group of key queries that allow them to reach the TOP quickly. Search engines have long ago learned to identify low-quality, useless and meaningless resources; therefore, they are not very long-lived. Resources promoting “banned” content end up getting removed even faster.

Doorgen generators are used to create doorways. If you want such a source to bring in traffic for longer, it’s best to create “white” doorways – and fill them with quality content to make them useful for users.

For example, some people create a grid of 10-20 YouTube channels that share likes and comments, provide views and raise the doorway positions in search results. Just like with your own site, you need to spend money on a domain, hosting, content, promotion, use proxies, and anti-detect browsers. It actually takes a colossal amount of work.

10. Batch Emailing

Whatever you say, batch emails still work and bring a lot of free traffic. For media buying purposes, creating a series of emails to “warm up” the audience and find your potential leads is good. So you can promote any offers directed to all GEOs without any costs whatsoever if you use batch email services with free trial periods.

Non-standard channels of free traffic

There are many less popular sources where you can get traffic for partners free of charge. These are any sites where you can leave a partner link. We will show you what we believe to be the most promising, not yet exhausted channels for free traffic media buying:

1. Ameba is a Japanese social network where you can blog.
2. Irc Galleria is a popular social network in Finland.
3. Nasza is the Polish version of Odnoklassniki.
4. Copains D ‘avant is another analog of Odnoklassniki, the French social network ranks third in attendance after Facebook and YouTube.
5. Wer-kennt-wen is a social network with an audience from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
6. DeviantArt – designers demonstrate their works on this platform. Leaving links in the comments or descriptions, you can promote applications for designers, design courses for artists, and tools for the product.
7. WeChat is a Chinese social network where people communicate and buy. The site has an English version.

Using these sources, you can get free traffic for media buying. However, they haven’t yet been tested enough to get to the TOP of free channels, but this gives them a huge advantage – there is practically no competition here.

PS When your start-up budget is limited or nonexistent, free traffic sources are the perfect way to test the connections and have a go at traffic media buying without investing. However, be prepared to spend a lot of time and systematically perform monotonous and uniform tasks. 

If you want faster results from an advertising campaign, think about push and pop traffic. Even novice media buyers can earn on TacoLoco 😉