In the last six months, we've been lucky enough to help quite a few companies and websites drive significant traffic to their sites. Many of these campaigns have been constructed around the goal of building search engine rankings, as this is our primary business, but we've also found that our ability has given us great power in the fields of brand-awareness and marketing overall. Thus, the following ten processes are primarily about building traffic and through it, attention.
#10 - Targeting Unmonetized Searches

• Ingredients: KW research tools like Yahoo!'s KW Selector Tool, Wordtracker & KWDiscovery + Overture's View Bids Tool and Google's KW Tool
• Process: Identify some relatively high-traffic search terms or phrases that have a very rough relationship with your industry, business or site but have little to no advertisers buying keyword advertising. For $0.10 a click (sometimes less), you can build your branding and your site's visibility. Make sure to serve up great content that targets exactly what the searchers want - a list of resources, an informational how-to article or the like. If you deliver great results in a search where you're the only advertiser, searchers will remember you, re-visit you and, occassionaly, write about and link to you.
• Results: Campaigns of this size can be anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand visitors per day depending on your budget. In either case, be sure to have some action items for visitors to follow and watch your analytics like a hawk to ensure that you're bringing in real value with the terms you've chosen (i.e. if your abandonment rate is 75%+, you need to tweak something).
• Examples: On this one, its very hard to give examples without giving away clients or potentially spoiling opportunities, but luckily, Graywolf has a perfect example in his Pirates of the Caribbean post, where there's a lot of searches trending that way and no advertisers - a perfect opportunity for the right player to get in the game (pun intended).

#9 - Creating Controversy

• Ingredients: A passionate audience or community with strong (and hopefully misguided) feelings about a subject, person, company, etc.
• Process: Create content through a blog, article, report or statistics that challenges commonly-held beliefs or assumptions or specifically challenges the views of a very popular person or organization. Be prepared to defend your positions, write about them in comments on blogs, in forums, chatrooms, online groups and wherever appropriate. Sometimes, you can even leverage the editorial section of a newspaper and re-print online.
• Results: Heavy traffic levels come through multiple channels, but your biggest source is often the direct response of the disagreeing party. Be sure you're handling the dispute in a professional and even-handed manner and you can earn a respectable following. It's all dependent on industry and size, but a between a few hundred and a few thousand RSS subscriptions are usually on the table.
• Examples: Dead2.0 (who I posted about earlier today) makes a great example, and Danny's post at SEW about his Google hates also follows along this tradition.

#8 - Maps & Mashups

• Ingredients: Google Maps, Yahoo! Beta Maps, MSN Virtual Earth, etc. + some good geographic data
• Process: This doesn't neccessarily require a map mashup, but they do make a compelling and timely example. Utilizing geographic data and a maps API system, you can create a very cool tool on your site that combines the two in a graphical, fun-to-use and highly-linkable way. Even sites in the most boring of sectors can employ this strategy by mapping things like their own industry's stats from census data or concentrations of relevant physical locations. If you're an optomotrist, why not map all the optometrists in your state/country (using a directory of some kind that you re-write into XML or tabular data) and mash it up with areas of high-tech concentrations (attempting to prove/disprove that techies who stare at their monitors all day need vision care).
• Results: Getting picked up by some of the major map mashup reporting blogs like Ajaxian (if you employ it well) or Maps Mania can bring many thousands of visitors in a say. Longer tail traffic sources often feed off these and send additional visitors over time. The holy grail here is to be mentioned on the example pages by the sources (the map API folks or directory/data source) which can bring a constant stream of thousands each day.
• Examples: Matt's IP to Location tool is a good one, as is Geology.com's Meteor Map, the famous HousingMaps and the hypercool FlickrMaps.

#7 - Event Coverage

• Ingredients: A popular, well-attended event with a particular industry theme and a passionate writer who makes friends wherever they go.
• Process: Go to the event, cover as best you can - make friends, take copious, detailed notes, go to the bars afterwards, shoot photos and videos and, most importantly, let everyone there know that you'll have the coverage on your site in the next few days. Time is of the essence here, but once you've got a great writeup (with photos!), send emails to your event contacts to help boost the buzz.
• Results: Depending on the size of the event and the people you form connections with, this can drive thousands or even tens of thousands to the site. Covering something private (with permission), exclusive or underground can be even more rewarding, though big, public events often make an easier starting point.
• Examples: We covered the SES NYC 2005 show to great effect and the Washington Post currently has a terrific blog covering tech shows and events.

#6 - Top Ten Lists

• Ingredients: A great idea and ten little numbers.
• Process: This might be the easiest of the bunch, but it's also the hardest to make work consistently. Top ten lists are everywhere and unless yours is particularly well-targeted, well-timed and well-marketed, it might end-up fizzling. The keys to great lists are - knowing your audience, knowing your subject matter (and writing as an expert) and presentation (the right content at the right time read by the right people). Tricky? Yes. Worthwhile? Absolutely.
• Results: We've seen top 10, 5 and 20 lists make it onto Digg, Slashdot and even into the mainstream press. While tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors certainly isn't the norm, it can definitely be your goal.
• Examples: Letterman's Top Ten might be the most famous, but on the web, Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes and the recent Top 10 Unintentionally Worst Company URLs (that made both del.icio.us/popular and Digg) are good examples.

#5 - Online Tools

• Ingredients: A service that you can code into a tool to save someone time, effort, money or, alternatively, provide entertainment (plus a solid developer, preferrably skilled in AJAX).
• Process: Tools aren't always able to attract visitors independently, so much like mashups, you'll need to do some promotion. Fortunately, there are dozens of online tool lists and plenty of folks blogging about their creation (like the aforementioned Ajaxian). The tool itself needs to serve a real purpose (or make people laugh) and it needs to be unique. If you're in the retail industry, imagine a tool that could be used to help visitors custom create a product, or organize a set of products in a useful, humorous or fun way. For B2B, cost calculators for customers can be useful, but are often un-exciting. Imagine how you can expand the use of your services to fit a wide audience, then make it fun and interactive.
• Results: Tools can generate traffic slowly over time, or they can have huge bursts. Often, they spread virally through email and social networks if they're built right (and look great - so pay attention to #4, too).
• Examples: SEOmoz's page strength tool got a bit too popular last week and crashed our server. It threatened to do it again yesterday. Some other great tools include this activity/calorie calculator from the Fitness Jumpsite and the website Hipcal, an online calendar tool.

#4- Graphic & Web Design

• Ingredients: A useful site, a talented CSS designer and a list of design portal sites (this one and this one come in handy).
• Process: Re-design your existing site to the best of your ability. Use pure CSS, graphics, color and layout that mesh well and make it not only easy to use your site, but aesthetically remarkable, too. If you're struggling for inspiration, look at the sites that make it to the front page of this site.
• Results: The design portals themselves can send 1-2 thousand uniques per day if you make their front pages, but the additional value you'll get from other bloggers and sites picking you up once you make it there is also worthwhile.
• Examples: There are thousands - as I noted before, just look at CSS Thesis or CSSBeauty to get the idea. Even a dentist's office site or a manufacturer of toilet seats can get traffic here.

#3 - Leveraging Social Networks

• Ingredients: Solid, targeted content, a writer who can create compelling titles and descriptions and this list of social sharing sites (from Ekstreme's Socializer Tool).
• Process: Create great content (from one of the ideas here or something totally unique), then submit it to the major social bookmarking and link sharing services. You can also use this tactic in a long-tail fashion by tagging many small pieces of solid, but unremarkable content to services like del.icio.us, technorati, etc. with regularity.
• Results: Digg's traffic effect is well known, as is Slashdot's, but even the smaller services like Reddit, Furl, Shadows and StumbleUpon can send several thousand visitors to the site.

#2 - Blogging & Blog Comments

• Ingredients: A blog, some elbow grease and a tactful, savvy, industry writer.
• Process: Regularly blogging about your industry, passion or profession can have enormous payoff if done properly. There's a host of considerations, but for the purposes of this short list, it's enough to simply blog well and take advantage of the inherent traffic provided by blog & RSS feed directories, tagging your posts at Technorati and commenting thoughfully and intelligently around the blogosphere. Even though those links don't get link credit (due to nofollow), you'll get clicks and attention if your comments are intelligent and provocative.
• Results: A successful blog can be the biggest marketing tool and online traffic source for many small and medium business websites. But, be prepared to giving it love and attention, as the value may be best felt after months or years of writing.
• Examples: There are tens of thousands of great blogs, but a few non  sequiter favorites include Better Living through Design, Montreal Food, Re-Imagineering and Creating Passionate Users.

#1 - Reporting Remarkable News

• Ingredients: A story that's so big, everyone will be writing about it and a talented writer who can passionately and effectively cover it.
• Process: This is the same process that sells newspapers and makes journalists. But, in the case of the web, the news can be smaller, as long as it's deeply tied to your industry or sector. Being the first to report is good, but by also being the best report on the subject, you firmly establish yourself as an excellent source for the current news and the future.
• Results: Some of the highest traffic boosts possible come from news reports as thousands of popular sites write about their own experience or opinion with the story and credit you, sending what can often be tens or even hundreds of thousands of visitors over a few days.
• Examples: Techcrunch has a remarkable reputation and ability to get news before anyone else, and some specific reports, including Henk Van Ess's SearchBistro post on Google's human-reviewed SERPs and Slyck's coverage of torrent-favorite Pirate Bay's servers being snatched by police.
  

• 
  
  Ingredients: An idea whose time has come.
• 
  
  Process: We're cheating by putting a #0, and cheating again because there's no set formula for this one - it's a build-it-and-they-will-come product. If you launch a site with goods, services or a gimmick that is simply irressistable, massively useful, universally appealing and hard to live without once you've tried it, rest assured that the Internet will respond by sending you appropriately stratospheric levels of traffic.
• 
  
  Results: These are the sites generating millions of uniques each day - traffic that borders on the insane.
• 
  
  Examples: Think Zillow, Flickr, Craigslist, Kayak. In a smaller way, our Web2.0Awards met some of these criteria and received a few hundred thousand visitors as a reward.

These tactics can very easily fit under the umbrella-term "linkbait," though not all of them are as useful for the purpose of link growth as brand awareness. If you've got stategies of your own to share or insights about how these can be tweaked and optimized, please do share.

How To Drive Traffic to Your Blog - The Advice of a 12 Year Old

Remember 12 year old blogger David Wilkinson from Techzi? David and I have kept in touch with one another since I posted about him last and recently I asked him to consider writing a guest post here at ProBlogger. I thought a 12 year old’s perspective on how to get traffic to your blog might be worth hearing. Here’s his post.
When Darren Rowse comes up to you, and asks you to write a post for ProBlogger.net, it’s not something you can really say ‘no’ to. Not that you’d want to of course, but more the fact that it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. Why should I write, of all people though? Well Darren wanted to hear the methods that I as a young person use to drive traffic to my blog, without spending any money.

Learning the basics

First you need to grasp and understand that the Internet is a big place. Several billion web-pages, and often with very little time available to the end-user, they’ll use several techniques to find what they’re looking for.

SEO

Search? Standard engines like Google, Yahoo and Live are the most popular nowadays, and optimizing your site to be found easily, can be easy and hard based on many factors.
My best advice for someone starting out would be to start by building quality content for somebody to see, then progressing to “The Three Cs”. This way, you’ll get noticed by genuinely interested people, who’ll actively want to play a part in your site’s development, by giving you quality feedback on ways to improve, design and usability.
If you have a blog or a website that’s been going for several weeks, perhaps a month or two, and you’ve done “The Three Cs”, or at least some of them, would be to start focusing on building on your existing content, with fresh, interesting, relevant and unique content. Note I say ‘relevant’ and ‘unique’. This is important. There are so many splogs out there now-a-days, that people can quickly distinguish whether an article has been written by somebody or not, at least the majority of the time. Relevance too, like I said, is a key factor. If you have a very personal blog, then one day write something completely off-topic about a new type of golf club that comes out, people will start to wonder if you and your blog actually have an aim or a purpose, which is yet another vital thing to consider.
If you’re somebody with a very mature blog, that is several months or more old, you can now focus on the technical side of things, which is mainly down to the spiders. If you’ve been blogging this long, then if you’re not on your own domain, or hosting, I recommend it, as it allows for greater flexibility, design and SEO. Search engine optimization? Yep! A Google Sitemap can be stuck on your server for the Google-Bot and metatags can be added, which let you pre-define information about your page automatically, such as the author, a description, keywords and feed information. This also makes usability easier for feed-ready browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer 7. Tacky pre-set designs become a thing of the past too, and upgrading to Wordpress can be a smart move, as the developer community there will help you along the way with every aspect of your blog, from the writing itself, to the advanced functionality like widgets that are available, and the themes that are freely downloadable to customize your blog’s look. Of course you could always give design a go yourself as I did at Techzi.net - though admittedly I enlisted the help of two professional designers as well.So, what are these ‘C’s that I’ve been talking to you so much about anyway? Read on to find out…

Community, communication, consideration.

The three founding principals of marketing your blog to an audience, whether general, or specific. People want to get be a part of the next thing, so give them a chance.

1. Community

Whether you start up your own community, or join others, via means of MyBlogLog, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing and others, this is a guaranteed and proven way to get visitors, to get hits, impressions, and often quality traffic, because you know that these people haven’t just clicked on a random link or search engine listing, but have seen you or your website’s profile, and followed it through to your homepage/landing page. The best ways to get the profiles themselves noticed? See below…

2. Communication

I don’t mean ’spam’ by this either. Get involved in genuine discussions, with other people of similar interests, start up a civilized, profitable, knowledgeable discussion, then when you’re finished, ask if they’d take a look at your blog or website. You’d be surprised how many loyal readers have come to my own blog in this way. Simply leave comments in communities, on social networks, on other blogs, etc.
Still not quite your way of dealing with people?

3. Considering

All the time, you have to consider the reader. Who are you writing for? The reader. Who will be navigating your blog? The reader. Who should you devote your time, energy and attention to? The reader. Consideration is important, and you can show this in many ways. Either by having a clutter-free, easy-to-follow design, or you could alternatively try getting the readers involved, by asking questions in blog posts, or website statements, and opening up comments. If people comment, strike up a conversation with them, and keep them coming back. Answer their queries and requests with solid, reliable, dependable answers, and take note of the feedback they leave by using it, and putting it into action. If someone states that your text is hard to read, change the colour to stop it clashing so much with the background, or simply make it slightly larger.
There are lots of ways you can show consideration to your audience, and it shows just how loyal you are to your readers through this. If someone spots an inaccuracy in a blog post and tells you, don’t be lazy. Go change it! They’ll keep coming back, they’ll tell their friends, and in turn this C will do word-of-mouth marketing wonders.

The Element of Surprise

You’ve looked at both SEO, content and the ‘C’s now, but my last tip is probably what has brought me the large majority of my visitors, both loyal and one-off traffic hoppers. Differentiate yourself, do something different. Be daring, be random! Try something wild, or something completely unheard of, whether it’s outrageous, or greatly beneficial to the reader. Sometimes, even beneficial to the writer! (http://www.techzi.net/donations/) Mad things work out great sometimes, other times, they really can lower your reputation, so it’s time to take calculated risks here.
My advice? Follow your instincts. Be an entrepreneur. Take that risk. Make it happen. Throw a competition (http://www.techzi.net/competition/), for all the good it will do. Stand out and be different. Darren will sure know what I mean by that…
David Wilkinson writes at http://www.techzi.net/