Ideas Needed for Monetizing a Short Term Source of Traffic (5)
Ideas Needed for Monetizing a Short Term Source of Traffic
Hi All,
I've just had a call from a friend who runs an IT support business which has attached to it a forum which used to be quite popular (~ 15k visits a month) but has been neglected over the last few months. He logged into his analytics account today and found that over the past 60 days the forum is getting between 6 - 10k organic visits a day due to a load of movie download spam threads that have been posted.
His staff are now removing all of the threads so expect the traffic to rapidly start dropping as the indexed threads are 404'ing but he has asked me for suggestions on how best to monetize any traffic arriving at the 404 page in a legitimate way whilst it lasts?
An obvious idea would be to stick something like a netflix affiliate banner on there but given the "want it for free" mentality that most of the visitors will have, maybe a PPV option would be better?
The volume of traffic is likely to quickly die off so any really quick suggestions would be greatly appreciated! 
Cheers
Mike
Depending on how concerned he is about retaining trust with people arriving on those threads, he could post a movie downloader offer of some kind. They're usually free, but attached to toolbars.
Alternatively, he could try some gaming offers for F2P games - the "looking for free entertainment" crowd is likely to be into those.
And don't forget that Netflix offers a "30 days free" option, or used to - he could try pushing the free trial aspect heavily.
Originally Posted by fearless_shultz
I've just had a call from a friend who runs an IT support business which has attached to it a forum which used to be quite popular (~ 15k visits a month) but has been neglected over the last few months. He logged into his analytics account today and found that over the past 60 days the forum is getting between 6 - 10k organic visits a day due to a load of movie download spam threads that have been posted.
His staff are now removing all of the threads so expect the traffic to rapidly start dropping as the indexed threads are 404'ing but he has asked me for suggestions on how best to monetize any traffic arriving at the 404 page in a legitimate way whilst it lasts?
An obvious idea would be to stick something like a netflix affiliate banner on there but given the "want it for free" mentality that most of the visitors will have, maybe a PPV option would be better?
The volume of traffic is likely to quickly die off so any really quick suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers
Mike
@carumen They actually specialise in spyware / malware removal and want to keep things legit so downloaders would be out of the question The F2P games thing could also work. I actually would have liked to try Netflix as they do indeed have a free trial however it looks like they are exclusively partnered with Comissision Junction and I'm not currently signed up with them.
This is part of the problem I am having; I am only signed up with a couple of networks at the moment so have limited access to appropriate offers. One of the networks do actually have a relevant offer but only available in US and whilst a large part of the traffic is coming from the US it is pretty much spread all over the world.
Traffic to the site is definitely dropping significantly now but is still looking set to be around 3.5 - 4k today which isn't bad for free traffic so still looking to put something up. I suppose if nothing else though, I've ended up with a shit load of rather interesting data about demand for downloading movies that will be useful if I decide to work with video streaming offers in the future...
The key thing that I've learned from this is that it is really important to have a broad range of network memberships and a good range of offers in place even if you're not necessarily going to use them immediately so that you can react to short term opportunities like this in a more agile way and this is something I'll definitely be working on.
@cmdeal Am interested why you think that? Is it because of the obvious intent of the visitor to get something for free so they are unlikely to convert or are you referring to the longevity of the source of traffic? As I said, I'm under no illusions that this will quite quickly die off as Google starts de-indexing the pages that 404.
I'll certainly posts any results I get up here though!
Originally Posted by fearless_shultz
This is as poor quality as traffic can get, as there is absolutely no purchase intent behind the traffic. It is like sending a email shot to a random email list of people who have not opted into anything.
You can try a simple test ... you have nothing to lose. Put a Netflix landing page (even if you don't have access to the offer) and just see how many of the 4 thousand users per day actually click through to the offer thank you page.
I would be delighted to be proven otherwise, but my sense is that you will not get any mileage out of this.
Home > Paid Traffic Sources > POP / PPV / Redirect