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.