I saw Shawn Collins speak at the Austin Internet Marketing Meetup about his favorite traffic sources on April 13, 2011. He’s an affiliate marketer and helps run the Affiliate Summit conference. He plowed through a long list of good ideas on getting web traffic. I wrote them down and did a little followup of the good ones. Here’s my notes from his presentation.
Many sites republish RSS feeds. Instead of trying to prevent people from republishing your content, embrace it. Give full text in your RSS feed. Leave you links in there. Site scrapers & syndicators will republish and leave links.
NetworkedBlogs.com – Add your website to this blog directory. Easy to manage stats and syndication including Facebook.
RSS out to Twitter with Twitter Feed and Social Oomph.
AWeber RSS to Email. RSS to newsletters. Set time and frequency.
Put links in YouTube descriptions, they’re clickable. Example: Ashton Brown of Thermo Studios – designs bla bla … (Thermo Studios is a link). Be sure to write a good title and use many relevant tags.
Meetup.com Perks – Low-cost and targeted text ads in targeted groups.
LinkedIn Applications – Feed your RSS, Twitter, Slideshare to your LinkedIn profile.
Create a Paper.li account for your company or organization. Retweet daily to build your Twitter account.
Flickr Links – HTML converts to links. Write HTML links in description of Flickr photos.
Facebook Ads – He sold his house in 14 days. Targeted to zip codes.
Use Bit.ly for tracking links and clicks.
Other Notes
Google wasn’t mentioned because it’s not in top ten sources of traffic on most of his websites.
Favorite WordPress Toos: Thesis Theme, and AWeber Integration WordPress plugin.
This question was asked “Please outline a new blog if you started one today”.
His reply:
Pick a topic you are personally interested in. Know that it won’t make any money the first quarter. Create a form where people can ask you questions. Answer the question your self. Publish these questions and answers as posts. Be sure to write informative keyword rich answers. Be sure to post the question so you can collect long tail keyword phrases.
Q: What do you think about Squidoo?
A: Too spammy. The owner keeps too much control of the system and content. I don’t like it.
Q: How to you choose which affiliate programs to promote?
A: A/B split testing. Try all the affiliate providers.
Use OpenX for Ad stats. Use the hosted version you doesn’t have to update.
Q: What hosting do you use?
A: Liquid Web for high traffic sites. Blue Host for throw away accounts.
Side not from people at my table:
Use trada.com for PPC Crowd Sourcing. You set the price you are willing to pay for a click. They run your campaign for you. They try to get the CPC below what you’re willing to pay and they keep the difference.