Five Sneaky Ways to Build Website Traffic

Glen Allsopp / 5 Comments / July 15th, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

I don’t want this to sound like I think I’m above anyone else, but I’m probably part of a small majority of people who test out new ways to drive traffic to sites apart from common methods, unless you are of the blackhat sort. Although I would never put these into practice on a respected site, these are just some of my findings that I think you might find interesting.

Note: I don’t condone or respect anyone who uses these tactics, I think it’s just useful to know the types of things people may be doing. Similar to the fact that I try to mix myself with people who are performing ‘dodgy’ tactics to keep myself well rounded.

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Five Tactics

Change Your Referrers - When you go to one site from another, your browser sends information across to the site about the page you came from, this is why you are able to see referring sites in your Analytics programs. It is possible however, to change the information your browser sends. Using a Firefox extension like RefControl, you can make it appear that every site you visit has been referred too from a domain you enter.

Why is this beneficial? Well, have you ever found yourself visiting a site simply because they show up in your logs as a referrer? I know I have. I also tested this out on a brand new site and noticed some interesting results. I don’t use the plugin but it is another way of getting more visitors to your site. I noticed a post on NickyCakes that might help you come up with some more mischevious ways to use this method, read the comments though; some people have been getting banned.

Mass Add then Delete on Social Networks - I’ve noticed this more on Twitter but this could apply to a lot of social networks. Basically what this involves is adding a lot of ‘friends’ on the top social media sites, then waiting a day and unfriending them. What happens when you add people is that they will get an email saying that you have added them to their friends list.

The majority of people you add will add you back, you can then go back to the site and stop following or friending these people (if you wish), meanwhile you have built a bigger audience to which you can speak too.

Manipulate Technorati Tags - This used to have a much bigger effect last year but it can still work very well. Basically, on the technorati homepage they show the popular tags that people are writing about, website visitors click through to see what the popular tags are (thousands of people do this) and the latest posts surrounding those tags.

I paid a programmer to write a plugin for me that automatically added these popular tags to a latest blog post so that the blog would show up first for all the tags people were clicking through too. Team this up with an auto posting RSS script and you have yourself a lot of free traffic.

Become a Social Mirror - If you check the likes of Digg often you will see sites go down quite regularly because they are able to send so much traffic. Instead of just waiting for sites to go down, you can offer yourself as a mirror i.e. copy the content on your own site and then post a link in the comments that people can go to incase the site goes down.

This works better for image hosts as a) image links tend to go down more often and b) it looks more normal to re-host an image for someone. Having your own free image host can be quite effective as you can place ads on the pages that include the content you are mirroring.

Paid PR for High Volume Keywords - Recently I wrote about how one article received 8,000 search engine visitors for one keyword simply because a site was in Google News. This is quite normal and a common occurence for established websites that are trusted by the big G.

In an ‘unethical’ or ’sneaky’ sense, you could look for more high volume keywords that have Google News integrated in the search results and pay a hundred dollars or so to get your copy into Google News and in turn the search results. If you pick some good keywords you can get a large amount of traffic for the money you paid.

In Summary

Once again, I would never put these into practice for a client or a respected website, I’ve used of all of these for testing purposes more than anything. What I really wanted to point out here is that just because something isn’t ‘the norm’, it doesn’t mean it can’t be effective or can’t work.

Too many people get stuck into thinking they have to abide by certain rules like not buying links, doing link exchanges or giving away free themes with footer credits. Those are just examples, but it should always be a case of trying things out for yourself. I’ll cover that more in the next internet business empire post on ‘Chances’.

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