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If you are involved in any way with online marketing then you’ve heard all the buzz about getting traffic from Web 2.0 sources. And of course the number of inevitable products that will teach you how to tap into this wealth of free traffic continues to grow. A product that recently launched at the time of this writing is the S.M.A.R.T.S program from the boys over at Stompernet.

I watched one of the free videos and was pretty amazed at what was presented at no charge. I don’t even know how much the program goes for and I don’t need to because it’s not something that I need at the moment. Frankly, I’ve got so many unfinished projects on my plate right now that I don’t need to dump anything more on top.

I’m still trying to figure out how to get the most out of WordPress blogs and all the neat widgets that go along with it. That in itself is a huge project.

At least for me it is.

From what I can tell, Web 2.0 traffic sources consist of not only blogs and social bookmarking sites, but also video sharing sites, social networking sites, and a few other sources that escape me at the moment. I have yet to create a MySpace or Facebook profile.

It’s all much too overwhelming for the likes of me.

Between trying to create software products and messing around with affiliate marketing and PPC, there’s just no time left over for the rest of this stuff.

I suppose I could outsource some of this, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin. How do you outsource something If you don’t have much of clue what it is you actually need from something?

Of all the Web 2.0 vehicles, the ones that hold the most interest for me are good old fashioned blogging on WordPress, and perhaps Squidoo lenses and video.

And when it comes to blogging, this blog right here is the full extent of it. Sure, I’ve been looking at using WordPress as a platform for affiliate content sites, but that’s not “blogging” in a true sense — as a form of relationship building. You really need to blog on a regular basis about something that you are at least somewhat enthusiastic about, regardless of any potential profit from it.

I am a bit excited about video and how it can be used not only as a traffic source, but also as a way to educate as well as entertain. I even went so far as to purchase a decent camcorder about a year ago. In that time I’ve put up a grand total of just one video and it was on YouTube.com. You can watch it here:

My First YouTube Video

Of course there is a learning curve on the technical side of shooting a video and producing it. Like all things technical, you get faster and better at it with repetition. However, the larger issue is having something worthwhile to say with your videos as well as a purpose for creating them in the first place.

As a source of free traffic — well the number of views I received from that video since I put it on YouTube might as well be zero.

I had read an article by someone who provides a service for companies that want to get high volumes of traffic from their videos posted to YouTube and other video sites such as Google Video. The amount of work involved to get eye balls to these videos made my eyes glaze over and to be honest, a lot of the tactics sounded pretty spammy. The service isn’t all that cheap either.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Web 2.0 is exciting and clearly has a lot of potential, but the down and dirty grunt work that appears necessary to make it effective continues to deter me from pursuing it further.