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!

Website Traffic Flipping : The Traffic Acquisition Cookbook

This is one of the more expensive, but potentially one of the highest return, methods for increase quality traffic flow to a web site. It's lifted from the forthcoming Keyword Cracker Traffic Acquisition Cookbook, which contains (at the present count) eleven separate strategies for generating high volume, high quality traffic.

There are three steps to website traffic flipping:

• acquire the website;
• convert the traffic;
• integrate the site.

It's important to note that this is much like a company takeover in which a rival is purchased for the customer list, and other assets, and the two are eventually amalgamated. I don't personally like the term asset stripper, but if you're familiar with it, try to think of this as something of the same.

Acquiring the Website

This requires research, and verification. Low priced sites, such as Squidoo lenses can be found on the open marketplace, and I daresay that there are Wordpress blogs for sale as well.

They need to have a high volume of traffic, be turning a profit, and have high conversion rates. The high conversion rates are important, especially when measured for pages that rank highly for the keywords that your traffic acquisition plan is targeting, as you're paying for engagement rather than raw traffic and conversion.

Other assets include mailing lists and backlogs (pipelines) of un-published, quality blog posts. Be prepared to offer a bit more for these, as they are very valuable in the right hands.

Converting the Traffic

Sounds easy - all you need to do is put a link to your website in their list, right?

If that's all there was to it, then a simple Joint Venture would suffice. However, the reason that we're buying the site rather than just doing a JV is to have the control to be able to convert the traffic in a consistent and controlled manner.

It's a gradual process of re-education (of existing customers) and gently diverting them to the new site, where they are promised better quality resources and content, and better deals on purchases.

Integrating the Site

At a given point, all the existing affiliate links will be converted to yours, and the various back-links will have been upgraded to point to your own site; and the customers will be educated.

The final stage is to ensure a consistent look and feel by redirecting the URLs so that they point to content on your site, and gradually phase out, or move across, the acquired content.

This final stage is, in fact, optional, as you could choose simply to dispose of the acquired site, having converted the customers and re-deployed the key assets. This is the online equivalent of the asset stripping I spoke of earlier, and as I said, I'm not 100% keen on it.

But it does work, probably better online than in the real world.