In the previous parts of this series we talked about generating traffic to your website with leaving comments on other blogs. Those were all basic techniques, so lets talk about something less trivial today: faking a blog sale.
Before going further, though, keep in mind that I consider this technique to be unethical. I try to keep a 100% transparency approach on all my projects and endeavors, therefore I would never fake something to generate traffic, and I don’t recommend other people to do so either.
But if we are going to talk about all the traffic generation tricks and techniques (that is the plan with this series) we need to cover the “black hat” methods as well, if nothing else for the sake of discussion and to keep people aware of what might be going around the web.
The concept: The idea is pretty simple, you make it appear that you are selling your blog, and try to generate as much buzz as possible around it. The traffic might come from several sources.
If you list your blog sale on big online forums or marketplaces (some free and some paid) you will inevitable receive visits from the curious folks and potential buyers. Sometimes thousands of them.
If your blog is somewhat popular and has a loyal following you might also receive traffic from the readers that will write about the sale on their blogs or websites.
After a couple of weeks you just mention that the reserve price was not met, and you call the sale off.
Does it work?: Overall no, it does not work. First and foremost because the traffic that you will receive will not be targeted. People will visit your website because they are planning to buy, or because they are just curious to see what is going on. Sure some people might like the content and come back in the future, but I would say that they represent 10% of the total traffic.
I happened to list some of my blogs for sale in the past, but because I really intended to sell them. If I remember well I received around 2,000 visitors from the marketplaces (Sitepoint), but the sale listing had no impact on my traffic levels or RSS subscribers on the following weeks.
There is also a negative effective connected with this practice. Some of your loyal readers might feel deceived. If they stop trusting you they might also stop visiting your website.
How to get started: Just don’t get started! As you can see the couple thousand visitors that you might end up receiving using this strategy are not worth the damage that you will do to your credibility.
Over to the readers: Those are my opinions are least. Do you think that it is OK to fake a blog sale? What about the kind of traffic that you would get using this method?
Website Traffic Series
- Part 1: Web Design and CSS Galleries
- Part 2: Blog Carnivals
- Part 3: Leave Comments on Other Blogs
- Part 4: Faking A Website Sale
- Part 5: Pulling an April Fools Prank
- Part 6: Using Forum Signatures
- Part 7: Putting A Blog on Your Static Website
- Part 8: Adding a Forum to Your Site or Blog
- Part 9: Buying Targeted Traffic
- Part 10: Email Signatures
- Part 11: Put Your URL On Online Profiles
- Part 12: Email Bloggers to Showcase Your Best Content
- Part 13: Faking a Hacker Attack
- Part 14: Promoting Your Content on Social Bookmarking Sites
- Part 15: Promoting Posts That Link to You on Social Bookmarking Sites
- Part 16: Promoting Your Content on Social Networking Sites
- Part 17: Using Article Directories
- Part 18: Exchanging Links with Partner Sites
The blog has been magnificent with the way it discusses the main aspects of how traffic could be generated for a web site.
i dont like thois way of promotion at all, i like to be honoust with my readers. bu hey there will be alot of people in the bloggosphere that will be jumping around for this tip
This is really a fantastic piece of info. I am sure this is gonna work. I will try it out al by myself. It was really worth reading it. Thanks a lot.
What if you put up a listing with a high BIN? As long as you’re willing to sell at some price, I don’t see how it would be unethical. You usually have to pay for the listing, after all.
A lot of people use this method to jump-start traffic to their site with no intention of selling it at that time, but once the traffic has started flowing in, they will end up flipping the site by now featuring the traffic stats from that particular month.
I’m surprised to see this, the traffic would be worthless – there are far better unethical ways to get traffic – and this strikes me as not being worth it. Not only is it not targetted, the people who visit are more likely to skim your content but not actually comment or interact or convert to sales/clicks/whatever. Essentially they’re lookyloos – people who just end up using your bandwidth.
I have found it interesting that a blogger would want to sell a profitable blog at all. It is a personal blog that they have spent time creating and then they would sell it to a total stranger? It’s not like a blog is piece of real estate or a stock. Or is it? Also, don’t you think the fans or subscribers of the blog are left hanging?
i dont like thois way of promotion at all, i like to be honoust with my readers. bu hey there will be alot of people in the bloggosphere that will be jumping around for this tip.
I do not see any good from this method, your rep goes down that all.
Ken Dahlin: (still scratching head)
its an evil way to get traffic but it works perfectly
I have a hard time believing some of the numbers posted and I have noticed the “for sale” tactic to increase traffic. This was a very interesting most….I have never seen this listed as way to increase traffic.
Well I must say that I’ve never heard of anything like this before, Very interesting tactic but like you said, is deceiving and could damage credibility. Overall it’s NOT worth it.
I think a negative perception could come about because your regular readers may think you are going to stop blogging so they may take you out of their RSS reader, so you actually lose some targeted traffic.
@Sam Stevens, if you read the post you can see that I am actually discouraging it. But I think it is important to talk about the stuff, even the bad stuff, so that everyone becomes aware.
When you posted the aquired blog I was quite shocked because to read DBT had become my daily routine and I thought here goes the big fish eats small one thing. So here we are good as always.
I’m disappointed that dailyblogtips.com would bother publishing a how-to about an unethical practice.
Hey Daniel, I think “Not John Chow” counts your april fools joke as fake sale ;D
Jimmy, for one thing to dissuade readers that might be wanting to try those methods.
I am loving this series. i stumbled t the fourth part and now have retraced myself and gone through the other three parts as well. Can you give a one line description on what the future installment of the series would be about. Just so that we know what to expect…
I see the use in discussing Black Hat methods in this series, but I don’t see the use in discussing Black Hat methodes you say don’t really work.
Why focus attention on this?
I think a negative perception could come about because your regular readers may think you are going to stop blogging so they may take you out of their RSS reader, so you actually lose some targeted traffic.
If someone wants to make an offer I am willing to sell or fake a sale to you! Ha Ha.
(still scratching head)