I’m always on the lookout for creative ways to generate traffic. One interesting way I have been testing in the last month is with the recent blog entry links at the Digital Point forums. This feature pulls your latest blog entry from your RSS feed and displays it at by your name and avatar with your blog posts.
I noticed that I was getting pretty decent traffic from this, but I don’t post that much, so I need a way to increase my exposure with these links. So I posted a message on the forum asking to rent people’s recent blog links. I got a pretty good selection of responses and rented out links on 9 other members’ profiles.
Some stats:
The average post count of the 9 members was 2,958.
The total post count for all 9 profiles my link was displayed on was 27,623
The total cost to rent these for one month I paid was $193
Traffic results:
According to Google Analytics, the referral links send 502 visitors in the month of September. That breaks down to an average CPC of .38 cents. Not dirt cheap, but not a bad rate for quality targeted traffic. Of cours, this particular link only works for promoting a blog, but it goes to show you that alternate traffic sources are out there if you look for them. Forums are a great place to find targeted traffic for any niche.
I get decent traffic from my ‘recent blog’ link too, although I held off on buying other people’s because I figured the CPC might be a little high (at least for my blog, which is just for fun.)
The interesting thing is how you can still ‘target’ this because certain members will spend a lot of time in the SEO and marketing forums, while others will spend most of their time in the CSS/graphic design forums, etc.
That’s a really good idea. I wonder if you could turn a profit with a dummy blog with adsense plastered on it and great pulling headlines.
I have to agree this was a great method to get things going,
Its great to hear it worked for you
I would like to see the statistics, after this post.
Sucker, I am being a little loose with my definition of “targeted”. To me anyone at DP, designer, SEO, or marketing, is close enough for me
very creative. I love the ‘latest blog post’ thingo on DP, I have found so many great blogs using it -including yours!
Never think of getting traffic via DP…from your case study it really looks promising