Sites I’ve used to boost traffic
Not a day goes by that I don’t get an email or a PM at DP Forums asking me how I was able to get so much traffic at GrownUpGeek.com so quickly. There really is no quick, easy answer to “how do I get more traffic?” – it takes a combination of work and most importantly good, unique content. Without good content on your website, all the link-building, AdWords marketing and social bookmarking in the world is not going to do much good and would end up as wasted effort.
After you have made your website unique and interesting here are a few sites that can help build traffic, and how they helped me (if at all).
SlashDot – The holy grail of traffic generating sites. If your website makes it onto SlashDot.com you can expect at least 100,000 visitors in a very short amount of time. Many sites that get “SlashDotted” quickly suffer the SlashDot-effect – this is when your server takes a dump because of the sudden increase in activity. SlashDot posts “News for nerds, stuff that matters” and has pretty tight editorial guidelines. Don’t even bother trying to submit your new proxy-site, or 3-week old ringtone site. But, if you have something truly fresh and unique, give it a shot.
Digg – Digg.com allows members to submit websites/pages that are interesting, funny or controversial in the tech-world. Other Digg.com members can then “Digg” you (vote) if they feel the submission is good or interesting. When submitting a submission to Digg, be sure you make the intro catchy and interesting – this can make the difference in being on page-1 of Digg or vanishing into obscurity. Also keep in mind that Digg hates spammers and will ban you or your site if they feel that you are just “Digg-whoring”. Because most Digg readers are more technically savvy than the average internet user, Adsense earnings from Digg traffic is usually pretty low, but the long-term traffic and back-links generated from a popular Digg submission are well worth it in the long run. Back in August 2006 GrownUpGeek.com got enough Diggs on a page that I submitted that it made it to the front page. The result was approximately 70,000 unique visitors over about 2 days. Traffic slowly died-down but even after almost a year we still get around 100 – 200 visitors per day from that same Digg submission – we also gained countless backlinks.
StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon allows members to submit sites/pages that they feel are interesting. Other members see these sites randomly while they “stumble” through them. If a member likes the page they stumble-across they give it a positive vote/review. The more positive votes a page receives the more often it gets displayed to other members. The result? You can easily receive hundreds or even thousands of hits from StumbleUpon.
Leenks – What? You’ve never heard of Leenks.com? Leenks.com is sort of a list of cools sites for the day and can easily drive several thousand visitors to your site. This is probably one of the most overlooked sources of traffic out there.
Eurekster Swicki – I don’t even know how this one works, but it is one of our top referrers, generating hundreds of hits per day for us.
Netscape.com – I didn’t even realize that Netscape.com could generate traffic until i started seeing it in my referral logs after someone submitted one of our pages. It works the same way as Digg.com and has the potential to send a significant amount of traffic.
Not on the list:
Myspace – The glory-days of getting rich from Myspace are over. These days Myspace has been taking a hard-line against Myspace spam marketing and Myspace users are getting tired of the constant deluge of spam in their inbox and bulletin list. Google is even taking a stance against bulletin spamming and may ban your Adsense account for driving too much traffic to your site from Myspace bulletins. Sure, you can get a boost in traffic (maybe) but in my opinion the effort and work involved is not worth the risk or small payoff. Unless you plan on making Myspace “marketing” a full time job, I say you should skip it.
Got any other great traffic-driving sites? Post a comment and share.
