It has got to the point that saying hello to someone online is spamming them. Granted this type of spamming is tolerated more than sending out 10 million emails peddling something that promises to enlarge a certain male accessory. There is a huge spam grey area and the following technique certainly falls in the shaded tract somewhere.
If you have a website or blog then you probably have a stats tracking program of some type deployed on it. On this blog I use StatCounter.com. (the page counter down at the bottom) If you don't then you are missing one of the most important tools in a webmaster's arsenal. Everyday most of us continuously check our stats to see;
- how many people have been to our site
- how many pages have been viewed
- which pages are the most popular
- how long was each visit
- how many return visitors
- how did people get to my site
- what "keyword" was used to find my site
- etc...
Stats tracking provides us with a lot of useful info that we need to fine tune and tweak our online business. Of all the stats you can track none are more important than the referral tracking feature. Simply put, you need to know how people get to your page. This is traffic and traffic is still the single most important piece of the online money making puzzle. No traffic - No sales... period, end of story.
Most tracking programs will tell you what percentage of hits (traffic) came from search engines or other sites and then list each search engine or website that referred a guest to your site. This will tell us that someone queried Google using the keyword "make money" and Google instantly presented them with a list of relevant sites with mine at the top. (oh.. don't I wish!)
Sometimes the tracking program will show us that a website was the referring agent and not a search engine. This is usually a link to your site placed on someone else's site - a backlink. It's always nice when our hard earned backlinks produce traffic. Every so often you will find a website referral that stumps you. We find a hit from a website that we are not familiar with - we don't remember trading links but none the less there is a link to our site from an unknown site. A little inspection is carried out by clicking the referring link and examining the unknown web site.
In most cases you end up on a landing page trying to sell you something. You search the page high and low but can not find the link to your site anywhere. How did this page refer someone to your page? The answer is link spamming and I will show you how this is pulled off and why it is done.
Let's back up a bit and look at the larger picture. We will use my website as an example. I have a site that wants to give away free copies of The Ultimate SuperTip ebook. How can I do this effectively?
Adwords - for sure, but expensive. (for a free ebook - never)
Post it on a forum - this is cheap and a good way to find the right target audience but you won't get a lot of numbers usually.
Write an article about it and post it in a directory - this is cheap and works well but has limited numbers as well.
Contact every website in the Googleverse that has anything to do with making money online and show them a landing page promoting The Ultimate Supertip. Perfect!
Huh? What was that? How can this be done - email spam? Nope.
This is done by leaving your link on every website in your target zone. How? Let me show you.
First - decide what it is you are promoting and who your target audience is. If you are selling a product that grows hair there is no point in trying to sell it to teens looking for free psp downloads. I want to give away The Ultimate SuperTip and my target audience should be websites that are connected to the whole "make money online" racket.
To find your targets go to Google and query your main keyword for your product - in this example I will query "make money". This gets me a short list of 437 million websites related to making money. Not bad, might be a few potential customers!
All I have to do now is leave a link on each one of those 437 million websites pointing back to my Ultimate SuperTip landing page. Simple right - NO says you - that's impossible! Well you are partly right, it would take forever to send links to all of them but I can send links to say 5000 at a time. No way, says you. Yes way says I!
Here's how.
Every time you visit a website you leave a backlink. Most of the time the link points back to the search engine you used to find the website. Sometimes the link points back to a referring website you were on. The link is stored in the stat tracking (page counters) program used by most websites. When the website owner checks his stats he will see that you were there (your IP address), how long you stayed, what pages you visited and how you got there (Google, Yahoo, a website, etc) and the keyword you used to find the site. Ultimately you have left a backlink that does you no good what so ever. Now imagine if every time you visited a website you left a backlink (in the stats tracker) that pointed back to your site or landing page or affiliate sales page. You will get traffic! Lots of it! Why?
Think on this - when YOU check your stats you usually follow the backlinks to see where your traffic is coming from. So do other people. If you left a backlink on my website pointing back at your website, I would click on the link just to find out who you are and how you are linking to me. I guarantee that all small web operators do this. (websites with more than a few hundred hits a day likely won't check stats in this kind of detail but sites with less than this amount of visitors will check every detail - don't you?) Luckily there are a lot more sites with low traffic rather than high, which means this procedure works like a charm. The first thing a website owner thinks about everyday is - "I wonder how many people visited my site". If you visit them they will know you were there - guaranteed!
How to get "There"
(note - this can be done manually but I don't recommend it - it will take a long time to put together even a small list of just a 1000 sites. I use keyword elite to do this procedure automatically to generate several thousand sites at a time. I am not familiar enough with other keyword generation tools but they should work as long as they have a feature that allows you to create html pages and a feature that creates email lists for backlinks. If you do this manually just do 100 sites to begin with so you can see the results.)
Let's start simple. The easiest way for you to leave a backlink on my stats page is to put my link on your site (yoursite.com) and then click it. You will come to my site and leave a backlink pointing to yoursite.com. I check my stats, see your backlink, wonder who you are, click the link in my stats, show up on your page and see the link that you put on your site pointing to my site. Done deal - I leave and think what a nice person you are for linking to my page. (Maybe I stick around, check out your site... buy something?)
Lets get a bit more complex. This time you do the same thing but instead of your home page you put my link on a link page on your site. Lets call it yoursite.com/links. You click and leave a backlink - I see your backlink and click, here I am checking out your links page (ho hum boring) I shrug and leave - don't even bother to check out your site.
This last step involves the same procedure as above but with two different links pages. You FTP upload your yoursite.com/links page with my link on it, click it and then remove the link page and upload a second page that has the same name yoursite.com/links but is a landing page for your product. I see your link in my stats, click it and end up on your landing page. I look over your whole page and wonder where the hell the link is to my site. Ain't there - although I might notice what you are selling. I've just been spammed except I went to the spammer!
Now instead of just my link you upload a page with 5000 links on it to various sites in your target range. Click 50 or so, remove the page and replace it with your landing page. Go back later and upload, click another 50, replace pages. Repeat ad infinum...
I suggest 50 at a time but you can do as many as you like. (This is time consumming and you don't want your real links page up for too long or your visitor might see it instead of the landing page.)
Catching on folks.
Make sure you are selling something related to the websites you target. In the above example you might have got my interest if you were peddling something that makes money online. If you were selling a book on dog grooming you would have heard the sound of slamming finger on mouse.
If you are doing this manually don't bother with large traffic sites - they will never see let alone check your link. Start on page three of the Google listings for your keyword, these folks won't be getting a lot of traffic and will be sure to notice your visit.
If you use an automated system then this whole thing is a breeze. I doubt if the creator of keyword elite had intended the software to be used this way but it is an added bonus. Keyword elite will run a keyword search (ie make money) and compile a list of related keywords. I can then get it to compile a list of websites that it suggests I get backlinks from if I want to rank high in the search engines for each keyword. This is all above board stuff to be sure. The next thing keyword elite does is save all this info on an html page that it creates for me. Better yet it compiles the list of websites in hypertext on the html page along with a hypertext email link. The idea being that I can now email all these sites requesting a backlink. A nice feature and it even supplies an intro page for you to send. All I have to do is upload the page to my site and click the hypertexed links. Presto.
This nice feature also allows us to slide into the spam grey zone. Instead of using this feature to send them emails requesting backlinks, you instead use the links to set backlinks to your landing page. It takes a long time to build a link page with 1000 links on it manually. Keyword elite does it in minutes.
There you have it. This method might be frowned on but it works. The best part is that you target the optimum buyer for your product and this means higher than usual conversions. I of course do not in any way condone this type of marketing and am appalled that people do such things. I have presented this to you simply to illuminate the methods people use to get traffic. What you do with this info is your business.
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Update on Viral Traffic Generator
original review here Free Viral Traffic Generator
Update: This program is no longer working.
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