Timing Traffic

Before you go blaming or crediting the copy and the keywords, you have to take into account that traffic is not a constant on any site. Just like the ocean has tides, the WWW has traffic tides that come and go at different times of days, depending on the niche and the demographic. It's your job to figure out when the optimal time to post is to get the most traffic. This is true whether you're trying to grab the most attention for an eBay sale or whether you just want to get the most traffic from a website back to your site. Timing isn't the only variable that can affect your traffic statistics, but it is the most influential.

WHEN IS EVERYONE ONLINE MOST?

The key question you have to ask yourself when you plan on posting is, “When are people most likely to be online to see your posting?” You stand to get much more traffic when there are more people online just by working the odds. It stands to reason then that you want to know when people are most active on different sites and plan your postings accordingly for the best performance.

It can vary by demographic too. If your demographic is comprised of people who work days and are up at night, then your traffic is going to show up at night. If your traffic is mostly coming from a different country than where you reside, it makes sense to post on their hours and not on your own. Pay attention to your website traffic logs from your existing website, and it will give you a good indication of when people are visiting it.

WHAT DETERMINES THEIR ONLINE BEHAVIOR?

If you analyze traffic trends based on the days of the week, you may find that you aren't getting good traffic on weekends when everyone is out, but you get great traffic on Friday when people are looking forward to the weekend. You may find traffic spikes at 7 pm at night if your niche is something outside of work, but it might spike at 8 am Monday morning if it is something that is vital to a working environment. You really have to get into the mind of your average customer to learn how to time your posting to get the most exposure.

For instance, if you are trying to rent a house or room, you can put yourself in people's shoes and realize that Thursday and Friday postings after working hours work best. That's when they are most likely to be online looking for a place to rent and visit over the weekend. The rest of the week, their minds are on other things, so why waste your time posting when they're not even noticing? Time your postings to when you already have their attention.

Good Ways To Capture Attention

Now that you understand the mechanics of generating traffic back to your site, let's talk about some not so obvious ways that can help to build excitement and buzz for your backlinks. You can see that by using these strategies, you will get more clicks on your links when you go to analyze them. Why they work is partly human nature. People are by nature curious. All you're doing is raising that curiosity to a higher level.

BE VAGUE

When you go to buy something, the first thing you look for is defects. It's only human nature. We don't want to feel like we've been taken, and most people really hate clicking on a link only to land on a link farm or spam page. That's why you don't want to give out too much information when you add your link. You want to be descriptive enough to engender excitement and curiosity, but not enough to give them all of the details upfront so they can pick your offer apart. By doing so, you will also ruin the surprise.

One of the best marketing strategies out there is to avoid giving out too much information in your backlinks; you never, ever sell based on features, only on benefits. Thus, if you're trying to get traffic to a book on how to garden, you don't add a backlink that says: ”Come check out my book on gardening.” That's a killer right there. Instead, you sell a benefit and make it a little vague, like: ”I saved hundreds on grocery bills, find out how!” If you've also researched the keywords and “saved hundreds on grocery bills” was one such phrase, and you used it as your anchor text, you're attracting attention from the search engines too!

HEADLINES AND PICTURES 

Even if someone isn't interested in what you are selling, he/she may still want to look at your post just to see what the picture is that you've inserted there along with your post. This works great on Craigslist and on other sites that allow pictures, but don't necessarily post them to view until someone has actually clicked onto your posting. Instead, the person reading ads may see a ton of ads with nothing different, but one that says “pic” next to it. Voila! Even if he/she doesn't care much for your headline, he’s/she’s going to click onto that ad just to see the hidden picture. If you pair that picture with an attention-grabbing headline, you can be sure you've created a psychological trigger that few will be able to pass up. Once you've got him/her to click on the general ad, he’s/she’s already there, so you can bet he/she will at least read your post, increasing the chances of getting him/her to click on the backlink too.

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