I've noticed alot of people asking how to get more members and activity to their forums. Here is a tip that I found just recently. Enjoy! This promotional tip is dedicated to Andrew Wee for popping my MBL cherry. If you’d like to pull in some Google traffic, this tip is for you. Google bait is a post that a blogger intentionally writes to pull in Google traffic. The basic idea is that certain topics have a high volume of interest and a low volume of competition. The only real trick to this promotional technique is determining what to write about. You could go through the tedious task of looking up search terms in the Overture inventory and then searching the various engines to guage competition (my former business offered a tool called Scout to do just that). Personally, I prefer to look through my traffic logs for keyphrase trends and then pick a few concepts that I suspect might be of mass interest. I prefer this technique because I’ve learned that people type hundreds of variations of similar keyphrases and the volume of one iteration doesn’t reveal the true volume of interest. Also, if a keyphrase is appearing to be popular in my blog’s stats, it means Google already values my site for this phrase and is likely to push related traffic my way. I’ll walk through an example of Google bait I created for this blog. I was looking through my web stats one day and I noticed that my #1 keyword occurance across all of my keyphrases was MySpace. It wasn’t much of a surprise given that MySpace is one of the largest sites in the world. I decided to write an article about how to hack a MySpace account. I chose this angle for capturing traffic around the MySpace keyword because I knew it was something people would be searching for and I had just recently read an article about phishing MySpace login info that I knew I could link to. I wrote the article on December 6th, which is more than 2 months ago. It is by far my #1 volume post receiving 6 times the page views as my #2 volume post, and 18 times more volume than my #4 post. All of my top ten most popular keyphrases are variations on “how to hack a myspace accountâ€. This was a great experiment for me because I am now going to start offering MySpace nuggets more regularly that are not my main posts. I don’t want my blog to become known as a MySpace resource blog, but I do want draw in potential readers by baiting Google. If the readers like me, they’ll come back or better yet subscribe to my feed. It’s a similar concept to why blogger would cover the release of Vista or the iPhone, which is that many people will be searching for this info so the subject is bait for Google. Have you ever written a post to bait Google for traffic? What do you think about the manipulative implications of the technique? No TweetBacks yet. (Be the first to Tweet this post)
What about buying a domain like howtohackmyspace.com and then redirecting the traffic? Would that work better?
Nah not really, since the introduction of cpalead noscript is getting alot of attention since it can block redirects including timed meta redirects, 301's etc. And since cpalead does rely on a meta redirect, now isn't a good time for those kinds of tactics The more popular cpalead gets, the more popular blocking redirects with noscript is going to become.
Never heard of cpalead noscript. I don't understand how that would effect traffic. I would use an apache alias to redirect the traffic. No scripting required.
Not sure what that has to do with increasing forum membership. Baiting traffic in such a manner is nothing new, particularly to bloggers; converting it in to increased forum membership takes a little more effort.
well here's what I meant by that Not only does it block the meta redirects inside noscript elements but any meta redirect it finds.
NoScript has done wonders for me, you can also use it to stop advertising networks from tracking your activities.
Why does noscript matter when you can alias a domain? You're talking apples not oranges. True but if the domain is relevent than the traffic is going to convert.
There are a few websites popping up now that allow you to browse cpalead protected content without the gateway popping up. I dont think cpalead are on top of this yet, but I have installed a script that identifys the refer and shoots them to a page full of annoying popups
I like using hittail.com to see what are good terms to search as well, they have a suggestions tab that has paid off for me several times.