Gadooney.com

Instant Traffic Sources Part III: Blog Comments

So far we’ve looked at a couple of different ways to generate traffic to your new site while waiting for search engine results to kick in, touching on using forums to generate traffic and using outbound links.

Today we’re going to examine using blog comments to drive traffic to your website. This should be a quick one, as it’s pretty obvious, but an easy way to generate some decent traffic to your site is to be a frequent commenter on blogs that are related to your subject.

In this day and age, you can’t chunk a rock anywhere without hitting 1,926 blogs devoted to the subject, so there are likely plenty of blogs about your subject matter out and about in the world. Most blog platforms allow you to include an email address and URL when commenting, which are displayed after you submit your comment, and can be clicked through by anyone perusing the blog you commented on.

Like many things discussed here, be judicious. Don’t spam blogs with comments for the sake of comments, as something like “Great post” is pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. You’ll get more bang for your buck if you do a little legwork and identifiy the most popular, respected blogs, as they likely have the highest traffic.

When you comment, put some thought into it, so that anyone reading it will realize that you know what you’re talking about, and that the odds are good that your own site will be interesting as well and worth checking out.

Another advantage of being a knowledgeable commenter on blogs is that your comments will often generate an incoming link to your site from the owner of the blog, especially if it’s on a related subject. It’s more professional courtesy than anything else, but it’s often easier to get someone to link to you if you simply frequently comment and contribute to their blog, rather than linking to their site and sending an email, begging for a link, etc.

Search engines are trending towards (or already to the point of) completely ignoring links in the comments themselves, so don’t get caught up in thinking that “Hey, I can generate tons of links if I just comment on blogs all day.” Spamming comments is pretty much a complete waste of time, so no need to go there.

A close cousin to using blog comments to generate traffic are services like Yahoo Answers, where you can answer assorted questions that users have posted, and (for now at least) are allowed to include clickable URLs in your answer. Your mileage definitely varies here, based on the topic and popularity of the subject matter, but it’s a decent way to generate some instant traffic, if there are questions posted that relate to your site and subject matter.

Again, like blog comments you get more mileage if you put a little time into it, as your goal is to impress any user with the fact that you know your stuff. If you just slap up one line responses and a link to your site, you’re likely to get flagged as a spammer or simply ignore by most users, thus rendering the whole exercise a pretty large waste of time.

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 I: Forums

One of the recurring themes here is the good, slow, and steady approach: write good content, write something every day, and good traffic will inevitably follow. That honestly and truly is all you need to do to make money in the world of affiliate marketing, as long as you’re consistent, and do it over and over and over.

But it’s definitely hard, especially with newer sites that aren’t fully indexed in search engines, as we’re hard-wired to want to see results from our hard work, and we want to see them now, not in weeks later and especially not a couple of months from now. ‘Tis a perfectly natural reaction, and I’m still prone to it myself. The natural question, then, is whether or not there are things you can do to generate traffic to your websites now, while waiting for your good, juicy content to get indexed in search engines.

Happily, the answer is yes. But I’ll immediately qualify it, before touching on a few ways to generate traffic. Like anything affiliate related, always consider the time premium. You’ve only got so much time to spend on your site. Be ruthless about how you spend it. Always ask yourself if you’re better off creating more content, as that should be your primary goal. Always. Good content will always trump any other technique or activity. Always.

So how do we generate traffic to a brand new website? Well, our first consideration should be to narrow that down, and ask how we can generate good, focused content to our sites. You could stand on a street corner and shout “Visit my site bluewidgets.com!” at every passerby, for ten hours a day, and that would actually create some traffic, as some people would be curious later when they got home and type in the URL, to see what that idiot on the street corner was shouting about.

But that’s pretty crappy traffic, as you didn’t pre-qualify them at all, and have no idea if they’re interested in blue widgets at all. It’s also not an efficient use of your time, as the handful of curious people that check out your site simply isn’t worth the ten hours you spent shouting on the street corner.

So we not only want to generate traffic, but we want to pre-qualify it, so that the visitors are more inclined than the average surfer to respond to the content on our site. Got all that? Okay, now let’s dive into the first of several ways to generate traffic to our new website.
Generating Traffic from Forums

One of the best ways to generate traffic to a new site is to find forum sites that are related to the topic of your site. In this day and age, pretty much any popular topic you tackle for an affiliate site will have existing forums out there, where people are discussing and debating various related topics. Just do a Google search on “blue widget forums” to find them, or something similar.

Most forums allow you to include a signature line with a URL in it. Check to make sure that the forum you found allows that, as it’s pretty crucial. If they do, you’re in luck. Register for the forum and simply wade into discussions, and create a signature line that has the URL of your website in it. Be sure, too, to put your signature URL to good use. This means varying your link phrase to reinforce important keywords on your site, and not always using the same default signature line.
If your site is about blue widgets, a natural link in your signature line would be “Blue Widgets”, with the entire phrase linked to your website. Set that up and post a good bit using it. If your website is for people looking to buy blue widgets online, another good link phrase would be “Blue Widgets Online”, with that linked to your site. Post for awhile with that, then switch it to “Buy Blue Widgets”. Mix it up, as variety in incoming links to your site will help you more in search engine results than all of the links being exactly the same.
Don’t be blatant about plugging your site and avoid the temptation to take short-cuts like just saying “I agree with JoeBob.” and nothing more. To get the maximum impact you need to build up a certain amount of trust factor, so that it appears that you know what the hell you’re talking about. Other visitors to the forum are much more likely to click through your signature URL on your posts if you appear to be an expert than if you’re an idiot or obvious just trolling for clicks.

Forum posts won’t generate tons of traffic but it’s generally fairly targeted, and most posts don’t expire, so the links will continue to work for you long after the post has been made. Not all forums are created equal, too, so it takes some experimenting to find ones that work well for your site. If you’re spending a lot of time on posting and seeing very few clicks, then it might be time to reassess, as far as whether or not you’re spending your time wisely.

I’ll continue this thread tomorrow, with more examples of good traffic sources for new sites.