Active and passive networking
by Sapphire (May 12, 2008)
I checked my stats this morning and got some exciting news: Project Mai Tai looks like it may get double the number of visitors this month that it got in April. Memorial weekend may take a dent out of that - Mother’s Day did - but it’s still a lot of growth.
Project B-2 Bomber has suddenly hit a tipping point - it had been stuck around 13k to 15k since late 2007. This month, it may see around 25k.
The most exciting thing about both these cases? There’s no one thing I did that made it happen. That means that what I’m doing - consistent, quality posting - works eventually. Sure, there are ways to make it happen faster, but those cost money and take up time you may not have. Now that I have money to spend, I’m looking into advertising my sites and all that good stuff, but I have some thoughts about that.
Networking done right
Networking really needs to be done in-niche. Meaning, you can’t just pal around with other affiliate marketers and ask them to launch your sites - unless you’re writing yet another How To Earn Online blog. B-2 Bomber benefited from a lot of networking because it fit the needs of a specific, active community online - all I had to do was stick a link in my forum signature and keep talking to the same people I’d already been talking to. When I saw LiveJournal users picking up the site, I got an account, made some “friends” and kept the account up regularly. That stuff does help. But could the A-list affiliate marketing bloggers have sent me any decent traffic? Not in the slightest.
So keep in mind that proper networking can mean you need to have a circle of friends in several different crowds. That’s exhausting if you’re an introvert, or if that particular niche has a large contingent of crazy people or competitors looking to steamroll you. It’s worth doing in some cases, but if networking is just not your thing, I recommend not driving yourself nuts over it.
Advertising done right?
I have yet to figure out how to advertise a site to popularity. There’s a lot of trial and error because when an ad works (or doesn’t work), you can’t be sure if it was the site you put it on or the ad itself that did the trick. Or the positioning. Or the colors! Or the specific week you ran it! There are so many factors. There’s a lot of science to it, but also a lot of guessing.
This is where a sort of passive networking comes in handy. If you can’t stand talking to your niche audience, can you stand tracking them? Look at the forums your desired visitors frequent. The blogs they read. The blogs they write. Take notes and check out those sites - those are the places to consider advertising. If you can bring yourself to post something (and surely, if you’re a blogger, you can scrounge up one little worthwhile forum post), put a link in your signature, post and see what traffic it drives. That should give you some indication what you can expect from an ad (although in many cases, the signature link will actually drive more traffic because it’s right in the stream of content where people are looking).
Posted in Traffic
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