10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic

In the last six months, we’ve been lucky enough to help quite a few companies and websites drive significant traffic to their sites. Many of these campaigns have been constructed around the goal of building search engine rankings, as this is our primary business, but we’ve also found that our ability has given us great power in the fields of brand-awareness and marketing overall. Thus, the following ten processes are primarily about building traffic and through it, attention.

#10 – Targeting Unmonetized Searches

• Ingredients: KW research tools like Yahoo!’s KW Selector Tool, Wordtracker & KWDiscovery + Overture’s View Bids Tool and Google’s KW Tool
• Process: Identify some relatively high-traffic search terms or phrases that have a very rough relationship with your industry, business or site but have little to no advertisers buying keyword advertising. For $0.10 a click (sometimes less), you can build your branding and your site’s visibility. Make sure to serve up great content that targets exactly what the searchers want – a list of resources, an informational how-to article or the like. If you deliver great results in a search where you’re the only advertiser, searchers will remember you, re-visit you and, occassionaly, write about and link to you.
• Results: Campaigns of this size can be anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand visitors per day depending on your budget. In either case, be sure to have some action items for visitors to follow and watch your analytics like a hawk to ensure that you’re bringing in real value with the terms you’ve chosen (i.e. if your abandonment rate is 75%+, you need to tweak something).

#9 – Creating Controversy

• Ingredients: A passionate audience or community with strong (and hopefully misguided) feelings about a subject, person, company, etc.
• Process: Create content through a blog, article, report or statistics that challenges commonly-held beliefs or assumptions or specifically challenges the views of a very popular person or organization. Be prepared to defend your positions, write about them in comments on blogs, in forums, chatrooms, online groups and wherever appropriate. Sometimes, you can even leverage the editorial section of a newspaper and re-print online.
• Results: Heavy traffic levels come through multiple channels, but your biggest source is often the direct response of the disagreeing party. Be sure you’re handling the dispute in a professional and even-handed manner and you can earn a respectable following. It’s all dependent on industry and size, but a between a few hundred and a few thousand RSS subscriptions are usually on the table.
• Examples: Dead2.0 (who I posted about earlier today) makes a great example, and Danny’s post at SEW about his Google hates also follows along this tradition.

Dead 2.0 combines controversy and a Top 11 List

#8 – Maps & Mashups

• Ingredients: Google Maps, Yahoo! Beta Maps, MSN Virtual Earth, etc. + some good geographic data
• Process: This doesn’t neccessarily require a map mashup, but they do make a compelling and timely example. Utilizing geographic data and a maps API system, you can create a very cool tool on your site that combines the two in a graphical, fun-to-use and highly-linkable way. Even sites in the most boring of sectors can employ this strategy by mapping things like their own industry’s stats from census data or concentrations of relevant physical locations. If you’re an optomotrist, why not map all the optometrists in your state/country (using a directory of some kind that you re-write into XML or tabular data) and mash it up with areas of high-tech concentrations (attempting to prove/disprove that techies who stare at their monitors all day need vision care).
• Results: Getting picked up by some of the major map mashup reporting blogs like Ajaxian (if you employ it well) or Maps Mania can bring many thousands of visitors in a say. Longer tail traffic sources often feed off these and send additional visitors over time. The holy grail here is to be mentioned on the example pages by the sources (the map API folks or directory/data source) which can bring a constant stream of thousands each day.
• Examples: Matt’s IP to Location tool is a good one, as is Geology.com’s Meteor Map, the famous HousingMaps and the hypercool FlickrMaps.

Flickr Maps Mashup – Showing Photos from San Francisco

#7 – Event Coverage

• Ingredients: A popular, well-attended event with a particular industry theme and a passionate writer who makes friends wherever they go.
• Process: Go to the event, cover as best you can – make friends, take copious, detailed notes, go to the bars afterwards, shoot photos and videos and, most importantly, let everyone there know that you’ll have the coverage on your site in the next few days. Time is of the essence here, but once you’ve got a great writeup (with photos!), send emails to your event contacts to help boost the buzz.
• Results: Depending on the size of the event and the people you form connections with, this can drive thousands or even tens of thousands to the site. Covering something private (with permission), exclusive or underground can be even more rewarding, though big, public events often make an easier starting point.
• Examples: We covered the SES NYC 2005 show to great effect and the Washington Post currently has a terrific blog covering tech shows and events.

The Washington Post’s Technology Blog on Events

#6 – Top Ten Lists

• Ingredients: A great idea and ten little numbers.
• Process: This might be the easiest of the bunch, but it’s also the hardest to make work consistently. Top ten lists are everywhere and unless yours is particularly well-targeted, well-timed and well-marketed, it might end-up fizzling. The keys to great lists are – knowing your audience, knowing your subject matter (and writing as an expert) and presentation (the right content at the right time read by the right people). Tricky? Yes. Worthwhile? Absolutely.
• Results: We’ve seen top 10, 5 and 20 lists make it onto Digg, Slashdot and even into the mainstream press. While tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors certainly isn’t the norm, it can definitely be your goal.
• Examples: Letterman’s Top Ten might be the most famous, but on the web, Nielsen’s Top Ten Web Design Mistakes and the recent Top 10 Unintentionally Worst Company URLs (that made both del.icio.us/popular and Digg) are good examples.

The Late Show’s Top Ten Lists Online

#5 – Online Tools

• Ingredients: A service that you can code into a tool to save someone time, effort, money or, alternatively, provide entertainment (plus a solid developer, preferrably skilled in AJAX).
• Process: Tools aren’t always able to attract visitors independently, so much like mashups, you’ll need to do some promotion. Fortunately, there are dozens of online tool lists and plenty of folks blogging about their creation (like the aforementioned Ajaxian). The tool itself needs to serve a real purpose (or make people laugh) and it needs to be unique. If you’re in the retail industry, imagine a tool that could be used to help visitors custom create a product, or organize a set of products in a useful, humorous or fun way. For B2B, cost calculators for customers can be useful, but are often un-exciting. Imagine how you can expand the use of your services to fit a wide audience, then make it fun and interactive.
• Results: Tools can generate traffic slowly over time, or they can have huge bursts. Often, they spread virally through email and social networks if they’re built right (and look great – so pay attention to #4, too).
• Examples: SEOmoz’s page strength tool got a bit too popular last week and crashed our server. It threatened to do it again yesterday. Some other great tools include this activity/calorie calculator from the Fitness Jumpsite and the website Hipcal, an online calendar tool.

SEOmoz’s Page Strength Tool from Last Week

#4- Graphic & Web Design

• Ingredients: A useful site, a talented CSS designer and a list of design portal sites (this one and this one come in handy).
• Process: Re-design your existing site to the best of your ability. Use pure CSS, graphics, color and layout that mesh well and make it not only easy to use your site, but aesthetically remarkable, too. If you’re struggling for inspiration, look at the sites that make it to the front page of this site.
• Results: The design portals themselves can send 1-2 thousand uniques per day if you make their front pages, but the additional value you’ll get from other bloggers and sites picking you up once you make it there is also worthwhile.
• Examples: There are thousands – as I noted before, just look at CSS Thesis or CSSBeauty to get the idea. Even a dentist’s office site or a manufacturer of toilet seats can get traffic here.

CSS Thesis from Veracon.net

#3 – Leveraging Social Networks

• Ingredients: Solid, targeted content, a writer who can create compelling titles and descriptions and this list of social sharing sites (from Ekstreme’s Socializer Tool).
• Process: Create great content (from one of the ideas here or something totally unique), then submit it to the major social bookmarking and link sharing services. You can also use this tactic in a long-tail fashion by tagging many small pieces of solid, but unremarkable content to services like del.icio.us, technorati, etc. with regularity.
• Results: Digg’s traffic effect is well known, as is Slashdot’s, but even the smaller services like Reddit, Furl, Shadows and StumbleUpon can send several thousand visitors to the site.

Rand’s StumbleUpon Profile

#2 – Blogging & Blog Comments

• Ingredients: A blog, some elbow grease and a tactful, savvy, industry writer.
• Process: Regularly blogging about your industry, passion or profession can have enormous payoff if done properly. There’s a host of considerations, but for the purposes of this short list, it’s enough to simply blog well and take advantage of the inherent traffic provided by blog & RSS feed directories, tagging your posts at Technorati and commenting thoughfully and intelligently around the blogosphere. Even though those links don’t get link credit (due to nofollow), you’ll get clicks and attention if your comments are intelligent and provocative.
• Results: A successful blog can be the biggest marketing tool and online traffic source for many small and medium business websites. But, be prepared to giving it love and attention, as the value may be best felt after months or years of writing.
• Examples: There are tens of thousands of great blogs, but a few non  sequiter favorites include Better Living through Design, Montreal Food, Re-Imagineering and Creating Passionate Users.

Disney & Pixar’s Re-Imagineering Blog

#1 – Reporting Remarkable News

• Ingredients: A story that’s so big, everyone will be writing about it and a talented writer who can passionately and effectively cover it.
• Process: This is the same process that sells newspapers and makes journalists. But, in the case of the web, the news can be smaller, as long as it’s deeply tied to your industry or sector. Being the first to report is good, but by also being the best report on the subject, you firmly establish yourself as an excellent source for the current news and the future.
• Results: Some of the highest traffic boosts possible come from news reports as thousands of popular sites write about their own experience or opinion with the story and credit you, sending what can often be tens or even hundreds of thousands of visitors over a few days.
• Examples: Techcrunch has a remarkable reputation and ability to get news before anyone else, and some specific reports, including Henk Van Ess’s SearchBistro post on Google’s human-reviewed SERPs and Slyck’s coverage of torrent-favorite Pirate Bay’s servers being snatched by police.

TechCrunch Leaking News of Google Calendar

#0 – Offering Something Incredible

• Ingredients: An idea whose time has come.

• Process: We’re cheating by putting a #0, and cheating again because there’s no set formula for this one – it’s a build-it-and-they-will-come product. If you launch a site with goods, services or a gimmick that is simply irressistable, massively useful, universally appealing and hard to live without once you’ve tried it, rest assured that the Internet will respond by sending you appropriately stratospheric levels of traffic.

• Results: These are the sites generating millions of uniques each day – traffic that borders on the insane.

Zillow.com’s Home Price Valuation System

These tactics can very easily fit under the umbrella-term “linkbait,” though not all of them are as useful for the purpose of link growth as brand awareness. If you’ve got stategies of your own to share or insights about how these can be tweaked and optimized, please do share.