Outsourcing Case Study 2 – Traffic Generation

Francis:

The previous example was pictures research. The next example is traffic generation. 

A basic example for a very simple technique that might be interesting for scaling up depending on which traffic strategies you’re searching is Social Bookmarking.

There exists many social bookmarks and they have the reasons or not for traffic generation based on what your website is and what your strategy is. 

One very simple platform for traffic generation is StumbleUpon. My proposition is if you want to generate traffic to your website which might be a content website, for example, you take your most popular site and edit to StumbleUpon. It’s like liking or disliking on Facebook. 

If it’s new, it will get entered into the database and needs a little bit of description and a tagging. If it already exists in the database, in other words, if someone has already added it to StumbleUpon then it will just receive the “Like”. 

Explain to your assistant how to do that – the description, the tagging and the liking. Then to prevent your profile from looking like a spammer, search a few other interesting sites in your niche and like or dislike them accordingly. Then and only then add the next very popular site from your website. 

This way you will generate a few instant traffic surges. In general, if a good site is submitted to StumbleUpon for the first time, I always receive about 100 visits for 1 day. And then very, very little visits in the future. 

So that’s only one traffic building step. Then, you can explain everything with this one platform to your assistant using video instructions, using text and voice explanations and then have him do it for the rest of your sites. 

Then, let him research on his own a few other social bookmarking sites. Explain to him that if he Google the best social bookmarking sites, he will receive a lot of posts with lists of hundreds of bookmarking sites.

Then explain to him how he can find out the best of them – the highest PR, the highest traffic generation using web research. 

And then, he should attack, for example, 2 other bookmarking sites Digg, Diigo, Reddit and others. As he does it, he should create a manual explaining how he does it. An alternative is he uses screen recording and you just watch him do it. 

This reporting on how he does the task on his own is very, very important. We don’t want him to lose time by the doing the task inefficiently. When you watch the video, you will see immediately if he does it wrong. Then you can correct him. 

If he does it right, give him good feedback and tell him he was very good at finding out how it was. If he doesn’t do it right, show him to these resources he can read on his own to learn how to do it right like tutorials, YouTube videos, forums.

And if he still cannot figure it out after a fixed amount of time which you tell him then he reports back to you and you decide if you want to give him close instructions or if you don’t want to use this system.  

This would be positive in 2 ways: you generate traffic as you go for your site and you teach your assistant to think more on his own. 

There’s not much attitude.

Stefan:

There’s not much to say about it. I would say that what could be a problem here is that you could lose time.

That’s a possibility because it would be only unless if you have someone who’s doing that job once. Instead of permanent assistant.

The problem resolve itself if it’s a permanent assistant because even if you would potentially lose a little bit of time, you would gain in the long term. So it shouldn’t be a too big of a problem.

Francis:

There is always the risk of you losing your assistant one way or the other. In cases like these, it’s very useful for your assistant to record what he’s doing anyways.

So that if you change your assistant, you have all the training materials you need to accelerate the training of the next assistant. It will not be a replacement immediately because all the communication cannot easily be replaced.

But at least the teaching can be fastened up by your assistant doing, writing down what he has learned in many words or videos for the next person in line and for important purposes.