How to get more traffic
After being in this game for 3 years, it seems there is no 'magic' or silver bullets that will make your site a killer. It's about taking the fundamentals and constantly working at them. Sure some of us make a lucky guess and strike gold the first time, and these are the stories you will hear from most in the media, becuase they are a whole lot more exciting about reading about a guy who took 10 years to build his business to turning over 1 million a year, but hey, thats still a good business, and because it is not built on luck, it will probably continue to do such volume.My List:
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1. Whitelabel your sites content
Because we have a profiles website we could look at ways of white labeling our content and setting the site up in a way that the content partner has total control of what is seen in the header section.
The valuable thing for a site like ours to offer this kind of setup, is that we know the average person spends 30 minutes on our website at a time, this means members are spending a good amount of time with your brand. This of course could be used in different contexts; If you have a jokes, lyrics, ringtones, etc site you could offer to do the same thing.
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2. Registration Exchange
This is a techinique I mentioned in a past post, basically what I want to do is setup a standard way for sites with large amounts of logged in members to exchange between each other leads at login or logout time. It could be a straight 1:1 ratio, if site A gives site B 1000 leads, the system automatically works to give site B 1000 leads from site A.
3. Directory Listings
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This helps getting a small amount of constant traffic, but based on my calculations, even if from each directory you only get 1 click a week from each directory and you can spend a couple of days just filling them out in your spare time you could get on to 250 directories quite easily, this is 250 people a week or an extra 10,000+ uniques a year. Depending on what kind of business you are in of course but this could be a nice bit of traffic for you. Of course it helps PR too.
4. Networking
Just getting out there and on to forums like this, and adding people to your MSN/AIM/Yahoo list means you can exchange ideas from people and find out the best way to implement ideas. I try also to get to a few conferences every year to.
I would extend this to even maybe just lurking around Adult boards, yes I know most people in this are not in that business (first and foremost at least), but you have to admit a lot of these guys make money, so you can apply some of these concepts in your business to (just without topless girls haha).
5. Web Awards
Get on as many web awards sites as possible, this is good for PR (as in Public Relations AND Page Rank), gives you something to talk about in newsletters and to put on the site to. Also remember the guys who know these sites probably also know a lot of other webmasters that you could work on deals with.
6. Banner Exchange
Because our Australian website has 100,000+ members we get considerable page views in Australia and therefore have something to exchange. I have seen many banner ad exchanges online before but to be honest haven't spent a whole lot of time on them, this is something I have yet to fully explore.
This is the challenge with a site like ours and I would imagine many others. The problem with a lot of these programs is they seem to accept any website and a lot of the standards are very low, and well I don't think they have the same kind of effort that we put into ours. But at the end of the day, this is a numbers game, so I'm going to give this more of a go.
7. Link Exchange
Of course this is very similar to banner exchanges, except plain text links only.
8. Email Exchange
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We have a large number of opt-in emails, and while spamming them isn't our policy we do some promotional send outs that can include a partners message. We have a total of 50,000+ opt-in emails we can do work with. I don't know of any good exchange programs at the moment.
9. SEO
I don't think needs an explanation, while this hasn't been an area we have been anywhere near as strong as we should be, it's something we are committed to working on daily.
10. Pop Under Exchange
Once again, an example of something that can be done when you have a good amount of traffic to get some real good traction. This is something we really haven't done. Anybody know any good companies that do stuff like this?
11. Upsell on E-Commerce Sites
Now this is a one of those 'experimental' concepts I have come up with, I don't know if this would fly at all. But basically the side I'm taking this from is that sites like mine become like the chocolate bars, candy (lollies where I am from) and trashy magazines found at supermarkets. After you have spent your $100 on shopping for the week, we decide we want to spend $1.00 on the National Enquirier while waiting in the queue at the check out.
How would this work on the web? Well say if somebody goes to xyzmusic.com and buys 5 cds, there would be a little tick box saying 'add on an account for FunkySexyCool.com for $5.00', my theory is because the guy has just spent $50 on CDs and another $10 on postage and handling, $5 isn't a big hit at all. Like I said it's an idea, and from personal experience often ideas have to be changed, and then changed some more before becoming a commercial reality. What do you guys think of this way. The best thing of course, from an affiliate stand point, is that the margins could be quite high for the website that sells it, so they are making an additional $2.50 on every so many orders just for putting a tick box of a complimentry offer there.
12. Free Co-Reg Exchange
Co-Reg networks have been around for quite some time, if you are not sure what a Co-Reg network is, check out the likes of coregio.com and coregmedia.com. Basically you add a bunch of tick boxes at signup time for people to register for other offers. But how about doing this for free, on sites that accept newletter registrations/member registrations and we have a system setup that controls it so everybody gets an even amount of signups. I do not know any websites that have such a program at the moment, anybody know of any?
13. Find a chatroom to align your website with
We did this in Australia and have an unofficial chatroom that gets 300+ people in it at once in the evenings on IRC's Austnet network. This has no doubt kept our traffic strong for quite sometime. I think the conditions had to be right for this, there are lots of teenagers in Australia hanging around chatrooms and FunkySexyCool was a solution to what everybody was lacking, an easy way to look at the pictures of people they were chatting to. It is pretty much a guarantee that everybody in the chatroom has a profile so with this very 'visual' demograph it works well. Would it work in different contexts? I don't know, I would be interested to hear on different perspectives on this.
14. Start a Yahoo Group for particular niches
Having researched Yahoo Groups quite throughly, I can't see how this would really be worth the effort. But who knows? Some people might have found a way to make it work, and I would be very interested to hear their stories. When I went there, most of the links were off to adult sites, or fronts for adult sites
15. Send out Press Releases
Quite frankly, this is one area I have no idea about. Who do we send press releases to? What should we write about? Do we need a PR agency? I have always been a very direct results kinda guy, just like Adwords you spend X, you will get Y clicks and Z signups. PR seems a bit flakey. But with the resources we have now we want to give everything a go without going crazy on the budget, anybody know of any good websites for this?
16. Publich articles for ezines
Sites like to keep their content fresh, we have the luxury of a site that generates it's own content however I know all sites don't have that luxury. We could pass content on to a plethora of ezines or smaller news websites. Once again, this is an area we haven't had a great deal of experience in and would be intersted to hear how other websites have done it.
Just coming to mind I guess the notable exceptions from this list are the 'internal' promotions of tell a friend, inviting users to bookmark your site on each page, etc. I'm sure there is a tonne I missed, so if any of you guys have any additional ideas on this I would love to hear about it!
posted by Don Marchand @ 10:59 AM
