Create Add-ons, Tutorials, & Resources For Third Party Products
The number one best strategy that you can employ in driving more traffic to your website is leveraging the success and visitors of other websites. A great way to do this is by creating add-ons, tutorials or third party products for an existing product or service. Before worrying about the How and For What, consider the benefits of going in this direction. Companies love when you extend or talk about their product or service for the same reason you would appreciate the gesture, free advertising. You single handily increase their exposure and the usefulness of their product or service.
With that being said, most companies would be more than willing to help promote your add-on and they may even have some insight into promotional areas you can leverage on your own. Taking a look at Apple’s online store we see a multitude of third party products that customers can purchase. The extra exposure these companies get by providing an Apple related product greatly enhances their product reputation and provides free advertising for their website. They can than leverage this extra exposure to help promote other product lines.
In another example, RAGE Software’s MapDesign provides a great way for website developers to easily add interactive media to their websites. Of course, there are dozens of software packages that users can use to design and build websites. One of the most popular for the Mac, RapidWeaver, was being used by many of our RAGE MapDesign customers. We leveraged the success of RapidWeaver by making it easy to use RAGE MapDesign along with it. We created an online video tutorial to show step by step how the two applications can integrate with each other and posted it to the RapidWeaver forums. Since we were the first to do this, we were able to attract a large portion of RapidWeaver users over to our product line. As we introduced more products, these customers kept coming back. In addition, we also increased our search engine rankings by branching off into new features that were searched often in many major search engines.
Now you may be wondering what you can do in order to leverage the traffic and success of other products and services, and in turn, gain new customers and higher search engine rankings. At the very least you can write articles pertaining to your area of expertise. However, by getting a little creative you can go further in leveraging the traffic of other websites.
First and foremost you must consider the industry you are in. Whether it be law, religion, technology, SEO, there is always creative options you can take advantage of. Very generically you can use special deal websites such as Red Flag Deals to announce your one time deals on products or services.
How To Brainstorm New Traffic Generating Ideas
Here are the steps involved in determining the websites to go after;
- Make a list of all the ways your customers use your products or services. Get specific and creative here. Do a search for your product or service name to see if anyone has been talking about using your product in a way you may not have thought of yet.
- Find other products or services that your products can be used with to help make those customers more productive.
- Look for any communities that may already have been established around these products or services to see if their customers could benefit from your offerings and to find places you can promote your product/services.
- Create your free add-on, tutorial or resource for these third party products. The important strategy here is to make this add-on free because it gives you more of an opportunity to promote and will lower the barriers required for new customers to come try it and discover what else you have to offer.
- Evaluate the traffic and feedback you get from these new users to see if your promotional efforts have paid off and whether you should consider additional add-ons for this segment or move on to a new one.
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