Do you ever look at the big marketers and bloggers in your niche and wish that you could just take a percentage of their traffic and send it directly to your site? Just think what would happen if someone with a list of 100,000 people or more sent 10 percent of their list to your site once a week. And what would be even more exciting is if you had 20 or 30 people like this all sending you a percentage of their traffic every day!
Well, even if this just sounds like a dream right now, I’m going to show you some simple tactics that will make this possible. It’s a tactic I call parasite marketing, and I’m going to show you my favorite ways to snipe traffic for free from all of my competitor’s sites every day!
Step 1: Understand How a Parasite Works
Before you can become a parasite, you need to understand how one works. Now I know that parasites usually have a negative connotation as “blood suckers” who live off of the resources of something else – but when it comes to traffic I promise you that it’s a good thing.
I was at an event recently where Michael Pennland talked a little about how parasites work. He said that a parasite will setup shop on an animal like a cow. Now, when this cow eats something, or gets something to drink, it feeds the cow, but it also feeds the parasite. The parasite doesn’t have to do a lot of work after it’s found its home because it can live off of the nutrients that its host provides forever.
Now, if you were a parasite, what type of animal would you want to become a parasite on? The skinny sickly cow, or the fat happy cow? Of course it’s going to be the fat, happy cow. You also want to find a cow that eats often, because the more often it eats the more often you would get fed.
Let’s switch to another analogy. Stephen Pierce once told me that you don’t need to create traffic. There is already tons of traffic out there, all you have to do is find out where it already is, and get it to come back to your site. You can do this by using this parasite analogy.
There are other marketers in your niche who are already getting tons of traffic to their websites. They already have huge mailing lists and already have followings of people. So, as a parasite marketer, I need to figure out how I can attach myself to their marketing, so I can benefit from their already existing sources of traffic.
Now, before I share with you my favorite strategies, I want to give you a warning that you cannot use these strategies to go to people’s sites and spam them. If you aren’t using them ethically, then you are as bad (or worse) than the spammers. I promise you that these techniques work well, and are MORE effective when you use them ethically.
Step 2: Comment Sniping
This is one of my favorite new ways of becoming a parasite on other people’s sites. Now, you need to realize how most good marketers run their businesses. Most of them have built up large mailing lists of subscribers. Most of them also have a blog where they communicate with their members.
And what often happens is that they will write a blog post then send an email to their lists saying, “Hey, I just made a new blog post, check it out at www.myblog.com.” What then happens is that tens of thousands of people rush to their blog post within minutes and read that person’s blog post and comment on what they said.
Now wouldn’t it be powerful if you were the first person back to their blog, the first person to read the entry, and the first person to post a comment with their signature file that had a link back to your site – so that when the thousands of others came to read that blog post they would read the post and then see the first comment (which is yours)?!
Unfortunately, we don’t always know the second someone makes a new post to their blog, but there is a solution. There’s a powerful software tool called “Comment Sniper” that you can get for free at www.CommentSniper.com. With this software, you can watch each of the most powerful blogs in your niche, and the second anyone posts to them, comment sniper will let you know, and you can race to that person’s site and make the first comment with a link pointing back to your site! As the floods of people they send to that post have a chance to read it, they are always going to see your comments and your links.
The keys are to make sure that your comment adds to what the original blogger wrote and then structure your comment so it will be a resource for other readers. For example, let’s say someone makes a blog post talking about how they use eBay to sell their products. An intelligent comment that would get you a lot of targeted traffic would be something like this:
Hey (name) – thanks for that post. I’ve also used eBay to sell my products. What I’ve found is a very powerful way to use eBay is to use their classified ad program to send traffic directly to my site. That way I can bypass eBay fees, and also get them to join my list. It’s been a powerful way I’ve used to build my list up huge.
Hope this helps.
Russell Brunson
To learn 7 other eBay tricks that I use every day to build my list download my free report at www.mysite.com.
Notice that my comment adds to the creditability of the blogger, helps give his or her readers more information and then gives them something free if they visit my site? Posts like this can get you 200 to 300 subscribers or more every time you post them!
Just be sure to use software like comment sniper so you can be there first, and be helpful so the blogger won’t mind leaving your post where it is.
Step 3: Live TV Shows
We have been doing a lot of live TV shows lately at DotComSecrets.tv. There are services out there like Ustream.tv and Justin.tv that will allow you to broadcast your own television show 24 hours a day. We have had up to 800 people on our live shows before and there are literally hundreds of other marketers in every niche with their own live TV shows.
What’s cool about these services is they allow the viewers to interact with each other during the shows.
Now, I first noticed this on my shows when I had people coming on just to spam their links out to my audience. We quickly deleted these members and banned them from coming back, but there is a way to steal people’s visitors ethically.
All you need to do is make sure the username you pick while you are watching the show is your URL. The biggest problem that the spammers have is they drop their links into the conversation and we immediately ban them. BUT – if their username is their website URL, and they post intelligent comments that add to the content of our show, then we let them post as often as they want!
So, every minute you could comment on the show, let people see that you know what you are talking about and that you’re an authority on the subject, and they are going to see your domain name over and over again. I know one guy who sold seven tickets to his seminar at over $1,000 each and added a few hundred people to his list during one person’s show using this exact same tactic!
Step 4: Testimonials and Case Studies
The last method is to figure out a way that you can either become a case study or a testimonial for someone’s product and they will send targeted traffic to you all day long. Here are a few examples:
Testimonials: I have a few friends who give testimonials for almost every product they can because they know that their name, picture and website URL will show up on the sales page for that person’s product and when they drive traffic to the site, a percentage of the people will always check out the people with testimonials and come back to their sites.
Case Studies: I found out that Mike Chen was launching his new software called “Make Your Own Software.” A week before it launched I called him and got a free copy of the product. I then created a software product with it, launched it and sold $11,000 worth of it during the next 48 hours! I then sent this case study back to Mike and he dedicated over a page on his sales letter telling my story, he had all of his affiliates telling the story about “Russell Brunson” and I added thousands of people to my lists and sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of my own product during this promotion!
Become a resource to people who buy someone else’s product: A good example of this is Anik Singal, who made video tutorials teaching people how to use Traffic Equalizer a few years back when that software was popular. The product owner then recommended these tutorials to all of his customers and Anik made tens of thousands of dollars selling these tutorials and additional coaching services.
The key to this whole article is that you can find out where traffic already is, and figure out ways to become a parasite and get those people coming back to your site instead. It’s very easy when you follow a few of the suggestions listed above.
About the Author: Online marketing expert Russell Brunson started his company, DotComSecrets.com in 2004 when he was a student at Boise State University. Within a year of graduating, he had made his first million. Known for teaching budding entrepreneurs to turn their hobbies and passions into online income, Russell, 33, also helps small business owners of all kinds to increase profits through Web marketing. Learn more at www.SuccessEtc.com.