I’m writing this article to follow up a great post that Andrew Tan wrote up on his The Prosperous Bum blog. Read the complete article: List Building Using Other People’s Traffic to Opt In Your List

 

What Do You Mean “Leverage Other People’s Traffic?”

 

The Inside-Out Approach

 

If you are new to Internet Marketing, the main hurdles on your road to success are traffic and conversion. Most people go about building traffic using what I call an “inside-out method.” Essentially, they focus only on driving traffic to the website they own. For the sole proprietor or small business owner, this method ofadverting your website is like standing in the middle of the ocean and turning on a flash light.

 

Outside-In Marketing… A Better Way Forward

 

The power of the internet lies directly in the name itself. The word internet is a short for internetworking. Making use of the ability to internetwork your website with another very popular website is the most effective method of advertising for the new internet marketer; This is an Outside-In approach. The idea is to building your reputation using the foundation someone else has already built.

For example, imagine two small start-up companies that have invented identical car engines that get 100 mpg, and produce no emissions. For simplicity, we’ll call them Company A, and Company B, and assume they both have the same advertising budget.

Company A spends their budget placing ads on local bill boards and in the local paper. They spend their remaining budget placing a TV ad with one of the local cable stations..

Company B on the other hand calls up General Motors and convinces them to take a look at their engine. They spend their advertising budget fitting the engine into on of GM’s vehicles and generating test data. GM agrees to create a vehicle using their engine.

You can see that by leveraging the
reputation and of course budget that Company B would be MUCH more successful.

 

Methods For Leveraging Other People’s Traffic

 

The first recommended way to leverage other people’s traffic is by use of a blogging technology called a trackback.

A Trackback is simply a feature that allows you to let other websites know that you have linked back to them. Typically, if you write a review, your review will appear on their blog.

Here’s a nice little video that Jack Humphrey over at The Friday Traffic Report put together showing how to create trackbacks using wordpress. I wrote a little review of it in my article: Trackbacks - Social Network Marketing at its Finest.

Here’s some information for enabling trackbacks for moveable type users on the Learn Movable Type Blog

The second method of leveraging other people’s traffic is to provide comments on their blog or website.

Typically the comments box will put your name and embed a link to your website or blog at the top of your comment. If you write a particularly well thought out comment, or post a though provoking question, it is highly likely that bloggers and blog readers will reward you by clicking on your link and reading your articles.

The third method of leveraging other peoples traffic is to write content for them.

Being new to internet marketing you might be wondering how in the world will you be able to contribute to a popular blog or website. The key is to find a blog or website in a niche in which you are an expert. Read through their content and when you find a “gap” where you could write an article that would benefit the blog. Write a good title and the first paragraph, and then contact the blogs author. Most blogs will have an about page, or a contact page where you may find the appropriate contact information.

The fourth method of leveraging other peoples traffic is to promote them on Web2.0 sites like StumbleUpon.com, Digg,com, Technorati.com, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, etc.

You will find that most of the very successful blog (I consider a very successful blog to have at least 2000 subscribed readers) owners keep track of who is visiting them through one of these Web2.0 websites. Add them as your contact, write good reviews about them, and give them Diggs / Stumbles.

 

Final Notes

Outside-In marketing is rapidly becoming the model of choice in today’s internet. We are currently working on a new series of posts called The Internet Profit Dominator which will be a comprehensive guide to building traffic and improving conversions for a brand new blogger or web site owner using the Outside-In method. Here’s a short video overview of The Internet Profit Dominator

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