Free Traffic Competition
In this posting, we will help you get an idea of what your competitors are doing and how to use that knowledge to beat them at their own game.
Internet marketers are always learning new tricks to build traffic. Many people have been doing this sort of thing for years now and can quickly generate interest by posting videos or other content on the web. Those are the people who are usually competing for you for eyeballs, especially if they are in your market niche. So, first you want to get a good idea of who is ranking at the top of Google using the keywords you've targeted, and then you want to find ways to copy them so that people searching for their content find yours instead.
This can be done with articles, videos, any type of social media. It doesn't take a whole lot of smarts, and it can be very effective because much of the work of attracting attention is already done for you. You just have to hijack that attention back to your site instead.
How To Be An Expert Copy Cat
The first thing you do is go to the Google search engine and insert the keyword you are targeting. Then browse the first five pages of the search results to see who has gotten top ranking. These are the people who you are competing against.
Knowing that, you can start visiting their sites to see if you can find a way to use their popularity to increase your own. The simple way to do that is to go each site and see if they have a blog you can comment on, a discussion forum you can add to, or any other way to get your name in their site, with an appropriate link back to your website, if possible.
The next thing you want to do is create copy that is very similar to what they are using to be successful. You want to use similar keywords and similar topics. You don't want to outright plagiarize, but you do want to paraphrase and re-market the same content that worked for them.
Next, you want to find out who linked to these sites and content which made them go up in the Google ranking. Again, you use the Google search engine and type in “link:http://competitorurl.com”
This will give you an idea of who has linked to them. Here you are interested in seeing which social marketing sites are helping them to rank better. And then, you go into those sites and add your own bookmark or link there to confuse people into going to your site and also to bring up the ranking on your content too. If you happen to be looking at a YouTube video, you would find the links at the Statistics & Data section given in YouTube for each video, instead of Google. Either way, you want to know who is linking and then try to get yourself listed there too.
Understanding Demographics
You will also want to know who are the people that showed such interest in these competitors. That's your target demographic too. You can do this for the competitor and for the links they go to. All you have to do is visit Alexa.com to get a good insight into the demographics of any site online.
Alexa.com
At Alexa.com you can insert the URL of any site on the Internet and search the traffic rankings by selecting that option. It will come up with the site and a brief description of what that site is about. That already tells you something about what kind of people your competitors and their links are attracting. Maybe it is a technology site or a business site, whichever, you now have that little piece of information stored away as one of the types of people who frequent your competitors' sites.
Under that you will see a breakdown of the traffic by country. This gives you an idea of the national demographic you may be targeting. You may think all sites are geared towards the US market, but that's not so. Once you understood who is coming to visit your competitors' sites, you will have a better understanding of how to build and market your own sites.
One last way to find places that can help you drive traffic to your site with Alexa.com is to use their Top 500 Sites list. It gives you a breakdown of which sites have the most traffic, separated by country of origin. This will allow you to target these sites to add comments, contribute content, and generally try to elbow your way into the limelight. It is located here: http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500 .
Quantacast.com
To further your understanding, you will want to visit quantacast.com for more market research on your competitors and their links. This site gives you a much better breakdown of the demographics in very minute detail. So, once you have some good candidates to research further, you add them to market research list you will do on Quantacast.com. All you have to do is type in the URL of the link you are interested in researching, and Quantacast can let you know what the gender, age, ethnicity, income, and college education is for all the people visiting that site. It will also give you the monthly traffic frequency too.
If you are looking for demographics, Quantacast.com is a goldmine of information!
Quantacast also has a very nice feature that allows you to see the other sites the audience that likes the link you are investigating also likes online. This gives you a handy-dandy way to find even more sites to research to see how they are attracting their visitors. Not only that, but you can visit these sites like you did the original site and see if there is any way you can add a comment, a link, or any other interaction that can drive traffic from those sites back to your site. And, don't limit your contributions to these sites to small things, if the return might be high. Think about submitting videos and podcasts too if that's allowed.
Strategies For Market Research
The best way to do market research is to stalk your competitors and see what they're doing. There are a number of different ways you can get that information and then use it to your advantage. It does take work and persistence. However, think how quickly your traffic can grow if you manage to find a site that is quickly building their audience and your content, along with backlinks to your site, is plastered all over their pages. You will quickly zoom up the ladder of visibility and you will see the results of your efforts.
Here is a step-by-step way to approach your market research in a methodical manner so as to use your time to the best advantage:
- Understand your market niche and keywords you are targeting,
- Go to Google and type in the keyword to find your competitors on the first five search result pages,
- Visit each of these to see if you can add content and backlinks to the site to increase your traffic,
- Take note of the most popular topics/content on these sites so you can later copy them,
- Target a few of these for copy cat efforts,
- Check out those few for their target market by visiting Alexa.com,
- Use Quantacast.com to find out more about the demographics of these sites and what other sites might have an interest in that content,
- Build content that is very similar to the sites you've targeted,
- Submit it to the same people who linked to those sites, using similar keywords, titles, etc,
- Reply to comments and build a buzz around your content.
As you can see the major strategies all had one thing in common. You want to saturate the Internet with your content, either through commenting, ratings, backlinks, or original content. That content should be in various media: articles, videos, podcasts, emails, and more. You want that content to highlight your area of expertise and to generate traffic for you through multiple sites. You want it to be attractive to search engines, using keywords that have been researched through competitors use or the keyword tool. You want your content available through blogs, websites, RSS feeds and anything that people online will want to use repeatedly.
You want to link to people who are popular already so that their momentum carries you to the top with less work. You want to be at the leading edge of the tools available to cut down your work and give each action more power to attract attention. You want to be able to understand the motivations of people who are visiting sites over and over again and cater to those motivations. And, you want to make it extremely easy for those visitors to sign up for repeated updates and continuous contact with you to convert that traffic to dollar signs.
None of this is brain surgery, but it does take some attention to target your efforts where they will show the most benefit to you. While good content will always be in demand, if no one knows it's on your site, it might as well be hidden under a mattress offline. It has to be promoted, it has to networked, and it has to use the power of the Internet to propagate itself. Once you start to get the hang of this, you will have automated many of the ways to do this and you will be able to see opportunities that others cannot see to make traffic go from big name sites to your own.
As the traffic rolls in, it will become clear that dominating the Internet is not as hard as it seems. It just takes careful strategizing and some knowledge of the mechanics in play to boost your site into the major headlines of at least a few major players. When that happens, their magic rubs off on you and you can become a major player in your own right.
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