This week, we’re going to be looking over the results of the website review traffic function that I talked about last week here. I feel it’s important to discuss results for two reasons:
1. I said I would, and my word is my bond.
2. I didn’t hear a peep out of any of you re: the offer for a free link back, so I’m thinking people didn’t put too much stock into the value of this technique - so I’m going to show you the results.
It’s not quite been two weeks yet, and I’ve already received 422 visits to the site I was promoting. Traffic is still coming in and I estimate I will receive at least 1000 visits within a month - all for an hour of work posting for a review on just 20 forums. I intentionally left a lot of forums I know about off my list, to give you guys and opportunity to earn a free link from us, but I may have to start building the list myself because this technique is too powerful and I want to use it more often.
If you are going to use this technique, be sure you have some awesome content to maximize the number of visitors you will be able to turn into regular readers. I’ve had countless people post on the threads saying they love my site and will be back, and from my visitor stats, it looks like there are more repeat visitors who didn’t post.
It’s an easy technique to generate a lot of free traffic to your site, so what are you waiting for?
Good Profits.
April 23rd, 2007 at 4:00 am
Not to attack Dave’s post but I do think the kind of traffic you get from this in general isn’t exactly valuable, in some instances maybe but in general your going to be attracting webmaster types who are reviewing your site’s design, layout and to a lesser extent content.
If your site has an amazing design like Dave’s does then more people will come back to admire it or to share with friends, which is good, but I don’t think its fair to say you’ll get hundreds of visitors without adding that the traffic is only a little better then the traffic you can buy from those targeted pop under’s.
I’m sure Dave will disagree with me, but from our experience with Easy By Design, sure we had lots of traffic from the forum post but we didn’t sell anything and Dave never reported that we had shopping cart abandonment issues either so for most sites you will simply have more stats.
Doing this is by no means a bad thing espically if your site would appeal to webmaster types, but if you have a site about gardening or some other theme which doesn’t relate to webheads.. It’s just for your stats.
April 23rd, 2007 at 8:54 am
the 50 - 100 daily repeat visitors I have gotten on my site from the forum postings disagree with you.
Content is more important than the design, that’s why people come back. Have good content and you’re set. My content isn’t particularly targeted to webmaster types, it’s just good content.
The Easy By Design comparison is like complaining that you couldn’t sell any paintings to the blind community you canvassed.
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:35 am
Well your also running other advertising and unless your useing some stat program I don’t know about theres no way for you to make that claim unless your forum advertising was the only thing you were doing to drive traffic.. awstats and mybloglog wouldn’t show you that your specific forum visitors are whats brining in the repeat, you could sorta kinda do it with awstats if you monitored the ip’s but that would be a HUGE job and mybloglog definately doesnt show those stats..
I can’t see extreme tracking or even google analytics giving those stats, so if Im wrong please tell us how you came up with those figures…
April 23rd, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Well, that is what’s happening. The stumble upon campaign ended, traffic retention from that was crap. All that’s coming through is traffic from the forums. Even if stumble upon retention rate was = to the forum retention rate, I still gained a good chunk of repeat visitors for an hour of effort and I’m still getting new traffic from the forums (only like 10 - 15 a day) and that should continue for some time.
Don’t worry folks, Jay and I are like an old married couple. We fight all the time and don’t have sex.
April 23rd, 2007 at 3:25 pm
I wasn’t fighting :p
Just wondering how you came to the conclusion you did, I’m still not entirely convinced since it’s really hard to state that we’re getting x visitors coming back from x source while running concurrent advertising.. It’s good enough for your own opinion but I just wanted to make sure our readers knew that this wasn’t a controlled study and theirs no way for us to say beyond person feelings that this is fact.
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Like I said, even if traffic from stumble upon converted equally well as forum traffic, I still picked up readers for what amounted to an hours work.
Free, and worthwhile… can’t disagree with that :)