Introduction
Question: What is the simplest and most fool proof way of attracting traffic toyour website? The answer that you have in mind is the wrong one. The way toaccomplish this task is much simpler. You print the website’s name on your t-shirt thango on and bang on every door in your neighborhood urging the people to enter your siteand paying one buck if they do so. Of course, this isn’t exactly what most webmasters doand there are plenty of reasons for it. First of all, this technique is very labor intensive,second of all you would become your neighborhood’s freak, third of all you can onlyreach that many houses or flats within a single day, next you would soon become brokeand thus finally the amount of traffic you would receive wouldn’t be exactly something tobe proud of. Not to mention that it is very likely that you will obtain a few restrainingorders in the process.
The First Lesson
This hypothetic scenario does teach us however about the basics of generatingtraffic. What is simple is not necessary easy and effective, you only have a limitedamount of time/money at your disposal to accomplish this task, the amount of trafficreceived per unit of time/money should be as high as possible and traffic generationtechniques should ideally be of the residual type. What does residual traffic mean? Well,the term has been coined right now under your very nose, but the principle behind it isrock solid. Basically a residual traffic technique will continue to generate traffic longafter the mechanism has been set into place, without further investment of time/money.Its opposite is what I call flashflood traffic techniques which naturally generate traffic fora very short amount of time or ongoing only for as long as time/money is invested.Sounds simple enough, but the devil is in the details. Let me give you 2 quick examples that will show you clearly how the two types of traffic differ:1)
Imagine that you just bought a permanent link on a blogroll (thecollection of links found usually on the right side on a blog). Of coursethe amount of traffic you will receive won’t be too consistent (unless itis a very popular one), but the traffic will keep on coming for months if not years, not to mention that the link will also get you some attentionfrom the search engines. This is a clear example of a residual traffictechnique.2)
Now imagine a different scenario. You have an article dealing with avery controversial topic posted on Digg. Before you know it, yourservers can barely keep up, as the story made it to the front page. Aweek later however, the traffic from Digg has stopped to a grindinghalt. Now this is an extreme example of flashflood traffic. Of course thesituation is not that simple if you think further. The story might be
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