Factoring Social Traffic Acquisition Strategies into Your Business

I reference TV, YouTube videos and podcasts quite a lot when I'm trying to explain different traffic acquisition and search engine engagement models as the visual and audio media are great ways to cram an awful lot of information into a relatively short space of time.

A recent Apprentice episode (The Apprentice, reality TV programme,  BBC One, London, 29th March 2014) serves to highlight a traffic acquisition technique that I'd previously heard referenced in a recording of an event set up by Matt Bacak (Traffic Infusion 2014) -- namely, using social influence to generate leads.

For those who didn't see The Apprentice Week Four episode in question, the task was to create a YouTube video channel and see which team got the most hits. This has echoes of a similar task run by Donald Trump in the original US version of The Apprentice franchise (The Apprentice : Episode 4, Snack Attack, NBC, New York, USA, 7th October 2010) which involved creating a viral video to promote a popcorn based snack brand.

Where the US version concentrated on getting the message across to promote sales, the recent BBC spin was to generate views, on the assumption that traffic attracts advertisers. That's a business model in itself, but the end result hinged on a part of the task that at first glance might have been overlooked by many viewers.

Traffic Acquisition using Social Influence

Part of the task was in selling their concept to a YouTube celebrity, to get them to agree on a collaboration, and then, vitally, use their social influence to promote the channel. We all know how hard it is to get traffic to an online property, and so using someone else's influence is an obvious strategy.

During the Traffic Infusion 2014 event, it was suggested that one of my favourite traffic acquisition strategies -- participating in online discussions -- could be enhanced by finding one person with a very active, and respected, profile, and paying them to host your link in their signature for a set length of time.

The Apprentice task mirrors this, using a popular online video producer to drive traffic; not for money, in this case, but in return for the exposure on one of the BBC's flagship crossover reality TV business programmes.

My point is this: if you're looking for a traffic acquisition strategy that really engages and pre-qualifies your audience, then using collaborations, or just paying for the association with someone who already has authority in your target channel, can be a very profitable way to create new traffic streams.

One book that is strong on this subject is Social Media Metrics Secrets, by John Lovett. It might be a 2011 book, but it's worth reading if only for Chapter 7, which gives you explicit guidance on measuring your ROI from social media engagement strategies, including a section on traffic acquisition.

Recommended if you are thinking of taking the plunge and using search engine and social engagement as part of your ongoing traffic acquisition strategy.

Using Type-In Traffic as part of your Traffic Acquisition Strategy

Sometimes technology comes full circle, and it was only a matter of time before type-in traffic found it's way to the top of the list of inbound marketing and traffic acquisition strategies. Those of us with reasonably long memories find it reassuringly familiar, but others might find the following explanation useful.

Image courtesy of Suwit Ritjaroon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The story begins with AOL, in the 1990s, then one of the largest, if not the largest ISP, online publishing network, forum host, portal and community, and, importantly, a suite of online access software, including a dial-up adapter and browser.

If you're used to broadband and always-on Internet access, you'll be a bit shocked to learn that, in the past, AOL users had to use a special piece of software to connect their computer to AOLs computer, using a dial-up modem, before launching AOLs browser. This then gave the access to AOLs so-called "walled garden online community" as well as (for an extra fee, if they had any sense) regular web sites.

One of the features of AOL were a set of some 5,000 keywords which gave users short-cuts to various corporate-run forums and user-groups. There were even television and radio adverts that would quote their AOL keywords, rather than the now-ubiquitous URL.

Companies would buy these keywords to drive traffic from AOL users to their forums or web sites, and the more cunning ones would buy up related keywords in the hope of grabbing a share of the traffic from users typing in keywords that sounded likely to yield a useful resource.

If that sounds familiar, then it should.

After all, users of any of the mainstream browsers (Chrome, IE, Firefox, etc.) will have encountered this phenomenon almost every time they type an address in the bar. How many of us have just typed in a word, trademark, or company name, knowing that Google, Bing, Yahoo or any of their distant cousins may well lead us right to where we want to be?

Taking advantage of so-called type-in traffic for traffic acquisition merely requires that you identify the keywords that help define your product, and then buy a domain name that matches, making sure that you avoid trademark infringement in the process.

Some webmasters will just redirect the traffic to the appropriate section of their main site, whereas others will display advertising billboards of related adverts from the likes of AdSense or other networks.

Either way, if you grab a good domain name, preferably an expired one that once housed a relevant competing or complementary product or service (and activate intelligent 404 redirects as well), this can be a cost-efficient way to snare some highly targeted inbound traffic.

Sidebar - In researching this article, I found the original 1996 AOL Keywords book, listing and organising all 5,000 of them on Amazon. It's worth a trip to the site (disclosure, that's an affiliate link, you buy and I profit but we've all got to eat, right?) just to see the price tag, and read the most recent review from 2010. Read that again - a book about the Internet that's still relevant to someone 14 years after it was originally published may well be a record.

Leverage this Traffic Acquisition Technique to Make Your Fortune

Of all the different traffic acquisition techniques we talk about on this blog there's one we don't spend a lot of time on, because it is perhaps the most expensive to pull off. In fact, as traffic acquisition strategies go, it's not exactly common, but it certainly works, but will usually cost substantially more than SEO, social marketing or just buying other people's traffic.

The technique itself is pretty simple : find someone who's offering could integrate with your own, and buy them out. Predatory companies like Google, Facebook and even relative newcomer Twitter have all acquired a number of different, yet related services.

(According to Wikipedia, Google's bought over 100 start-ups, Twitter nearly 30, and Facebook around 10.)

Considering most of my readers don's have a  spare $40 million in their back pocket, it may seem like a strange topic for the blog, but here's the rub : what happens if you're on the other side?

Show Me The Money

The process can be broken down as follows:

• find a predatory market leader in a domain that you have skills in;
• set up a service that is complimentary, and valuable to their users;
• allow users to sign up for free, monetize via adverts if need be;
• generate social noise;
• get bought.

I'll admit that re-reading that in black and white it feels a bit naive, but looking over the hundreds of high-tech acquisitions that have gone on over the last 10 years or so, one can't help wondering if, sometimes, very clever people haven't just adopted the above five step process.

At the very least, you'll learn a lot about traffic acquisition as you try to build up the service so that it hits the radar of your target predator. For that alone, it ought to be worth a shot!