First of all, I have to thank Bryan for inviting me to be part of a small team focussing on social bookmarking. Bryan is a real star, getting 10 times more traffic than me! (6,000+ unique hits in one day and he started at the same time as me.) A big thank you to Aldian, Bryan, James and Raymond, without this group, I know I would not have learned as much as I have about social bookmarking and massively increased my traffic.
How Aldian gets Free Traffic
Aldian shares a case study he wrote about this free traffic, along with his traffic result. http://aldianprakoso.com/case-study-free-traffic/http://aldianprakoso.com/top-10-free-traffic-generation-conclusion/
BRYAN'S STORY
I joined SMCC in Brisbane late June this year and have a few projects going, but I have been focusing on http://www.beatyourdepression.com/blog/ this month (I started this blog in August).
My dad, John, writes the posts for this blog but I have been doing the technical side of things for it and and the traffic strategies.
From the stats, you will see that most of the traffic was generated by stumbleupon.
The biggest day was on the 13th of September, where the number of visits was 6678 (most of these were unique). The traffic was so high that it actually made a page be listed on http://popurls.com/for a day.
Most of the traffic on this day was from this article http://beatyourdepression.com/blog/attitude/ten-rules-for-being-human
The traffic in stumbleupon was not highly targeted traffic, but it did lead to several comments on the blog, one way links leading to the page, about 12 optins and 1 affiliate sale with rapid manifestation ($30.49). For the 1st few days the page did not have the sales links on it. Also there was no direct optin capture on the page.
I also used onlywire, digg and reddit for traffic generation. I believe that submitting to these social bookmarking sites helped the search engine rankings of the beatyourdepression site dramatically.
Aldian had organized a traffic generation strategy via SMCC forum, where I joined and participated. To start off with it was mostly Aldian, James, Raymond and me participating in the group, but now others are learning how to do it and reaping the benefits.
Whilst I have not received PRISE yet, stuck on route somewhere, I have been lucky enough to learn some tips from it via the Brisbane/Gold Coast mastermind group. I found that the permalink structure made a huge difference in rankings too, based on a runescape website http://www.bestrunetips.com/blog/ that I am working on with my son. Working together in teams is very powerful. We can learn from each other, support each other and motivate each other. This is one of the reasons I joined the Stephen Pierce group and I am glad that I did.
Cheers
Bryan
Here's what I sent Stephen:
MY BACKGROUND
I joined SMCC and received my PRISE cd in late July and started my site almost 8 weeks ago on 5 August. My site is http://www.organiclivinglifestyle.com/ and follows the normal PRISE model with PPC in the sidebar and Clickbank affiliate products at the bottom.
STATS – MY TRAFFIC HAS INCREASED 9x
Because things have happened so fast, here’s what I posted on 10th September on http://stephen-pierce-fan-freebies.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html (A blog to chronicle my journey and experience with SMCC.)
Stats - week 5 First 10 days of September:
· 650 hits a day (average) vs 341 in August
· 37 visits a day (average) vs 27 in August
· people in 16 countries have visited my site
· my unique visitors total is now at 231 for the first 10 days of this month (September)
· 35% of visitors come from search engines and social bookmarking vs 1.1% in August
We’re only 10 days into September and my unique visitors total is almost the same as the 241 I had for August. Based on this I expect to at least triple the figures from last month, that is get to about 700 unique visitors for September. If I can keep tripling this figure every month, that would be awesome. That would mean 2,100 unique visitors in October, 6,300 in November and 18,900 in December. Momentum is what it's all about!
It’s funny to read that now! Have a look at the screen shots below taken this morning (Friday). My goal less than 3 weeks ago was to triple the number of unique visitors and it’s now at 9 times! I expect by the end of the month on Sunday, it will be 10 times! I’m excited to see what October will bring.
Stats Today – Almost 8 weeks since starting September average (to the 27th Sept):
· 2,586 hits a day (average) vs 341 in August
· 120 visits a day (average) vs 27 in August
· 42.7% of visitors come from search engines and social bookmarking vs 1.1% in August
How Much Traffic Is Enough?
I worked out that if I only maintain an average 100 visits a day and have 3% of people buy the affiliate product that pays $10.50, then the site will make me over US$11,000 a year.
If I increase traffic to 500 a day, this increases to over $57,000 a year.
Then, if I increase conversion by just 1% and introduce my own $19.95 product (or another affiliate product), it will bring in $145,000+ a year!
STRATEGY, TOOLS & TECHNIQUES
Initially I was writing comments on other people’s blogs and on forums. Now my strategy is:
1) write an article a day (unique content)
2) participate in our small social bookmarking mastermind group
Social Bookmarking Sites We Use:
* StumbleUpon
* Technorati
* Digg
* YouTube (I haven’t used this for my site yet)
* Reddit
* Netscape (Propeller)
* RSS feed (I haven’t used this yet)
* OnlyWire (I’m also experimenting with a brand new one called SocialMarker from Ed Dale which looks even better)
Now almost half of my traffic now comes from Social Bookmarking and most of that is from StumbleUpon.
Other Ideas I will be adding to my Traffic Generation strategy:
* YahooAnswers - answer questions and include link when appropriate (Bryan’s suggestion)
* Submitting articles – ezinearticles.com
* Facebook & MySpace
