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| 1. A SNEAKY DOMAIN TRICK GIVES INSTANT LINK POPULARITY! On Altavista, you can view the link popularity of a domain by typing: link:www.trafficology.com ... and seeing how many results you get. When I did this (NOV 5, 2003), there were about 600 links. Interestingly, Altavista considers all non-letters and non-numbers between www and the domain name to be "whitespace" - in other words, irrelevant. What this means is Altavista considers... link:www-trafficology.com [note the hyphen instead of the dot] ... the same as... link:www.trafficology.com ... when viewing link popularity. In other words, if you type in link:www-trafficology.com into the Altavista search box, you will actually see links to it even though it's a bogus name. (The domain name "www-trafficology.com" doesn't exist.) If you were to register a popular domain name with "www-" attached... and then submit that to Altavista, you would - at least theoretically - have instant link popularity for that name since Altavista apparently can't tell the difference. Presumably, you'd submit the domain as http://www-domain.com, NOT http://www.www-domain.com. I don't know how much weight Altavista gives to link popularity in determining rank, but if they consider it at all, you're WAY ahead of the game! 2. EXPLOITING F R E E IMPRESSIONS ON GOOGLE ADWORDS In Google's PPC "Adwords" program... your ad is placed on the right side of the results page when people search for a particular keyword or search phrase. Like all PPC programs, you pay a certain amount every time someone clicks on your ad and visits your site. But the impressions themselves are f r e e. Let me say that again - clicks cost money; impressions are f r e e. Knowing that, it might be a worthwhile strategy to focus on reaching a customer with your impressions instead of clicks. Here's what I mean. A typical Google ad is worded something like this: BENEFITS-ORIENTED HEADLINE For heaven's sake, please click here and visit my site because I need to sell you something! www.yoursite.com And every time someone clicks that, it costs you anywhere from $0.05 to $3.00. Obviously, we're all interested in getting visitors. That's the bottom line. But for popular search terms, Adwords click-throughs are simply too expensive for most of us. So what if... instead of trying to get someone to click on your ad, you try to get traffic by taking advantage of the fact that impressions on Google are essentially fr e e. Here's how to do it. First, change the wording of your ad to get your message READ, BUT NOT CLICKED. Here's a couple of examples... DO NOT CLICK HERE! Type "proclickexchange.com" in the URL line of your browser. Want to know why? Visit... http://www.proclickexchange.com/ A FUN EXPERIMENT... Type "PRO Click Exchange" into Google's search box and see what happens! It's awesome! http://www.proclickexchange.com/ Get the idea? You're trying to get people to engage in behavior that makes them wind up at your site... without you having to pay the Adwords fee to get them there. Google requires that you get 5 clicks per thousand impressions in order for your campaign to remain active. But with the 5 cent minimum, you can just click your ads yourself (if others have not) and your maximum cost will be 25 cents per 1,000 impressions. 3. GET PEOPLE TO USE YOUR OWN ROOT DNS SERVER To run your own root dns server, all you need is a server that's hooked up to the internet, and some nameserver software, preferably BIND. (F r e e) You can then create your own "invented" TLDs, like... .steve .venture .idea .new .tennessee whatever. ... and give them away. They cost you nothing to create, and as long as people put your root server in their Windows internet setup, these domains will work just fine, and will point to real IP addresses. Your root dns server will hold records of your invented TLDs AND all other existing root dns servers' TLDs (including internic) so people who configure their computer to use your root server will still be able to access all other websites. In other words, there's no reason for them to ever change. The more fr e e bie domains you give away the better, because you can do like Geocities and add your own banners or ads or popups or popunders or whatever you want. But unlike Geocities and the other fr e e web hosts, hosting a domain literally costs nothing. 4. EXPLOITING "COUPON" SITES One of the most overlooked opportunities for building traffic is to exploit "coupon sites" - and all you need to be listed on these sites is a legitimate offer, like 10% off, f r ee shipping, etc. This will get your site listed in DOZENS of highly-visited sites, increasing both your immediate traffic as well as your link popularity rating. It also allows you to see what your customers prefer. You could put out two "coupon codes" on two different sites - one for 10% off, and one for f re e shipping (for example), and then see which one is the biggest draw. [With a good, creative offer, I think this has the potential to generate several hundred additional visitors a week.] This idea was submitted by Stefano Panusa of http://www.couponsurfers.com. Coupon codes for the major online retailers, updated weekly, never pay full price online again! 5. THE NEXT BIG THING... AFFILIATE SIGNUP BONUSES!? We all know that GOOD Affiliates = Traffic and Traffic = Money, right? Here's how one website has managed to convince SUPER AFFILIATES to sign up and start promoting them. They offer them money... for nothing! That is not a typo. NOTHING! Here's what the affiliate manager says: "We HAND PICK webmasters with popular sites and we offer them a crisp $100 bill just for signing up with our affiliate program and promoting our link.This idea was submitted by Jack Reece of http://www.instantdegrees.com/ Bachelor, Master or Doctorate College Degrees instantdegrees.com has the ultimate solution. 6. OPTIMIZING PAGES FOR LINKS CONTAINING SEARCH TERMS Sometimes webmasters have links on their page that link directly to search results. In other words, they create a link on their site that, instead of taking the visitor to a regular web page, it takes them to the results page for a particular search term on a particular search engine. Such a link looks like this: "http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=unusual+traffic+ideas" Find unusual traffic ideas on Yahoo! And because these search terms are included in link form, sometimes these searches can be disproportionately common. For example, how many times would you guess the following 2 phrases are searched for on Google? (Don't cheat and look at the answer!) 1. "pigeons mental rotations" 2. "pigeons ping pong skinner" If you're like most people, you'd probably say "never". Or at most 2 or 3 times a year. I can assure you that these searches are performed thousands of times every month! Why? Because Google has a little "parody" page of its pagerank technology called "Pigeon Rank". You can see it here. http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html And when you click the "spacial orientation" link, what you get are the Google search results for "pigeons mental rotations". Similarly, when you click the "playing ping pong" link, you get the search results for "pigeons ping pong skinner". How much competition would you have if you optimized a page for "pigeons ping pong skinner"? That's right... NONE! And there are literally thousands of websites that link to search results in this way. Sometimes they'll use text links, and sometimes they'll use a graphic. On wedj.com, for example, there's a Google graphic at the bottom of the page that, when clicked, actually takes you to- http://www.google.com/search?q=wedding+dj+photographer If you optimized for this search term ("wedding dj photographer"), it'd be like having a link to your website on wedj.com. The trick to using this strategy is finding websites that do this. So far, there's no real easy way to find them. About the only way is to perform a search like this - "www.google.com/search" ... and then go hunting, page by page. Don't forget - people do this for all kinds of search engines...not just Google! So go out there and start tracking them down! 7. DISCOURAGING OVERTURE BIDDERS Here's an interesting little item. I don't know how practical it is, but I think it's worth a look. There are several people who constantly pour over their Overture bids, optimizing here, experimenting there, and maximizing ROI whenever possible. But most of us - those who have lives - usually just wait for the monthly activity report from Overture to analyze our bids, and to re-think our strategy. It's usually at this point when I make the decision to raise or lower a bid, and it's that tendency that inspired this idea. The submitter of this idea first suggests doing research to find out when the Overture monthly report data is compiled. To do this, he begins changing his bids on various keywords (every 8 hours) a few days before the Overture monthly report is due. He makes a notation of the time and date of each bid change. When the monthly report finally arrives, he checks the information in the report to see which bids are identified in the report, and uses this data to find out exactly (well, within 8 hours) of when the data was compiled. Now that he knows this, he can raise his maximum bids to a very high level JUST BEFORE the next monthly report is compiled. Whatever clicks he gets will cost him more, but he only has to do this until the report data is collected, which he knows within an 8-hour window. After that point, he can return his bids to normal. What's the point of all this? Okay, let's say he and I are bidding on the same keyword. I'm bidding $0.25 a click and he's bidding $0.26 a click. He's #1 and I'm #2. Since I know that the #1 position on Overture gets a lot more clicks, I might be tempted to bid $0.27 to be in the top position. But then, he'd bid $0.28, thus starting a bidding war. Before you know it, we'd both be paying A LOT MORE MONEY per click, yet we'd have the same relative position we had before. But what if, when my monthly activity report arrives in my inbox, I see that I'm #2 at $0.25 but the #1 bidder has a maximum bid of $3.50?? I don't even have the slightest temptation to adjust my bid at this point because I'd have to bid $3.51 per click! So I would leave my bid right where it is. And of course, as soon as the monthly reports are sent out, he goes to Overture and reduces his bid back to $0.26. As I said, it's an interesting concept, and one that may even prove to be practical with high-price-per-click keywords. Of course, Overture would hate this! 9. INCREASING EMAIL READERSHIP People are always sorting their Inbox emails in various ways to find what they're looking for. Sometimes you sort alphabetically according to Sender, or alphabetically according to Subject line. It just makes it easier to find certain emails. By changing your email address so that it starts with a "0" (zero) or by adding "#" or "!" or "*" to your subject lines, you will make sure that your emails are always on top when sorted alphabetically by sender or subject. It may not make a big difference if you just email customers occasionally, but if you send out lots of news letters or other opt-in mailings, this could have a serious impact in the number of times your emails get read. Don't forget - by adding "ZZ" to your email address or subject line, you'll also appear at the top of everyone's email list if they do a reverse-alphabetical sort!
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