If The Search Engines Collapsed Tomorrow
Here’s something a lot of people don’t know…
Search engine traffic accounts for only a TINY percentage of all the traffic or people that are around online. I can’t remember the exact number but I believe that less than 10% of all the traffic online is search engine traffic. That means that 90% of people who use the internet aren’t going to Google and Yahoo to get whatever they want…
Pretty staggering considering how much time niche marketers spend on trying to get traffic from the search engines huh?
So what other ways are people getting traffic?
Well there are lots but the one I want to mention briefly here is by leveraging the traffic of other webmasters. You see, there are sites out there in your niche that are already getting traffic. They’ve already done the hard work to get into the search engines or paid for advertising on other sites or used offline advertising or any number of things to get people to their sites. Rather than do the same yourself you can simply leverage or borrow their traffic. How do you do that you ask?
Basically you have to do favours. You have to offer something to another webmaster that will benefit them in exchange for them sharing their traffic with you. Here are some ways:
Way 1: This is by no means new but something that I personally have used to get some great traffic to our sites. What I do is offer to provide free content to owners of other websites in your niche, whether they have ezines or blogs (some kind of site they are continually updating) in exchange for them providing your link. Essentially it’s article marketing but to real sites rather than article directories.
What most people don’t realise is that there are some great sites out there in so many niches that don’t have their ezines listed in ezine directories, that most people don’t know about, but that have great readership from their blog or ezines AND that would kill for some great content that THEY DON’T HAVE TO WRITE each week or month.
In essence you do some search engine research to find the right sites, anyone with a blog or ezine is good. Then you simply mail them to ask if they’d like some free content. The best thing to do is write a bunch of articles to use specifically for this purpose, that way you can offer the site owners EXCLUSIVE content that no one else will have access to that they can publish in their ezines.
Most of them LOVE it. You provide them a great unique article you’ve written along with of course an author bio with links back to your website and it’s a major win win! Of course this is PARTICULARLY powerful in non IM type niches where site owners don’t have content coming out of their ears. If you have the kind of site that warrants it you’d be silly not to be doing this kind of marketing.
Way 2: This one’s a bit sly dog so use it as you deem fit if at all.
What you can do is make an attempt to get the site owner to give you a link back to your site. This will only work with certain kinds of sites, big guys will see straight through it and smaller guys, well it won’t be worth your time even if you can get them.
What you do is put a good link to their site on your site. You can even have a small banner made of their site on your site. This makes it look like you’ve gone to a BIG effort to help promote their site without asking for anything in return (yet).
So you put up this great link or banner on your site to their site. It doesn’t matter that you’re site is getting no traffic. You’d be surprised how many webmasters have sites that get decent traffic but know relatively little about what goes on in online marketing.
You then email them saying that you came across their site and you really enjoyed their content. You enjoyed it so much that you put up a link/banner of them on your main page for ALL your sites visitors to see 
They don’t know how many visitors you’re getting so a MAIN PAGE link seems like a big deal.
At this point they’re already feeling pretty good that you’ve helped them out so much that they feel compelled to reciprocate the generosity. If they don’t reciprocate with a similar link then don’t worry, it will be the start of a relationship between the two sites that could pay dividends later down the track.
The key is in your email communication. You need to make it seem that you have as personal an interest in their site as possible. Tell them you went to their site and loved their article on XYZ. Tell them you signed up to their email list (and actually do it!) and everything. It’s very different receiving an email like that than the old “Hey I put your link up in the link pages article of my crappy site – will you link back to me too?” kind of deal.
If you’re feeling a bit sly give this one a go. If you do it right and enough you can increase your traffic in nice chunks.
There are many creative ways you can use to get other people to put your link on their sites (don’t forget good old banner advertising which if you find the right site and the right price can send you great traffic for your investment) but again the point of this article was more to lay the seed of thought that you shouldn’t rely ONLY on the search engines for your traffic.
