Drumming Up Web Traffic on the Cheap
by Michael Winnick

Q: My culinary webzine Fillet hits the spot, but how do I get more people to visit it?

A: So you've built a well-designed site, and you have great content. Now all you need is an audience. Unfortunately, a Web site in need of exposure is about as rare as oxygen. There are roughly 100 million Web pages in the etherzone and well over a million unique domains. Of these, the top 10 percent receive about 90 percent of the overall traffic. Indeed the Web, often referred to as the land o' plenty, is a tough place for smaller sites to get exposure. To succeed, a site like Fillet needs to be crafty, sly, and, most importantly, determined.

Get a grip on your site
Before getting into shady marketing tactics, it's essential to have a sense of your site's current traffic, including the number of daily users, the number of pages they view, and if possible, what links they follow to come to your site. All this information is stored on server logs that you can pore over yourself or have checked by a shareware analyzer. It's also a good idea to check your rankings and placement in search engines and directories. Instead of doing this on your own, you may want to use a free Web tool.

The basic idea: It's traffic, stupid
There are only two ways to increase a Web site's traffic: Increase the number of new users coming to the site, or get your current users to look at more pages. (If you can think of more than that, please send résumés to jobs@hotwired.com.) In this column, I'll focus on the first part of the equation.

If you've got bank, go for broke: banner ads, paid links, press releases, print advertising, and, my personal favorite, transit ads. But before convincing Adam to drop coin on a bus campaign for Fillet (Meat. Are you over it? Or are you all over it?), I'll probably have to focus on guerrilla marketing, a quaint euphemism for marketing without a budget. Links, email, and word-of-mouth are the killer apps for online guerrilla marketing. They aren't sexy, but hey - they're free.

Working with Search Engines and Directories
Luckily, a lot of the big-traffic Web sites – Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite, and HotBot – lead a parasitic existence by directing people to so-called destination sites. I have found that the best strategy with these sites rests somewhere between subtle coercion and all-out lying. The first and most important step is to submit your site to the search engines, or, as they describe themselves, "media navigation aggregators." There are even services that will make your submissions for free, and a few that charge a minimal fee.

Once your site is submitted, our navigation aggregating friends will crawl your site. It will then be indexed according to a number of variables that usually sound scientific and professional when you read search-engine FAQs - but then again, these are the jokers that call themselves navigation aggregators. Regardless of the"scientific" principles at work, meta tags are your only hope for any control over how your site is listed. An obvious point perhaps, but submissions and meta tags should be crafted to maximize the number of times your site gets brought up in a search result. You know what that means: Porn.

Rumor has it that the top 100 keywords on all the search engines involve some obscenity and 15 misspellings of Pamela AndersenÕs name. Instead of fighting the flow, Fillet should rush to join it. Not in the brash and unsubtle manner of sites like Swoon and Persian Kitty that simply pepper their meta tags with smut, but in a more elegant and honest way. A good description for Fillet may include phrases like "big meats," "oral pleasure," and words like "hot", "steaming" and "amateur." "Searching for the latest hot information on dining, Fillet is an amateur Web site housing recipes for steaming big meats and other culinary forms of oral pleasure." Complete nonsense, but very effective.

Reaching Out to Other Sites
If you can't stomach such meta-tag tomfoolery, a more palatable approach involves simply contacting sites that have a strong affinity with your own. In the case of Fillet, recipe sites and ezines focused on food are fertile territory for this sort of outreach. Again, you should start by browsing subject directories or conducting a few general searches. It's a safe bet that sites with prominent listings in the directories and search engines also get a healthy flow of traffic. I happened upon Aunt Libby's Kitchen in Yahoo, and was tempted to keep on going. Its taupe background and flesh-colored stripes may not seem appetizing, but swallow your pride, and save your snobbery for wine-tastings. After all, it would be a fine place for Adam to send an email about Fillet and request a link. The email may look as follows:

Aunt Libby,

I was checking out your site and thought you might like to see Fillet (http://www.fillet.com), a recipe and dining Web site that I am developing. We have a number of recipes that would fit into your kitchen, and I'd appreciate if you could put links to Fillet and some of our columns on your site.

Thanks,
Adam

P.S. You guys should go to Webmonkey and read some tutorials on developing graphics and color schemes for the Web.

Will this email lead to a link for Fillet? Maybe, maybe not. But if Adam sends out these messages regularly, he will be exposing his site to a lot of recipe buffs on the Web. Of course, this message would be a lot more effective if Adam could offer a link to Aunt Libby's in exchange for the one he's requesting.

Another benefit of regularly perusing and contacting other sites is that you can see what steps they have taken to get Web exposure. When I stumbled upon Aunt Libby, for instance, I was able to overcome my initial background-induced queasiness to find two interesting marketing opportunities that Auntie L is currently involved in: the Link Exchange, and a cartel of sorts called "the recipe ring."

Get to Know Your Neighbors
LinkExchange offers to mid-sized Web sites a "free" method of promotion. In exchange for a designated banner area on Fillet, the LinkExchange would provide Adam with the opportunity to serve up Fillet banners on other sites in the LinkExchange program. (The company itself makes money by selling impressions to advertisers on the 250,000 sites in its network.)

The recipe ring is another variation on the same theme: Band together with a group of sites and develop ways to promote each other's content. A number of these small ragtag bands have formed on the Web, covering topics ranging from recipes to coding to porn. Of course, Adam may not want to sully Fillet's design with navigational items featuring photos of drumsticks and honey-baked hams, but hey, I'm a marketer. Why should I care?

Michael Winnick is a former HotWired marketing manager and the director of product development at Guru.com. Billy Blanks is his hero.