Link Bait Me

As some of you may know, I’ve become too busy to manage JoeTech.com, TwitterTech.com, this blog, and all my other sites, so I decided to sell most of my sites. With less than three days left on the auction, I figured I would give a little link love and go out with a great link bait experiment.

While poking through my referer logs, I found a referral from Affiliate Crunch and guess what. It worked. It got me there and more than that, it generated a link to Affiliate Crunch from me. Maybe you’re a regular visitor or maybe you’ve been lured here by a fake referrer log in your web site logs. If you fall into the second category, you know what I mean. It’s called Referrer Bombing, and it usually refers to spammers slamming a site with thousands of requests to a page with a fake referrer. In this case, though, we’re talking about something much less sinister. It’s a FireFox add-on that you install and every time you visit a site, it will pass a fake referrer for you or none at all. It’s up to you.

How does it work?
It’s pretty simple, really. When a you pull up a page in your web browser, you are sending an HTTP REQUEST to the web server that hosts that site you are viewing. This request typically contains a some important information for the webmaster. Usually, this is intended for log files and can be viewed in your hosting package’s logs page. As a bonus, third party applications that generate stats for you can also pick this information up. Part of this information is whether the user typed the URL in directly or clicked on a link and where that link was that was clicked on. When you pass along a fake referrer, the goal is that the webmaster will see it in his or her logs or statistics program and visit your site.

Is it targeted?
Like any campaign, it can be targeted. For example, if you’re looking to promote your new Twitter site, you would want to visit blogs about Twitter or the sites of some Twitter users that have a ton of followers and like to talk about the sites they frequent. This could work for most anything you want to target fresh new traffic to. It would seem that you could target this new traffic as tightly as you’d like.

Will I get a million new visitors?
Frankly, I don’t know. I haven’t really tried it before, so it’s hard for me to say. And don’t forget… You still have to do a lot of foot work, visiting a lot of sites, to get your URL in all those logs. If you have a habit of providing great content, this method will work even better because you want people to stick around, but that’s true for nearly all web marketing. If you do give it a shot, come back and let me know how it went.