You may have done those calculations in your head, which you use to try and justify getting really cheap, ineffective traffic by the bucketful. You might have signed up for those “guaranteed traffic” scams by thinking that “if only ¼% bought, I’d be a millionaire!”

It doesn’t work because most traffic is entirely unfocused and the focused traffic is extremely expensive.

Publicity driven traffic doesn’t work that way.

When you use publicity to promote your site, you will get 55 gallon barrels full of traffic delivered directly to your site for almost no cost, other than your time. There are a few ingredients to getting this traffic though, and that includes time, persistence and creativity.

1. Time- you have to focus on who your spending time courting because each venue has a certain intrinsic value to you. You don’t want to spend 2 hours courting a guy with an e-zine base of 100 but you might think about it if he had a major website with millions of visitors a month.
2. Persistence- publicity rarely comes quickly. In my experience, it can sometimes take months of sending a new press release every few weeks and plenty of personal emails before a major outlet would cover something that I wanted them to. However, when they did, it was worth it!
3. Creativity- publicity is based entirely upon being able to be more creative than your competitor. This is why publicity stunts work; everybody, the media included, loves creativity. It makes them think, it makes them laugh, and it gets them to pay attention. It makes you stand out as an intelligent person. This could include a good news hook or something interesting in your press kit.

Publicity can be used on and offline to bring you publicity, and I would recommend using both venues. Trade journals are surprisingly easy to get into if you have a good article and writing skills. If you don’t, you can always hire a ghostwriter to do them for you at a reasonable rate.

Good luck!