Lissie from How to Make Passive Income Online alerted me to the fact that the blogger's on Today.com were a bit green - and she was correct. If you have been following my advice for any lenght of time - say a week - then you are already an expert compared to the folks plodding about on Today.com. This isn't to demean them - they are truly nice people but they are completely new to the ways and means of internet marketing or even just blogging in general. Moreover the moderators are just as green. Even more astonishing is the fact that the powers that be behind the domain don't seem to have a great deal of knowledge either. And this brings me to the topic at hand.
Today.com encourages people to use social networks to attract traffic. The screenshot below is from the forum and one of the "Administrators" actively encourages people to use Entrecard.
Click image to enlarge
For those of you who don't know - Entrecard is easily the most useless traffic producer online. It consists of wasting an hour or two or your day loading 300 URL's in your browser and then clicking on them in order to visit 300 websites. You never actually look at the websites you visit - you just open it in a tab and by the time it loads you are already 4 tabs away loading another url. By the time you have loaded all the sites you simply close the browser window and wait for 300 other entrecard users to load your url in their browser - none of whom bother to read your posts either. When it is all done you pat yourself on the back because you had 300 unique visitors to your site. None stayed more than 2 seconds but what the heck it makes you feel like you are popular. Oh and gee - look at that - Alexa gives you a ranking.
Most of you learned long ago that you sure don't make any money from entrecard users. This also applies to the stumblers and diggers and redditers and sphinners and twitterers etc. Useless traffic that sucks your bandwidth and leaves without so much as a comment. Traffic that you waste hours trying to garner. One huge time sink if you are trying to make money.
However - and this is the point of this post - a lot of my readers still spend their days courting social traffic. You do it because your site isn't really set up to make money - you still hold onto the fact that maybe you will get famous because of your writing. Maybe targeting the search engines is a bit too much work. Maybe you will get around to doing what Griz says... one day but for now you're just gonna go with what you started with. If that is the case then Today.com is for you.
Why?
Because they will pay you for all that useless traffic. $2 for every 1000 useless unique visitors. It ain't much but I bet it is better than what most of you make right now with your social blogs.
Now some of you are thinking that getting 1000 visitors a day is hard - even useless visitors. Nope - not really. (I can't believe I am going to tell my readers how to get social traffic - lol)
Target Celebrities, Gossip, Tech/Gadgets/Gaming, Politics, humour and hot stories (ie - American Idol is back again)
Use images - lots of properly alt tagged images.
Post photos - tag em', keyword the photo with a short blurb
Post ten times a day - 10 posts per page.
Use Linkvana, Backlink Solutions, RT's ConnectContent, and buy anchored backlinks for all the targeted keywords.
Use my niche support page - it is free.
Use all the social sites to stumble, digg etc but if you use the link networks mentioned Google images will send you a ton of visitors all by itself.
Because you are using a free sub domain you need not worry about G. Just don't link it to any of your real sites.
This is the kind of stuff I did plenty of in the old days and I still have a couple of tropical fish sites that receive in excess of 10,000 visitors a day each - most from Google images. The sites make me nothing - the odd ebook sale but if I was getting $2 for every 1000 visitors I would build more.
If Today.com wants to pay for traffic then give them traffic. You can also set up affiliate links provided by Today.com and if approved by them they will also pay you $1 a post as long as you don't do self promotion posts.
The best thing about this is that you don't need to write much content. Just small keyword optimized blurbs about the photos. This is exactly how I used to use Technorati to drive thousands of people to my hot topic sites before Technorati canned the "what's hot" page. I posted photos with scandalous post titles and short keyword optimized blurbs. Social traffic loves crap and will bounce all over the net looking for it.
Here is the most visited site on Today.com http://whybenormal.today.com/ - 7000 daily visitors. Take a look at it. How much work do you think it takes to do that? (I mean no offense to the owner - good on her I say) $300 a month for posting humorous photos. Nice.
Unfortunately Today.com doesn't accept people worldwide. They don't publicize what countries are acceptable but it appears that N. America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Asia (Tiawan, Japan) are ok. I'll update this post if people leave comments regarding their own country - pass or fail. If any of my readers that specialize in sneaky tactics have some ideas on circumnavigating the home IP blocking then feel free to leave your ideas below.
If any of you sign up or have an account already send me an email with "Today member" in the subject and I will let you know of another way to drive traffic - a very simple system. I won't respond back until I have everyone included so be patient. Let me know your today.com url in the email.
Today won't make you rich but I suspect a lot of you wouldn't mind a few extra bucks in your pocket given the current recession. Those of you who want to work a little harder can probably make some decent money using the affiliate ads provided if you target your sites to the right traffic.
I know a lot of you aren't making anything with your social sites - you may as well do the same thing you are doing now on a site that will pay you for the visitors.
Note: To all my "I'M In" participants. I haven't forgot you. Just ironing out a few things and will send you all an email shortly. Frank and RT - haven't heard from you but would like to...
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