Wayne Yeager's TRAFFICOLOGY - Strange & Unusual Web Traffic Ideas July 2001 ------------------------------------------------------------- (c) 2001 by Trafficology.com. All Rights Reserved. ------------------------------------------------------------- 1. The Pay-Per-Click "Subsidy" Offer This is a pretty interesting idea I received last month. If you've used Pay-Per-Click search engines (like Goto or FindWhat or Kanoodle, etc.) to drive traffic to your site, you've undoubtedly seen the cost-per-click gradually increase over time. I remember when you could be in Goto's Top 10 for "domain names" for a penny. Those days are gone. Now it's more like $2.00 per click! No one is particularly happy about this... (except the search engines), but here's a way you can use this to your advantage: You can approach website owners who are already advertising under the same keywords you would use and offer to subsidize their Pay-Per-Click advertising costs. Here's an example: "I see you are paying 6 cents per click under the "domain names" keyword at Goto. I am not a competitor, but I do have a business that could benefit from this traffic and would in no way effect your own enterprise. If you'd be interested, I would be happy to pay 33.3% of your advertising costs (2 cents) for each click if you'd send your visitors over to me when you're finished with them..." Of course, you'd want to adjust the wording for your own particular business and situation. And maybe you'd want to start out offering 10% or 25% of their advertising costs, or even go up to 50%, depending on the amount, keywords, delivery method, your conversion rate, etc. The beauty of this idea is that you can literally approach everyone advertising under your keywords (or at least all the ones you can afford to partner with!) and strike a deal with them. You'd get lots more traffic, and at a fraction of the regular cost. In fact, since Goto raised their minimum bids to 5 cents, if you had 20% subsidy deals with a bunch of 5 cent advertisers, you'd be back to paying a penny per click again! Here's where it gets exciting: This also allows you to entirely bypass the "relevancy" factor, so you could literally approach everyone under any keyword that remotely resembles your area of business. Imagine if you had 1000 such partners and were getting all this targeted traffic at a penny each! I'm not sure about the best way to get this traffic, whether you'd use pop-ups, pop-unders, exits, blind clicks, etc., but this is surely worth some experimentation to see what works the best. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Holy Grail - Part 2 Last issue I mentioned a traffic idea which I called The Holy Grail, because IF it could ever be done it would revolutionize web marketing forever! The idea, though, is a simple one: what if you could set up your website in such a way that each visitor "automatically" generated another visitor? (If you missed that article, here it is reprinted: http://www.trafficology.com/june_2001.txt (Article #2) If you could do that, you could just sit back and let all your visitors generate more traffic! This idea generated a flurry of emails from people suggesting improvements, contributing all kinds of "add-on" ideas, and of course, several others telling me precisely why it's impossible. I've never received that much mail about a single idea, so obviously this got several readers pretty excited. Believe it or not, I think I may have (nearly) built a real, working "Holy Grail" site! Not quite... but VERY CLOSE! If I can get just a 0.18% better CTR on my banner than I have now, I will have done it! (That's not 18%. That's POINT 18 percent, or about 1/5 of 1%!) I'll keep you posted and provide full details next month. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Using Testimonials - A New Twist! Everyone knows that testimonials are nice to have on your own site, but did you ever think about the value of having YOUR testimonial on the site of others? This idea was submitted by a woman who has successfully used this technique to drive a considerable amount of traffic to her own site. Here's how she does it: She signs up for lots of free things: free ebooks, free newsletters, free webmaster services, free marketing courses, etc. And since she's a webmaster (webmistress?), she also uses a number of paid products and services too, of course. Then, if she likes something, she writes intelligent, glowing testimonials about these things and sends them to the people who created them. Who could resist putting this on their site...? "Of all the material I receive about web marketing and traffic generating, there is NOTHING that I anticipate more than your fascinating, amazing and interesting Trafficology newsletter. I read it from beginning to end, very often multiple times. You, sir, are a bloody genius. Mary Smith, webmaster www.sellathon.com" I mean, you'd just HAVE to publish something like that! And since you'll want to attribute this, you'll basically be putting an unpaid link to the writer's site. The trick seems to be to write the testimonial in such a way that it absolutely gets published. Here are the main things to remember: a. Genuinely mean it. After all, it's your name that's going to be printed under the words, so don't send a testimonial about something you don't believe in. And it's obvious when a testimonial is just made up, or if the writer isn't a "True Believer"... so be genuine. b. Consider the webmaster's motivations for including testimonials. Is he selling something, collecting email addresses, soliciting donations? Write your testimonial to address the most likely objections that his potential customers/clients/readers/users may have, and he'll gladly publish anything you write. c. It may be a good idea to write the webmaster first and say something like "I've really enjoyed your BLANK, and I'd like to write a little testimonial about it. Would you mind if I sent you something over?" How could he refuse? Now you've just put him on record as being interested in your testimonial. People like to appear consistent, so he'll probably be very inclined to follow through and post it on his site now. Maximizing the opportunity: a. In as polite a way as possible, request the publication of your url. b. If you choose to do this in a big way, you might consider a specific URL designed to be used solely for testimonials. It could then redirect to your "real" site. In other words, if your website is REALLY titled "aaaservices.com", which means nothing, you could register a domain like "free-money-for-webmasters.com". Get it? c. There's nothing wrong with doing a little "marketing" in your testimonial. For example, instead of "Your book was full of good ideas", I might write "Since my newsletter is read by all the top web marketers, I'm always on the lookout for new ideas. Your book was filled with them!" d. If the potential recipient doesn't have a testimonials page, you can still get him to publish your testimonial if you make the page for him. By copying the same theme and layout of his regular site, it's quite a simple matter to make a testimonials page (Where yours is first and at the top!) and just give it to him as a gift. This will save him time and earn you a couple of extra points if he's still doubtful about including your testimonial and/or your URL. And it only takes a minute. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Free "Radio" Advertising... Online. The nice thing about this idea is that it's not only FREE... but targeted. If you've done your research then you have a pretty good idea of your target market. From this profile you may further determine the type of radio station the individuals you are interested in reaching are most inclined to listen to. Millions of people listen to internet radio every day, and while online, listeners are in a position to take immediate and direct action IF the advertiser's URL is aired. So, how do you implement this? Easy. Either you (or your employees) can visit online radio stations and make requests. Most requests can be entered via a web-based request form that's usually prominently located. Submit your music requests on behalf of your URL once to several times per day. The announcers will usually say something like this: "This next song is a request from the staff of Trafficology.com. Okay guys, here you go." Immediately afterwards, a handful of visitors will trickle in. If I were going to do this in a big way, I'd probably get a domain that was impossible to misspell and that would sound interesting on the radio, like "elephantdroppings.com" or something like that. See what I mean? For a pretty comprehensive listing of stations on the internet, visit http://www.internetradiolist.com. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. Using your URL as your "User Name" The following traffic idea, according to the submitter, can generate 1,000 hits a day, and the best part is, you have fun promoting your site. The idea, as submitted, goes like this : Go to a game site, like pogo.com, for example, and sign up for their games service. Use the url of your site (alas, without the dots) as your screenname: For example, I might sign up as wwwtrafficologycom. The submitter says that while he plays Bingo, for example, he starts to chat with the 100 or so other people who are also playing this Bingo game. All the while, the other players are constantly seeing his screenname (URL) in the chatbox. If you have a good name, and if you're a nice chatter, it is very likely people will go and have a look at your site. This could generate lots of hits, depending of course on the number of Bingo players at any given time. And this can be done over and over. Better (according to the submitter) is the bingo game at uproar.com. You sign up again as wwwtrafficologycom, or whatever your domain is, play the bingo game, and if you win (which, apparently, is not that hard), your screenname will be displayed to approximately 1000 people every time. Again, depending on your domain name, you will get some hits. The submitter says, "The good part is you have fun playing bingo, you have a chance winning the big jackpot, and you are promoting your site along the way." The reason I selected this submission was because I think the concept could be expanded greatly. I personally don't play games online, but I'm pretty sure that this would be beneficial in ANY setting where you've got to choose a user name that others might see: auction sites, message boards, chat rooms, instant messaging, email addresses, etc. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. An Interesting "Twist" on Message Board Posting If you have an article or idea on your site, especially a TIMELY article or idea, that relates even indirectly to the operations of an important publicly-traded company, you can post a brief note, including the page's URL, to the Yahoo! Finance message board under that ticker symbol. You can also post to Raging Bull, which gets quite a bit of traffic too. It's not unusual to get 100 or more visits to your site during the day you first post. And there's no reason why you couldn't repeat this ad nauseam. There are MANY companies and MANY people discussing their fortunes on these boards, and investors in these companies are usually great leads if you have the right type of content or service. Posting to message boards may sound old hat, but if you use these particular types of boards, you'll be getting a high volume of quality visits. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 7. Getting on Yahoo's "Full Coverage" If you're going to use this one, you'd better be good. The submitter of this idea said, "This is one of my very best secrets. Please don't use it unless you've got great content." Yahoo has "Full Coverage" pages on hundreds of news topics. And, under those topics, they list useful sites (not the same listing as in the Yahoo directory). My friends from the Web Hosting Industry Review (theWHIR.com) used this tip and recently got added to the area under Full Coverage for the topic "ISP's." Also, specific articles on their site are now regularly posted by the Full Coverage editors. This has increased their traffic, boosted their credibility, and of course because the link is from Yahoo, it's great for the algorithms like Google which measure link popularity weighted by how important the referring site is. To use this suggestion, find the appropriate Full Coverage area - for example http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/Tech/AOL/ - and then click on the link "Submit Links to Full Coverage." If your content is deemed worthy by a Yahoo editor, they might include it. Just *PLEASE* don't annoy them... or this tip will become useless! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 8. Beating the "Google" System We all know link popularity is important, especially with Google. The submitter of this idea says she's figured out a legal way to beat the system, and not like you might think. "Many people have tried to improve page popularity by joining programs where everyone links to each other, trying to cheat the system." But as google says: "Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important." But this idea submitter says "Google gives you all the tools you need to get the job done." The first step is to download the Google tool bar at http://toolbar.google.com/ This handy tool is the most important part of this strategy. With the toolbar installed, every page you visit displays an icon of the page's pagerank. Using this you can see exactly how important Google thinks a page is before spending time to request a link exchange. One way to do this is to do a search on the key word you'd like to rank higher on. Obviously, the first few results are the pages that Google considers "important". And according to them, these pages were classified as "important" because of the other "important" pages that linked to them. Now it's time to get to work. Click on the first returned result and use the "Backward Links" feature found in the Page Info menu of the Google toolbar. This is now a list of all the pages linking to the top ranking page of the keyword you just searched for! These are also listed in order of importance. This gives you a more focused and powerful list of sites to request reverse links with. I've found that many of these sites are actually highly targeted link/resources type pages with owners who are always on the lookout for more great resources to link to. When emailing the owner of the page, be sure to indicate the exact url of the page (or, if applicable, the section) you'd like to be linked from. While you're at it, you can even provide a little non-hype blurb for the webmaster to use. Anything you can do to make it easier for the webmaster to add your link is a GOOD thing. After your link has been placed, it's a good idea to "help Google" find this new link to your site from the "important" page. You can do this by submitting that page to Google for reindexing. Repeat these steps as needed and watch your page rank increase. According to the submitter of this idea, it's a slow process... BUT it generates outstanding results. As a side note, the smart thing about focusing on Google is that it's the engine that powers the search for Yahoo. A high ranking on Google means a lot of extra traffic from Yahoo! too. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- You or someone pretending to be you subscribed to Trafficology. We send out JUST this newsletter once per month. However, if you want to stop receiving this monthly newsletter, just go to http://www.trafficology.com/subscribe.html and scroll down to the UNsubscribe section and enter your email address. ------------------------------------------------------------- (c) 2001 by Trafficology.com All Rights Reserved.