Blogging Experiment Part 2 – Using Paid Traffic and Remarkable Content as a Link Building Strategy

                                                                      Blogging Experiment 

Here is an advanced technique for promotion and link building. I call it an “advanced” technique because there is no assurance that it will result in real links pointing at your website, but it has plenty of power and plenty of potential if done right.
The idea is this:
Take about 10 of your ultra premium articles, your absolute best stuff on your website, and throw about 5 dollars worth of paid Stumbleupon traffic at each one. (Premium content is the foundation of our original blogging experiment).
Stumbleupon traffic is not perfect by any means, but it is fairly cheap (10 cents per visitor) and it allows for quick and dirty testing, which is really what we are after here.
We want to use paid traffic as a way to run quick experiments and find out which is the best performing piece of content.
I recently did this experiment on my own website. Take a look at this picture below that reports on paid versus “free stumbles.” I tested about 3 different articles across these 6 days:


Each day I promoted a single article with 50 paid Stumbles (5 dollars).
On the first two days, the article that I was promoting only received two free stumbles each day.
But look at the next couple of days. One of them received 90 free Stumbles, and another received 164 free Stumbles.
Thus, some of my articles that I was promoting that week performed better than others. The plan is to promote about 10 more pieces of “premium content” in this manner, and see which piece of content gets the most free Stumbles, and thus had the most “likes.”
Once the winner is established, I will likely throw some more traffic at that particular article (maybe 500 visits or so), and do some other unique things to share and promote it.
Why all the testing and fuss over which piece of content is most successful?
Because I am trying to pull in organic links. Real links. And create real word-of-mouth marketing.
Anyone can send paid traffic to a landing page. However, by using this technique, you can test various articles and find out which one is getting the best response.
If you spend 50 dollars on testing and then spend another 50 dollars sending paid traffic to the winning article, will it be worth it?
Maybe, maybe not. But if you push yourself to create a variety of amazing content then I would bet that you will net at least one or two permanent, organic links out of the deal.
And if not, you are still learning something (hopefully). Your testing will still reveal the piece of content that was the most “liked.”
At this point, you could create 5 new articles for your website, all variations on that “winning” article, and try to make them more useful, remarkable, and link-worthy.
Rinse and repeat.
Is paid traffic part of the TKA curriculum? No it’s not. But this is one method of “social promotion” that does not rely on cheap or manufactured links. Instead, it relies on creating remarkably good content. If you create an article and drive 500 targeted visitors to it and you don’t get a decent response, the answer is not more traffic. The answer is design better content. The tactics keep changing (and always will), but the foundation of your promotional strategy and link building should be content-based, not “manufacture as many cheap links as possible.”
Paid Stumble traffic is just one example out of many. There are a million other tactics out there. While the individual tactics may change, consider using an overall strategy that is sustainable in the long run, one that draws in real world links based on worthy content.
For my own experiment, I will test several more articles over the next two weeks, then hammer the “winning article” with 500 visits. At that time I will report the results of that experiment. Stay tuned……
View the original article here