I’ve been working on a few processes on generating website traffic and how to become a thoughtleader. Some for automation, other for self execution. There are countless guides, blogs, and websites on this, (I’m looking forward to David Walsh’s M6 Method process on it) but I find most of the information out there too heavy to absorb, so here’s my particular black book on how to scratch your niche and make an impression. It assumes you want quality readers and have good content (or are in the process of producing it).
Warning: Know your niche. Be able to identify who your target audience is in under 10 words. I tried to bypass this and leave it vague for my website. I recently realized you can’t do that. Choose something as specific as possible. Ask yourself, do I enjoy providing X for these people?, am I good at it?, and will they pay me for it? Have a mission, or your just wasting time surfing the web with the tactics below.
These processes build on each other.
Find Where Your Audience Hangs Out
Use Quantcast and type in a few websites you know your target audience goes to. Pick up on their “lifestyle” affinities and suggested other sites, some of these sites are low level enough (my educated guess would be something that gets less than 30k hits a month or around 5000 subscribers) that you can befriend their owners, guest post, or become a recognized guest commenter.
Use StumbleUpon, go to a site you’ve identified as in your targets niche, and use their “Stumble” bookmarklet (a link that submits the site to StumbleUpon) … if you have an account you’ll see a list of people who have also submitted this site to StumbleUpon…click them and see a list of their recently stumbled websites. Bookmark related sites to invest it for future relationship building.
Look at where YOU hang out. You are most likely affiliated or part of your demographic, put yourself in your audiences shoes.
After you have about 50 bookmarks, go through them, grade them, narrow it down to the 10-15 best. You can manage keeping up with 10 news feeds, commenting and adding, connecting and socializing.
Research Why the Sites Your Audience Hangs Out at are Popular
Now you know of some associated sites and potential competition, it’s time to find out how they got popular. There’s no cut and dry way to find this out, but there’s a sneaky web way; backlinks. Yahoo has a tool called Yahoo Site Explorer that allows you to plug in a website and see all the websites that link to it. Check it out here and make sure only to filter the list by selecting “Except this domain”. There are also a few
Read other people’s comments, take notes why they like or dislike that site.
Reverse Engineer Backlinks
As you’re scanning the backlinks, make some more bookmarks of which sites you can go comment on, add your site to or befriend in some way. At the very list, add them to your own backlink log.
Create your own Backlinks (or “traditional link building”)
This is where I have a growing workflow process I’d like to test and automate. I put all the “traditional” backlink methods here, like directory submission, or site and post submissions to news release sites and classifieds, or media submissions to YouTube and Flickr, basically all the heavily indexed places on the web that let you know put in a link. Great for search and “web presence” but becoming much less important for trusted influence.
Make a Hundred Friends
After you’ve been at this a few times for a few hours at each go, you should be able to send out a enough “hello, I like what you’re doing’s” and click on enough “add and follow” buttons to rack up some 100 connections, and probably a good amount of people who will return the favor to your site.
Be Well Known at a Few Blogs (1 month)
If you’re a regular commenter, and you’ve taken a shine to a few of the sites you’ve now found yourself comfortable in, ask to send in a guest post. Pre-write it and send it in for approval. I won’t go over the process of getting a guest spot here, the web is littered with them, Google it.
Make a Core Ally (2 months)
Once you’ve played in this zone for a while and kept the “medium” sized fish on your radar (read RSS reader), start making a play at guest posting or forming a “success alliance” (call it that, they’ll love that) with someone. It’s a great way to cross promote, keep yourself accountable, and grow your base audience. Really connecting with one or two other sites is a powerful method of rapidly growing traffic. Viperchill (Glen Allsopp, AKA the man), a popular viral marketing website calls this tactic so under-used it may as well be a secret.
Survey Them
I recently read a great guide at Think Traffic on how to stir up traffic to your site involving several brother sites in your niche category and a survey. Once you’ve done all the above, you can combine and cross promote with all of them in one super post in the form of a survey. Get the guide here.
I Didn’t Mention Using Facebook or Twitter
The reality is of course you’re going to use social media to drive traffic to your site, but this depends on your existing sphere of influence, which unless you’ve already done the above repeatedly still consists of your friends on Facebook and those 12 people you know on Twitter. Don’t use this to “push” your site or content until you have a feeling that it will actually land as relevant to people, that’s the bottom line.
Oh Yeah, Produce Great Content
You knew that already though didn’t you?
Note: SEO and Ads
I’ve now realized there are waves of importance to keyword work in relation to SEO and advertising. Remember they are two different beasts. Search results are a refining process. Test and tweak. Your first wave (first couple months), just throw things on the wall for results and don’t sink more than a couple hours into it each week. I now have an idea of what to target with IT Arsenal, and part of that is knowing that friendship and partnering with other sites are going to fuel this business more than base keywords. Articles here and there will drive traffic, but I’m not pitching a specific product or service alone, so keyword only efforts are not useless, but their almost pointless at this point in the game. Spending money on ads just isn’t the play right here, this isn’t true for individual product only sites that can benefit from adwords more so then relationship traffic. The second wave should refine what type of person you’re looking to see at your site, what words draw them with, and shape whether you’re going to add hours and money into automatic online advertising (ala Adwords), or connecting with people.
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Sound like a lot of work? Yeah, maybe…depends on how you view networking. It’s not something you do in a weekend, all these tactics are part of a slow build process. Once you have a reputation, you can focus less on getting people to your site and more on what to do with them when they are there. That’s the plan anyway. Onward.
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