Instant Traffic Sources Part II: Outbound Links

In Instant Traffic Sources: Part I we discussed using forums to drive traffic to your websites, while you’re waiting for your pages to get fully indexed at search engines. Remember, our goal is to not just get traffic at all cost, but to maximize our efforts in areas that not only provide us with decent traffic, but other potentially valuable things as well, such as incoming links to our sites, etc.

Today we’re going to look at how we can use outbound links to drive traffic to our new site and to generate incoming links. Incoming links not only serve to boost your Google PageRank, but they also speed the rate at which your site is indexed by the spiders of assorted search engines. And, more obviously, surfers on the sites that link to you do click through links, so incoming links also generate traffic directly.

Any link on your site that points to an external site is considered an outbound link, one which, if clicked, takes the user to an entirely different website. Some outbound links are inevitable and necessary, such as Adsense links or affiliate product links. Those links are what puts money in your wallet, so you don’t need to worry about the fact that the user may click them and never return, as the whole point of your affiliate site is to encourage people to click those links.

What’s slightly more problematic are outbound links to other sites that don’t generate income for you. Let’s say you’re working on your blue widget affiliate site, and discover that there are other great sites about blue widgets out there, that readers of your site would probably find useful as well. Your first impulse is a generous one, which is to provide the best site for your users, so you’re inclined to link to those other blue widget sites.

But then you put on your shrewd, mercenary hat, and start thinking “Hmm, how does that make me money? Not only might I lose traffic due to people clicking through the links and never returning, but my link might boost the other sites in search results, hurting me even more. I’m not doing this to be nice and make friends, I’m doing it to make money. So screw linking to any other site.”

Lots of affiliates subscribe to that line of thinking, and I’m not going to try to debunk it, as the concerns are very valid. But, like many things, it all depends on the particular situation, and in some cases linking to other similar sites can not only boost traffic (and income) of your site, but it can ultimately boost your site in search engine results.

The Nascar news site I recently launched is a pretty good example of a case in which outbound links have given the site a nice boost. One of the first things I did when pondering launching the site was to poke around and see if there were similar sites out there, especially ones with an affiliate angle, as far as being optimized for Adsense, etc. While I found a goodly number of blogs and fan sites, hardly any of them were designed to make money.

So I decided, from Day 1, to include lots of outbound links, to any quality blogs or fan sites that I could find. You’ll find the list of links in the sidebar to the right of the page. I didn’t stop there, though, as I created the links and regularly clicked through myself, so that the webmasters and owners of the linked sites would check their stats and suddenly see traffic coming from some new site they’d never heard of, called Vroomchatter.

In fields where you don’t have a lot of cutthroat affiliate competition, the natural impulse for a webmaster who sees that you’ve linked to them and are sending them traffic is to return the favor, and link to you on their site. You’d be amazed at how quickly this happens, as many of us are obsessive about stats and check them constantly, and in my case I had incoming links added by sites I’d linked to in less than an hour from when I put their link up and clicked through it.

(Remember, you’ll need to click the links yourself, to simulate traffic to their site, as your new site likely has no other traffic to do the clicking.)

Have those return links produced tons of traffic and great riches for me? Not at all. But the site is already making money for me, despite the fact that it’s not indexed in search engines. Keep in mind, too, that the nature of the topic the site is devoted to (and the lack of competition in general) is what makes the outbound links work for me. If I were pushing Viagra pills or some other highly competitive product with beaucoup affiliate sites devoted to it, it’d be a complete waste of time to link to other similar sites, as the mercenary webmasters behind them would never, in a million years, give you a courtesy link back.

As with anything, moderation is also usually best. Don’t go nuts with outbound links, as a very large number of them can hurt your overall site in search results. It’s also best not to extend the idea and to contact people you’ve linked to, asking for a reciprocal link back, etc. Not only is that time consuming but are you really committed to monitoring and tracking who has linked back to you, who hasn’t, and so on? If you do decide to use judicious outbound links, just link ‘em and forget about it.

Outbound links to similarly-themed sites can also potentially give you a boost in the new world of search engines that incorporate semantic considerations, too. All that means is that search engines are getting smarter, to the point that they can potentially reward pages that are about a certain theme and obviously part of a larger network of sites devoted to the same theme, whereas they wouldn’t reward another page if it had no visible connections (i.e. hyperinks) to similarly themed sites.

In the grand scheme of things, outbound links simply aren’t going to generate huge amounts of traffic for you, but their judicious use in some cases can produce a decent amount of traffic, as well as generating incoming links and speeding up how fast and regularly your site content is spidered and indexed in search engines.

Instant Traffic Sources Part II: Outbound Links and related information can be found in Getting Started, Traffic generation