Remember five years ago when start-ups would pay their customers cash to use their product? I admit, I signed up for PayPal because they paid me $5 and used some advertising-loaded browser bar because I got a check each month. To think I could be bought so cheaply… The technique worked to generate customers, but it was just expensive.
I’ve noticed a new trend which is equally as powerful, and much cheaper to execute: give away your traffic. These days, traffic is currency. Thanks to Google AdSense and all the other ad networks, if you have a website that receives traffic, however small, you can convert this traffic into cash. Sure CPM rates vary based on the type of traffic you get, where you place the ads, etc. But the fact that you can reliably convert traffic to cash makes traffic as good as money. Can you give your customers traffic for using your “product.”
The ultimate examples of this today are Digg and TechCrunch. Start-ups are climbing all over each other to get a mention on these sites, but how can you use this technique without turning your website into a news portal?
Justin Chen recently told me about a creative example of this:
Each time a foodie blog reviews a new restaurant, at the bottom of the blog post they put a widget that links to this restaurant’s homepage on Urban Spoon. Urban Spoon detects this incoming link and automatically adds the blog’s review to the restaurant’s page (scroll down to the section, “Blog Reviews of …”).
Despite the fact that Urban Spoon needs some work as a site, this idea is fantastic. It’s a huge incentive for all these foodie blogs to link in.
One more example. I see the MyBlogLog widget on almost every blog I go to these days. Apparently one of the reasons that bloggers add this, and keep this, on their site is because of the incoming traffic that it generates. If you click one of the faces, you’re taken to that person’s profile page and you see all the other sites they are reading… and you probably click one of the sites.
As soon as bloggers start to notice a lot of referring traffic coming to them from MyBlogLog, Urban Spoon, or your site, you’ve probably hooked them for life.
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