Just judging from recent “Spicy” ratings from Google Trends system, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that a few people might be trying the “Chump and Dump” technique of building buzz. This method could be inspired by earlier Google Trends gaming pranks. It might not be unreasonable to speculate that those who “game” Google Trends to build buzz might apply these techniques to more nefarious purposes–pump and dump stock schemes or some such buzz-dependent financial crimes. Buzz building manipulation might pose a big problem for Google because it allows manipulation of their search results indirectly through innocent third parties’ actions. That’s what makes it tricky.
None of this novel. An earlier variation of “buzz”-based stock manipulation schemes involved spammed “investment advice” touting penny stocks on “the verge of breakout”. Remember those annoying emails back in 1996? Google Trend gaming would just be a more up to date, Web 2.0-specific incarnation of the same tired but injurious scam.
The bottomline is: Don’t become a victim of “buzz” stock manipulation schemes.
Here’s how (we think) it works:
1) Scammers run many bots at differing IPs. All enter the same search term at differing times.
2) The search term (company or stock symbol) is searched so much that it appears on Google Trends’ “spicy list”
Here’s where it gets tricky:
3) Other sites like inquistr and other blogs that deliberately blog about trends based on Google trends start blogging about the “hot trend” topic. They follow Google Trends carefully so they can ride the surge in interest in particular “hot topics”. These guys are completely innocent third parties.
4) The stock manipulators/buzz scammers bought stock in the company or launched a new company and are looking to get funding
The payoff
5) The buzz generated by this technique either lifts the junk stock (penny stocks) because of Internet buzz or, in the case of startup funding scams, get more leverage when trying to raise funding from investors. As you know, “buzz” on the Internet often equates to real money when it comes to startup internet businesses.
Be on the lookout for such shady ‘buzz building’ tactics. Do not become a victim.
WARNING: “Pumping and Dumping” stocks is ILLEGAL in many jurisdictions. This blog post is purely for informational and consumer protection purposes only. In no way shape or form do we advocate nor condone such practices. All items discussed in this post are matters of speculation and opinion only. Bottomline: Do not become a victim of the (theoretical?) scheme as detailed above. Make sure the “buzz” about a stock is based on what’s real–it’s earnings and/or actual potential.
Besides, the dramatic criminal dimension discussed, this (theoretical?) buzz building technique probably might work for more legit and legal purposes such as generating hype/buzz for upcoming movies or other similar product launches. As always, whatever you do, make sure your actions conform to controlling regulations and sites’ Terms of Service rules.
This is the third installment of our 5-part series analyzing the “Top 50 ways to Drive traffic to your Site”. The previous installments: Part 1 and Part 2.
21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.
How it works: In exchange for showing a free link exchange network’s banners on your site, the network will give you credits to show your banner on another site’s pages. This system works on a credit system--your banner’s appearance on another site depends on how many times you show the network’s banners on your site.
Pro: Free. Some networks are sorted by category so you have SOME control over where your banner will appear.
Normally, these banner exchange networks are very flexible and they allow you to drop out anytime.
Con: Categorization is still a hit and miss affair. If your site’s niche is fairly well-known and popular, it will be easier to find banner exchange programs that can deliver targeted traffic to your site. However, if you are a longtail blogger or niche product/service marketer, this traffic generation method might be of little value because your category is not included or might not match the “closest related” category the network might put your site in. Another problem with this method is that banners, generally speaking, don’t perform as well as text ads. Text ads are direct and, with the right copywriting skills, more descriptive and persuasive than banner ads. There IS such a thing as banner ad burnout. Internet users have been ‘trained’ by saturated banner and Google Adsense adveritisng to ignore ad spaces. To fully leverage this traffic generation method and compensate for bad category targeting and bad conversion rates due to “banner blindness”, you would have to publish a whole lot of ads on your pages--this will make your blog/page look really bad and might turn off your site’s visitors.
WARNING: link exchange programs (and traffic exchange programs in general) can be cheated through the use of bots that run their fake hits through a proxy bank. The page views look like they are coming from different computers when they are actually just coming from one computer. These computers keep loading the pages where the banners are located so it registers as an “impression” in the banner network. The network then shows the bnaner at another site. Beware of this practice because you might end up just wasting your time and feeding your traffic to someone else.
22. Create a desktop application or webscript and give it away for free.
How it works: Your applications (desktop or server-based) draw users who need a one-time download or regular site visitors who repeatedly use your free webscript. Applies to firefox plugins, too.
Pro: You attract a highly specific population--people who need to use your application/webscript. This is a “self-filtering” traffic pool since only people who are interested in your software/script will come to your site to download/use it. This specificity allows you to show ads or site content that fits this target audience’s needs. One category of sites that routinely use this method to get traffic and generate ad views are “Free SEO tool” type sites. iWebtool is a very good example of a “tool traffic”-driven site. You can pair Aweber.com’s newsletter services with every giveaway of your downloadable application, firefox plugin, or “free lifetime membership” to your password-protected script to create a mailing list. The mailing list could yield sales for a long time.
Con: Scripts/software cost money. For every giveaway you plan to market, you’ll have to spend money on development fees. Another problem with this traffic method is that it assumes you know what kind of free tool people would flock to your site for. No one wants to spend thousands of dollars on tools that end up being used by very few people. One workaround to this problem would be to run surveys on your sites asking your users what online task they’d like to save time on. Build your specs based on these surveys. Another approach would be to consider your own experiences and come up with script specs that will save you time and effort.
23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.
How it works: When people misspell the domain name of your site or your competitor’s, they end up on a page not found page. By buying mispellings you direct these searches to your site. Common “misspelling traffic” methods involve reserving names that sound alike (example: youtube.com vs. utube.com), plural vs singular, and taking out a repeated letter in a domain (example: hello vs. helo).
Pro: Relatively cheap way to, depending on your ‘target’ domain, get a lot of traffic. You are basically feeding off the established traffic/buzz of your target domain. The more traffic your target domains get, the higher your traffic load. Based on forum posts, this method works best for sites where the main domain holder also has an affiliate program like casino and adult sites.
Con: Depending on the domains you target, some domains may be protected by trademark law. ICANN regulations provide that if you register a trademarked domain and the trademark owner contests your registration, your domain (and its traffic) will be transferred over to the trademark owner after ICANN strips it from you. However, if there is NO trademark AND the domain is NOT distinctive (example: made up of commonly used words or words that are commonly used together), you have a good chance you can keep the domain. Another consideration to keep in mind--typo domains/variation domains ARE NOT free. Since they cost money, you might lose a lot of money if you register typos/variations that don’t get much traffic. There’s really no way to tell which of a domain’s variation will pass an ROI test. With the end of domain tasting (you register a domain, test it out for traffic, and ask for a refund after five days if the ROI is not there), domain buying in general has become a more costly proposition. For investment and traffic purposes, domaining used to be one of easiest ‘slam dunk’ ways to make money online. Not anymore. The barrier to entry has gone up dramatically with the death of domain tasting.
24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.
How it works: There’s many sites (I recommend Hunting Moon and PDDW--I went to college with the guys behind these excellent services) that list domains that get traffic, have backlinks, and/or already have page rank. You buy a domain with these qualities and set up a redirect page going to your site using .htaccess
Pro: Very effective way to get highly targeted traffic. Very low effort required.
Con: Pricing is all over the place--from very cheap to very expensive. A lot of targeting is required on your part to make sure that the domain pays for itself. Always keep return on investment in mind. Also, Page Rank might be lost if you just redirect the page.
25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.
How it works: Get cards printed with your domain name, description of what your website is all about, and hand them out.
Pro: Good way to piggyback on the impact face to face connections have in establishing credibility/rapport. More people are willing to enter into long term deals with someone they’ve met in person. Business cards also let you graphically set the tone/level of professionalism of your business’ image.
Con: Obviously not free. Not only do you spend money for printing out the business cards, design and layout and copywriting also cost money. However, the biggest problems with this traffic method are: No targeting and Bad conversion. The way the traffic method was written, you are supposed to randomly give out your cards “everywhere you go.” Bad move. Unless you’re going to a very specific business convention, giving out business cards randomly will get you very little results because the people you’re giving your cards to might not be your target audience/market. Go to a convention and you’ll have a better shot because these people ‘filtered themselves’--for example, only people interested in comics would go to Comic Con. Distributing your cards to targeted inviduals helps eliminate the second problem inherent in giving away business cards for traffic--conversion from physical card to actual site visit. For someone to type in a domain in a browser after hearing about it or reading a card or brochure, takes a lot of convincing. Just because someone knows a domain name, it doesn’t mean they automatically type it in a browser. They must have a REASON to do this. That’s why targeted card distribution works--only people with a NEED for or genuine interest in your service/product/content will type your domain in a browser.
Overall, we recommend this method for B2B (business to business) websites if the webmaster/publisher distributes the cards at a convention or some sort of industry meeting. For business to consumer websites, the ROI might not be there.
26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.
How it works: Affiliate programs are business arrangements where you pay other webmasters/website publishers for sending you sales/leads/emails/downloads. Each individual referring account is tracked by the affiliate management script you install on your pages or, if you don’t want a custom solution, you can use affiliate marketing programs’ own proprietary tracking systems. For examples of these programs, try share a sale or Commission Junction. The webmasters post your tracked link code on their sites, pages, software, or whichever way they promote online and whatever traffic comes in is tracked by the system. You pay only for results--no sale/lead/info collection no payment. Simple as that.
Pro: You only pay for results. You piggyback on the efforts and expertise of webmasters. Whatever expertise and efficiency they possess work to benefit you. Depending on how you set your affiliate system up, payouts and accounting are a breeze since everything is automated and stored in a database. It is also easy to change advertising materials if you’re using the right platform.
Con: The biggest problem with a standalone affiliate program is recruiting the right affiliates. Not all webmasters cater to your target audience. Not all webmasters run sites that are in your niche. How do you find them? How do you recruit them? Thankfully, there’s many webmaster forums available. Just do a search for “affiliate marketing forum” and you’re bound to get a list of these sites. Create an account on these sites and, if allowed, put a banner or text ad for your affiliate program in your “signature” line (your “sig”). Make targeted forum posts that emphasize your niche. Another way to get affiliates is to get your affiliate program site listed in affiliate marketing directories--just do a search for that term and you should be able to get a lot of listings of these types of directories. Finally, another way to get your affiliate program publicized is to hire an affiliate program promoter to find forums and directories and submit/market your program aggressively.
Affiliate recruitment is not a problem if you choose to use a network-based affiliate program. These websites have a recruited base of thousands of affiliates (example: cj.com and shareasale.com), all sorted into categories. When you join their network, they send out an announcement to webmasters in your niche category.
Regardless of whether you’re using an affiliate network or you run a standalone affiliate program, you will still face the following challenges when running an affiliate program: competition from other programs, dealing with webmaster recruitment conversion, and improving your active webmasters’ conversions.
Competition from other programs: Unless you’re selling products/offering content/offering services that are truly unique, chances are there will be other programs offering the same items as you. You can compete based on price, quality guarantees, and selection. Meet this challenge head on--don’t shy away! Get nice banners designed, get effective marketing copy written, and give away FREE CONTENT to your affiliates. Give your marketers the right to distribute your free ebooks, free articles, free images, and whatever else you can put your domain or live link on. Free content establishes credibility with the target customers. Free content is also viral as it gets passed on from one circle of influence to another. With each transmission, there’s a chance that a reader will connect with the materials and click on a link to get more information.
Dealing with webmaster recruitment conversion: It’s a fact of life in online marketing--the webmaster productivity funnel. For every 100 webmasters you market to, only a few will bother signing up to your program. Of the few that you managed to sign up, only a small percentage will actually install your affiliate code and send traffic. Of the few that are sending traffic, only a few will send substantial traffic or traffic that converts. Of these, only a few will remain with your program. Each stage in this funnel needs your active intervention if your affiliate program is to become successful. Here’s what you need to do: Maximize the number of webmasters you market to--join as many forums and submit to as many affiliate marketing directories as you can. Get your base number of potential webmaster recruits as high as possible. The higher the base, the higher the number of recruits (regardless of the dismal recruitment ratio). Use effective banners and convincing text link copy to increase your recruitment ratio. Advertise that you give out free content or tools or other goodies that either minimize the webmasters’ time or costs.
Improving existing affiliates’ peformance and improving webmaster retention: Once you’ve got webmasters to sign up--make sure to personally ask them how you can help them directly. Make a webmaster resource tool page which list tools that your affiliate webmasters can use to generate sales (content, traffic tools, and conversion tools). Establish a relationship and never let up. You can outsource this affiliate management tasks to a cheap virtual assistant company. Once the webmasters are sending traffic, aggressively monitor their performance and send them optimization tips and tricks. Offer them specialized landing pages or custom materials. Once they are sending sales, continue the conversation by brainstorming with them on how they can increase their site’s conversion ratios. If you take this proactive approach, you can minimize the negative effects of the webmaster productivity funnel.
27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites
How it works: Many social bookmarking sites are DO FOLLOW and have PAGE RANK. Many are also highly categorized and also very tag-driven. You submit your site to these services and list out the keywords, description, and tags you want your URL to be indexed with. This combination of factors give user-submitted links is Social Bookmarking sites an SEO boost. Just how much of a boost is open to debate nowadays since Google has reportedly started downgrading the SERP boosting effectiveness of social bookmarks in general.
Here’s a quick video explanation of how social bookmarks work
Pro: Free. You also get direct traffic from the social bookmark services’ installed base of thousands if your content is compelling and viral enough. You get a lot of flexibility on which tags you can use. Great for pairing main keywords and subkeywords. Great for building backlinks to a rotating set of keywords.
Con: Very time consuming. Automated tools are prone to banning due to the fact that automation tends to miss certain “guerrilla” tactics that manual seo linkbuilding employs. Depending on the site but sometimes filing your site under the wrong categories can render your submission worthless.
How it works: Just judging by the mammoth page views that Susan Boyle’s tryout at “Britain’s Got Talent”, Youtube delivers traffic--and lots of it! To use this method, you simply upload your video, send a notification to your newsletter subscribers, socially bookmark the video, send out notices on social networking sites, post about it on forums, and otherwise get the views up. The more REAL views the video gets, the more Youtube itself will publicize it to its other members. This drives more traffic to the video and upward spiral is created. How do you get traffic? Through links in the video description and in your channel page.
Pro: Explosive traffic if the video is compelling enough. You can put links that link out of youtube in the description page for the video and in your channel page (linked to your username). You can also improve your channel’s and videos’ traffic by using an attractive profile image (that don’t run afoul Youtube’s Terms of Service and copyright laws, of course) and postinga lot of comments on highly popular videos. Click here to get more Free YouTube Traffic Tips.
Con: You have to know how to boost your video’s page views if, for some reason, your video is not compelling enough. While you can do it using real traffic, there’s also automated bots available online that are very tempting. Don’t use them unless you’re prepared to risk getting your url banned on youtube. Youtube traffic is free but the cost of producing a compelling video may NOT be free. It depends on what kind of video you plan to use--funny video, tutorial, etc. Also, general Youtube traffic may not be the way to go. Untargeted traffic produces crappy conversions, normally. Sometimes the Zen Buddhist mantra of “Less is More” applies and it might apply to this traffic generation method--better to create a highly specialized and targeted video with similarly discriminating tags and get a few but high converting clicks than a video that will appeal to everyone (like the Susan Boyle video above) but generate few sales.
29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website.
How it works: Post a free survey on a topic that is relevant to your website’s topic/theme. Post the results. Publicize the results via Digg and press releases. People interested in the same topic/theme will come to your site to see the poll or read your analysis.
Pro: Great traffic generation method to use with the traffic method of issuing a press release. Not only do some press release sites publish categorized backlinks, they can also be used to publicize “newsworthy” events such as survey findings. Many news sites and agencies can also link to you or mention your poll in their surveys.
Con: The survey itself is free but the publication (via press releases) may not be. Also, the reason many scientific surveys and accurate polls get a lot of publicity is because of the credibility of the organizations running such polls. Also, the value of a poll depends on the sampling quality and, depending on the topic, quantity of the people taking the poll. So if your traffic pool is general in nature, their opinions on a particular specialized topic might not carry much weight with news agencies and sites.
30. Find joint venture partners that will send you traffic.
How it works: You find websites that already get a lot of traffic and you set up a special affiliate deal with them that gives them a larger payout or higher level of affiliate support as you would normally give to a regular affiliate. This deal might also involve a larger amount of custom content you produce for that affiliate. It can also involve a lot more customization. Generally, the discussion above regarding affiliate marketing applies to this traffic method as well. The scale just happens to be larger.
Pro: and Con: Generally, the same concerns as the affiliate marketing traffic generation method discussed above.
This entry is a continuation of our 5-part critique of the “Top 50 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Site.” Read the first installment of the series.
11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. It’s a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.
How it works: Configure your email client’s signature system to include your hyperlinked title or your raw URL along with a text description. Wherever your email ends up, someone can see your link and click it. Specially helpful if you send email to a groupmail system or you pass along a lot of annoying chain emails. Your sig is automatically added to the bottom of your email. Your link goes wherever the email goes.
Pro: Your signature adds a certain professionalism to your emails. If you use a sig when doing link exchange solicitations, it helps in establishing your credibility and legitimacy. Groupmail and chainmail emails bearing your signature often travel the globe many times over and going through tons of inboxes--provided the chainmail is viral enough. There’s no CAN SPAM provisionsagainst that because the email is non-commercial in nature and sent only from friend to friend In the case of groupmail, group members opted to receive email from the group.
Con: This traffic generation method depends heavily on how much you use email. If you only communicate with a small group of friends or a small business circle and the nature of the emails are fairly mundane, there’s very little chance your email will “surf’ the massive interbranching networks of friends’ emails. The “viral” ability of email, just like the viral ability of web content, depends in large part on the quality and nature of the email. Even if you were to consciously pass on chainmails, many of your friends in your address book might resent you for forwarding that crap. Overall, email signatures yield low traffic and have no obvious SEO/linkbuilding value (unless it gets published on a web page). Thankfully, creating and using email signatures doesn’t involve much time and can piggyback on your daily email activities. Otherwise, the traffic produced would not be worth the time involved.
12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.
How it works: When you update your site and delete pages or change file names or change directory structures, your visitors’ web browsers can’t find the page they were looking for and a 404 page appears. If you have a static website, use .htaccess to set redirect your 404 to your homepage. Here’s sample 404 redirection code.
Pro: Simple. Straightforward and easy. Great way to preserve traffic instead of wasting it on a bland/linkless 404 page.
Con: Tracking the lost/missing url the user was trying to access isn’t recorded. This information would be useful because it would tell you what page(s) you need to rebuild or at least tell you about the content your audience is looking for.
13. Use PPC search engine advertising.
How it works: You place a bid range for your keyword. If the user runs a search on the keyword, the search engine will show your ad based on your bid compared to other bidders and other considerations such as the quality of your landing page, etc. The 5 most popular pay per click providers are Google’s Adwords, Yahoo’s Overture, and the smaller players: Miava (formerly known as FindWhat.Com), 7Search.com, and Adbrite. All of them work on a similar model. However, Google Adwords has added features you may want to know about. Here’s an official Google Adwords video on how their auction works.
Pro: If you pick the right keywords, you can drive a lot of targeted traffic to your site/page in a very short amount of time. You can finetune your campaign to quickly find keyword combinations that produce the best Return on Investment (ROI). Here’s a great video on how to use Google Analytics to maximize your Adwords ROI
Con: Obviously not free. Also, it can get quite pricey if your click through rate is bad and your landing page’s Quality Score is not very good. There used to be a very common business model where you buy cheap keywords at a few pennies per click from Adwords and point the traffic to a page targeting higher paying keywords with Adsense ads. The profit is the difference between the per click rate Adsense payout and the per click cost from Adwords--factoring in conversion rates. This is called Adsense Arbitrage and it used to be extremely easy and lucrative. Google’s changes to their Quality Score plus wholesale elimination of many big Adsense accounts of arbitrage player has pretty much destroyed this business model. Many of the survivors moved on to Yahoo Publisher Network--buy cheap adwords keywords and dump them on YPN pages. There’s also the IAC workaround to this. Unfortunately, it’s not as lucrative as before. Regardless of whether you’re playing the arbitrage game or not, the Google Adwords Quality score system poses a formidable hurdle to webmasters who want cheap and easy traffic. You have to have a clear understanding of your target audience and the ROI of your keywords for you to make PPC ad buys work out for you (or just to break even).
14. Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.
How it works: Add a small piece of code to your site which adds you to your users’ browsers’ bookmarks. Here’s one way to do it.
Pro: Nice and simple. Very quick to do.
Con: No real disadvantage but you may want to spice things up by using a nice looking graphic. Also, simple browser-based bookmarks just add your bookmark to the user’s browser--it isn’t public. You may want to add Sociable or other social bookmark plugins to your blog or use a standalone social bookmarking code for non-blog website. Why social bookmarks? Instead of just saving the bookmark in one person’s browser, the saved bookmark is searchable in a central site and can be accessed by other users. It also has SEO backlinkbuilding benefits. Here’s a good video on how social bookmarking works.
15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.
How it works: Nothing works better than word of mouth. We see ads all the time but we pay more attention to ads that our friends have vouched for or recommended. Why? It takes less effort and resources than personally investigating and researching something. Someone else already did the work for us. This is human nature. This dynamic plays out not just in buying products/services but also in meeting new friends and establishing new relationships.
In the online context, “Tell a Friend” boxes consist of simple code that you add to your site and your users enter their email address and name. There’s a box underneath where they can list out the recipients who they want to know about your site. The admin/setup of these boxes allows you to specify the message that is sent to the recipients. Here’s one free tell a friend script.
Pro: Free. Very easy. Great way to maximize your traffic--you’ve spent time and effort to get a person to visit and read your site. Maximize that visit’s value by giving that person an opportunity to voluntarily recruit people in his/her circle of influence to visit your site. Doesn’t take too long to set up.
Con: Established and l337 (“elite”) webmasters think is so 1996, cheesy, and “Old School.” Not all visitors would recommend--the numbers may be very minimal. Also, it doesn’t work for certain types of sites like adult, penis enlargement, or gambling or other types of “private” content. Regardless of these “drawbacks”, every little bit of traffic helps and “Tell a Friend” is an easy, free way to leverage your existing traffic’s friend network to get more traffic to your site. Moreover, the conversion rate for refer a friend type systems depends on the quality of your website content. If you have quality content, your content has a higher chance of going ‘viral’ through referrals.
16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.
How it works: Many ezine sites have page rank and they pass some of this along to your target site when they publish your article. The links are usually included in the “About the Author” section.
Pro: Mostly free. You control the targeting level of your article since you can massage the keyword you’re targeting in the title and in certain areas of the article body. You can put up to two links in the about the author section to target differing pages on your target site. Many ezine sites have direct traffic so you can also get direct traffic. These articles can also be configured to sell directly so you can set your links to be redirect pages for affiliate sales landing pages.
Con: If you’re doing this for linkbuilding make sure you keep in mind Page Rank and Do Follow. The sites you are submitting to must have both of the above characteristics or else you might be wasting your time trying to build backlinks there. However, if you are trying to get sales from the articles, linkbuilding is irrelevant since you’re trying to convert the readers of these article ezine sites. Make sure you categorize your article correctly. Miscategorized articles don’t do too well both for linkbuilding and direct sales. See our prior installment and read up on the article submission section to see other “Con” drawbacks to this method.
17. Hold a crazy contest and make it go viral.
How it works: Sponsor a contest on your blog/site and publicize it. The contest terms must involve having the participants visit your site to either get more information or to register. You don’t have to offer money. Depending on your target audience, digital goods like ebooks or free services or links on your site should be enough.
Pro: Relatively inexpensive way to get new site visitors. Also, you can use the contest to build your newsletter/lead sheet by requiring contestants to give their name and email address. You can use free newsletter sites for this or use professional mailing list managers.
Con: There’s too many contests taking place on the Internet already. There’s even sites that just focus on contests. Users may already be burned out from too many contests. Even if your site users are not burned out on contests, contests are NOT by definition viral. Just because you’re giving away a prize, it doesn’t mean people are automatically going to flock to you. Successful contests focus on psychological triggers in their target audience to spread the word. It will take time, effort, and a lot of user profiling to get an idea as to what these triggers may be.
18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.
How it works: Figure out the key “secrets”, tips, methods, or special content that your users would want to PAY FOR and give it to them free. They have to sign up and register for your newsletter so they will be notified when the next installment is ready.
Pro: Low cost. You have to spend money on custom web content copywriting for the ebook/report/course materials. However, you leverage that cost by having users coming back to your site get the latest updates. You also get viral marketing benefits if your users share these ebooks with others since your ebooks will have your links in them. Remember to put links to your newsletter sign up page--let your ursers drive more users to your newsletter. This creates an exponential effect.
Con: It will take some effort to determine the content that your users would want so bad as to sign up to a newsletter to get it. This is not an easy “a priori” issue. It requires that you listen to your users’ feedback and create a real relationship with them. This is not for ‘drive by’ web publishers that just want to profit quickly from their users. Also, you have to structure your ebook distribution so that it does result in your users coming back to your site--return traffic is key. You can’t just give out the materials once and they never come back. Maybe instead of an ebook, the better approach would be to convert part of your site into a password-driven member content area. This means they will come back to your site for updates. It depends on whether you make money via site ads. If you make your money from direct links, newsletters should be good enough and there’s no need for the user to come back to your site.
19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.
How it works: The Old School way of viewing web content is that you have to type in the address in your browser or look up your bookmarks to visit the site you want to go to. Once at the site, you read the content. You waste a lot of time if there’s no new items/updates. RSS revolutionizes this process by having the content of sites you like COME TO YOU instead of the other way around. By installing RSS on your blog or site, you leverage the power of this great way of reading and distributing website content. Here’s a great video that explains it:
Pro: Very easy to do. Use wordpress or blogger, they have RSS feeds built in. WordPress uses RSS 2.0 and other versions. Blogger.com uses the atom.xml format. Once your blog is up, submit your feeds to feed aggregation sites so your content “teasers” will be published at these sites or show up in the blogs of their subscribers. If you don’t know where to submit, you may want to use a blog RSS feed submitter service. Always ask for a report after they complete the work.
Con: Lots of scumbags will try to LEECH your feeds. There’s even wordpress plugins to put ‘blogging on autopilot.’ Why would they do this? Laziness. It takes time and effort to write quality category-relevant content. So they use RSS feed aggregators like icerocket to find niche-specific content and get the content through the feeds. They also strip out all links. What do they do with the content? One way is to post on their own blogs with their own ads--you provide the content, they make the money. Sucks, no? The other way is to post you content as updates on their sites for SEO purposes. Both of these practices HARM you because the content on your site might get dinged with duplicate content penalties and you don’t make any money/benefit from your content. How to fix this problem? Run your entries periodically through copyscape. Find where the duplicates are and investigate. Report the thieves to their hosts so their webhosting companies will close them down. Another solution is to set up your feed to produce only summaries--people will have to click on the link to go to your site and read the full entry.
20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.
How it works: There’s many link directories on the internet that list, describe, and categorize websites. You merely just fill out a submission form and they review your site for quality. If they approve your submission, your link appears on their database--hyperlinked to your target url. Oftentimes, there’s a short description next to the link.
Pro: Relatively easy way to get backlinks. Not exactly free but cheap enough if done by a directory submission service. If you’re going to submit to only ONE directory, it must be DMOZ.
Con: Categorization is key. If you can, find directories that focus specifically on your category. These are very rare considering the tons of content categories available. Plan B is to find directories that have specific enough categories in their multi-category database. Make sure these directories have Page Rank and they allow search engine robots to FOLLOW the links to their specific listings. Submissions can be tedious. For best results, use differing descriptions for your site, rotate your titles, and submit deep links. One final note: Google and other search engines have continuously eroded the SEO value of directory-based links. However, these can be partly offset by highly targeted categorization, rotated links, and custom descriptions.
Photo Credits: KevinDooley
Here are the remaining items on the list which will be critiqued and analyzed in PARTS 3 through 5 of this 5 part series.
21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.
22. Create a software program and give it away for free.
23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.
24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.
25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.
26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.
27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as www.wowzza.com .
Welcome to the production blog for Webmasterlabor.Com
Our vision for this blog is to provide a resource compilation of helpful tools and resources for webmasters and bloggers aiming to generate high revenues from their online businesses. Future posts will focus on website and blog content analysis, SEO tips, SEO tools, search engine resources, analysis and “brain dumps” on potential free traffic sources, and affiliate marketing in general. This blog seeks to be content-neutral so that it can offer value to as many types of webmasters as possible–from gaming/casino webmasters to adult webmasters to mainstream website publishers.
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This is the third installment of our 5-part series analyzing the “Top 50 ways to Drive traffic to your Site”. The previous installments: 
This entry is a continuation of our 5-part critique of the “Top 50 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Site.” Read the ![](http://i49.tinypic.com/ilwt4j.gif")
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