OPT stands for “other people’s traffic.” One way to get traffic is to use other people’s traffic. So how do you do that?
First, you have to know what traffic you want. If I have a pitiful website and a mailing list of 22 people, you don’t want my traffic. You want to find leading websites or people with big lists in your niche. Let’s say you’re doing a website on stock market tips for a down economy. You need to prowl around in that niche and find great websites. You should look at the “bigs” (the ones that are the largest) but also the ones that seem to be the most amazing or respectable. For instance, there may be a couple of cutting-edge websites (new ideas) that aren’t all that big but are getting some buzz. You may also find some smaller sites that are quite excellent but not huge. So you need to find sites that work.
You should also start looking for people. Maybe there is a guru in terms of stock buying or online trading that you’ve been following. Maybe you bought some info products from somebody about profiting in an ecomomic downturn. The point is you have to know your niche and be able to target people who have the kind of traffic you want.
I’m going to use a real-life example but I’m going to change a few details to protect the actual site. But this is close to a true story. A woman wrote a product about planning perfect honeymoons. This wasn’t just a bland how-to document, it had lots of unusual and great ideas, plenty of websites and other contact information, and it was a fun read. It talked about things like cruising down the Nile or watching the zebras on the Sergengetti or parasailing in Acapulco. But everything was niched for the honeymoon couple. But she needed better traffic.
She found it when she latched on to a great website that was all about planning a perfect wedding. Actually, she found multiple sites and gurus in the world of wedding planning. And everyone was a good fit for her product because:
- Her product was a logical complement to the main product
- There was no competitive relationship
So let’s say you can figure out how to find those perfect matches and you have some gurus or websites that are getting oodles of traffic. How can you cash in on their traffic flow? The same way you get writing jobs! Make yourself irresistable. In the case of the honeymoon lady, she offered to partner with some of the giant wedding sites. The plan was this: she gave the webmaster/owner of the biggest site her product. She then offered an affiliate relationship. For every one of her products the webmaster could sell, she would give them 50% (it amounted to around $25 each). All the webmaster had to do was send out an email to her list.
Now get this–the honeymoon lady wrote a few sample emails, too. In other words, she made the offer irresistable: very little work, easy profit, no competition.
Affiliate relationships can work out really well providing you and the other party are extremely clear about who does what, who gets what, and your own motives.
That’s it for the traffic series. You can buy traffic (effective but pricy), use article marketing (cheap, effective and well suited to writers), link for search engine ranking (effective but longer-term), and find ways to leverage OPT.
