Generating extra traffic for your site.

Posted by Scott on April 30th, 2007 .

car.jpgWith summer fast approaching the amount of deals being done for vehicles on Ebay continues to rise, I recently sold a vehicle and decided Ebay would be the easiest way to reach a large audience so listed the car and monitored the results. Typically I couldn’t resist turning it into a little experiment along the way though.

I decided to host a page on one of my domains all about the car with full details, the complete spec and quite a few extra pictures of it. Adsense was used on the page.

Listing the vehicle on Ebay I merely added a link in the middle of the auction page details to my hosted page offering more pictures, the auction ran it’s course and during the 10 days I had around 150-200 visitors click through to my hosted page each day.

The Ebay.co.uk listing fee was £6 (Roughly USD $12) and took around 1500 uniques to my hosted page during the auction, that works out at £0.004 ($0.002) each …good value I think you’ll agree?

On top of that I also listed the vehicle for free with a couple of auto classifieds sites/car forums like Piston Heads, the traffic coming from there peaked at about 100 uniques a day but averaged around 50 per day and as it happens the advert is still on there bringing in around 50 visitors per day.

All in all I had over 200 visitors to my single page each day of the auction with the vehicle and adsense on it and, the car sold, I gained some backlinks  from Ebay & others (Ebay now shows up as a backlink in Google) and that page continues to get around 50 + targeted visitors per day and ranks well in MSN. I can only imagine the traffic you could get on Ebay.com as I was using just .co.uk

This was a genuine sale but I have seen a growing trend of this type of use for generating traffic, unethical you could say but so is buying links according to some, or trying to game the search engines, either way, it happens.

The false sale
There are a number of websites that are being used to send free traffic to websites. One of the ‘advertisers’ that I have come across on more than one occasion is Maps of the World. Listed as a website for sale on Sedo (domain & websites for sale portal) they generate a lot of extra interest and traffic to their website by having it displayed prominently and for free on sites like Sedo 

288! offers have been made for this website! One of them was from me, just try and get any response or an asking price and I am sure you’ll get no response, I tried contacting them through their website as I was genuinely interested, alas no response. I did list my tattoo website for sale on Sedo as a test some time ago and don’t have exact figures now but it did certainly send a good bit of untargeted traffic my way.

The helpful expert
People also go and answer questions on sites like 43Things and Yahoo Answers with the remit of getting a backlink on a page that can quite likely rank well for their search term or at least a backlink and some traffic. In fact there was a good post just on 10 ways to get traffic from yahoo answers not long ago.

Targeted traffic from sites that are in the same genre or rank well for our keywords are always of interest but free traffic is often of a poor quality and short lifespan, banner adverts are still a very effective way to generate extra targeted traffic to your website, I pay just over £200 ($400) per month for an advert on a website that send me 1000 visitors per day, 30k per month which for me is good value, there are still good deals to be done and webmasters are more than ever always very keen to secure some guaranteed set income from banner adverts from relative websites as long as they are not direct competitors.

Toplists
list.jpgOne very effective way of generating traffic is to create a new top list for your industry, this was very effectively done by Al last week and generated a lot of traffic & links to this website, perhaps that could be applied to your industry or sector? If you can put a spin on it, make your analysis of the top 50 different and accurate and you will catch people’s attention, use a new formula that is fair and accurate can often generate extra plaudits and attention, I found one on fashion blogs last week which was done differently where they used a variety of factors to rank.

We used three basic metrics to determine the blog ranking. Unique visitors (audience), traffic (reach) and links to the site (influence.) This data was compiled from Quantcast, Alexa, and Yahoo and weighted according to what we felt was the most accurate data. We then calculated the overall score and came up with a ranking.

I only covered a couple of very general methods used here as the most effective way to generate traffic will often depend on the website and the market and won’t work for all sites/blogs and can only talk from experience. On Wednesday I’ll maybe do another post but taking some specific examples of types of sites and ways to generate interest & traffic, feel free to suggest any sites/topics.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 and is filed under Building Traffic . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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16 Comments »

Comment by watch video online Subscribed to comments via email
2007-04-30 09:00:55

Very good post for add traffic! put it in my favorite!
thanks

 
Comment by Matthew from GadgetVenue Subscribed to comments via email
2007-04-30 09:04:01

There are some good ideas there. I like the eBay idea. I do not sell stuff that often, but I could genuinly list a lot of items as I do need to have a clear out. It will be interesting to see how that goes and how the traffic converts or sticks.

 
Comment by Eliena Andrews Subscribed to comments via email
2007-04-30 10:27:31

thanks for sharing this nice tip with us for traffic. Do we really need Ebay account to do like you did ?

 
Comment by Martin Reed from Community Building Blog
2007-04-30 11:01:01

An interesting article - not sure how this could be used to drive targeted traffic though as everyone clicking is looking to buy a website, not necessarily to check out your sites content.

Comment by Scott from Scott
2007-04-30 11:05:28

Ebay could be used in a variety of ways, say I had a photography forum/website, I could look to sell some photography equipment/prints etc (for real) and in the listing link back to my website for more images/info and therefore that helps make the traffic more targeted. Just listing on the likes of SEDO would offer exposure, more traffic but not good quality.

 
 
Comment by Keith
2007-04-30 14:24:41

This raised an interesting question. I have previously posted items on eBay to sell, and on the item description I placed external links to my site, which (similar to your case) contains more information.

However, eBay removed the entire listing and claimed that such action is not allowed in eBay, i.e. members are not allowed to place links on to eBay items. It happened a couple of times when I listed some my of items.

So, I wondered why is it that you have not been detected? I doubt eBay has changed its policy because the last time I did that was 2 months ago.

Comment by Scott from Scott
2007-04-30 14:31:33

Ebay do not allow external links however I have sold lot’s of websites,products & domains on ebay all of which have been linked out externally which is often natural, perhaps it’s depends what is on the other side Keith? I linked to an information page with pictures, info & adsense, maybe I have just been lucky, I can only speak from experience, sometimes I wish ebay spent more time policing the real crimes that go on there.

Comment by Keith
2007-05-01 14:24:34

Well Scott, I guess I am just unlucky. I did almost the same thing, except that the product is not web-based like yours, e.g. domains and websites. eBay retracted my listing a couple of times because of external linking. Perhaps, I should use images to link out instead of anchor text.

(Comments wont nest below this level)
Comment by doolally from doolally Subscribed to comments via email
2007-05-01 20:16:14

I think you can link out only if it’s to extra infomation that is relevant.

 
 
 
 
Comment by Jay from Online Opportunity Subscribed to comments via email
2007-05-01 13:08:01

Some great tips! Especially the one about generating a toplist. I’ve seen those all over the web, but never thought of them as a traffic generation tool.

 
Comment by Paul Subscribed to comments via email
2007-05-02 01:59:27

Are then any other sites similar to 43things?

Comment by Scott from Scott
2007-05-04 09:00:55

You can look up the top 50 sites across all engines for your main keywords Jay, if there are any social sites there with user generated comments then you have the potential to get a very good and relative backlink by participating.

 
 
Comment by funny pictures Subscribed to comments via email
2007-05-03 18:38:58

43things and yahoo answers.. i hadn’t try yet, but one of guy was selling a ebook for 7$ on dp forums for this.

 
Comment by recep Subscribed to comments via email
2007-05-06 07:42:57

You are are very clever guy mr. well thats a very good idea, we can even do it, but isnt that much for $.008 for each guests if you ve only adsense in ur page and what if 10’s of guests dont click the adsense? 0.8 is lost.

Deppnote : 0.004£=0.008$ isnt it ?

 
Comment by jim from Toplist,ebay ideas Subscribed to comments via email
2008-03-29 22:35:49

I like the toplist idea!

 
Comment by Dave from ebay selling tips Subscribed to comments via email
2010-03-02 23:11:14

I really like yahoo answers, I don’t even have a clickable link yet and still get traffic

 
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