by claire on June 25, 2009
(Say that title 3 times fast 
)
First off, if you’re not familiar with Twitter Trending Topics, they’re the links you see on the right side of pages (like your home page), that track commonly occurring words in tweets. Clicking on them takes you to a search result page that displays all the latest tweets about that topic. Naturally, these pages get a lot of eyeballs, as curious people look to see what people are saying about the Trending Topic.
Spammers, being great at finding opportunities to get clicks, have infiltrated this space:
Notice how Nicelyu1045 has cleverly added “Tehran Transformers 2 iphone AT&T Spain Iran” to the end of her tweet? While this might get some clicks, by it’s very spammy nature, it probably won’t have high returns and is a blight on the whole purpose of the Trending Topics to display true tweets about the topic.
I don’t recommend mimicking this spammy behavior, but we can learn from the spammers and find ways to get traffic while also adding value to the conversation.
Here are 3 non-spammy ways to get traffic from Twitter Trending Topics:
- Try to anticipate hot topics before they happen
My team recently decided to anticipate the launch of Transformers 2 and get ready with an article about it. Anticipation works pretty well for things like movies and hot product releases, but is a little more difficult for things like breaking news (especially when many news stories are now first broke on Twitter), which is why I recommend #2:
- Monitor hot topics regularly and write content around them relative to your site’s niche
With a little creativity, nearly every Trending Topic could be stretched to something related to your niche. Take the Transformers 2 example: 8 Transformers 2 Cars to Snag Megan Fox – pretty far stretch to tie the movie back to insurance (the site’s niche). However, the article is effectively accomplishes this goal. The window of time the topic will be in Trending Topics can be short, so you have to act fast when you see a new trend appearing.
- Reply to users in the Trending Topics timeline, referring them to your related content
Once you have some content around the the trending topic, if you think it’s valuable to a person’s tweet, interact with them. One thing to watch, though, is if your topic is a far stretch, your tweet may come across spammy. If done with tact, however, you may be able to pick up some new followers, in addition to get some good traffic.
Do you have other ideas of how you could use Trending Topics for traffic? Let me know with a comment or tweet!
by claire on June 16, 2009
I recently encountered this sneaky little affiliate trick using Yahoo SSP on a site I work on that drives traffic through a number of affiliates and pays them for CPA leads. If you don’t know about it, Yahoo has a somewhat unfair program that is called “paid inclusion” or Yahoo Search Submit Pro (SSP). The thing about Yahoo SSP, is that it’s impossible to tell by looking at the front-end of the SERP that you are looking at a paid inclusion listing. They show up intermixed with the organic listings. This means, if you’re not using Yahoo SSP, it’s highly likely that the page 1 real estate you’re competing for organic space on is really only 4 or 5 spaces, as opposed to the top 10.
Here’s the affiliate trick:
Sign-up for SSP with Yahoo (or one of their preferred providers). Tell them you are an authorized agency for the website (or don’t tell them anything, as they probably won’t ask). Then, use your affiliate ID as your destination URL in the SSP feed (same as you would with a PPC account). Optimize your feed for your target keywords, and better yet, for the brand/domain name. What this means is that if someone searches for the brand name of your offer, you are most likely going to rank #1 on Yahoo. I would never recommend someone actually do this, because it’s dishonest and takes advantage of others. If you’re an affiliate and you try this, shame, shame.
However, if you’re a website owner and you have affiliates, be very aware of your affiliate traffic sources. If it’s Yahoo, and appears to be organic, you may have a problem – that affiliate could be purposefully stealing your 100% gross-profit traffic and charging you for it.
Here’s how to tell if a listing is Yahoo SSP:
- Look at the source code. Does the url around the link appear to have a couple of redirects? If so, it’s probably SSP.
- Look at the Title on the SERP. Compare it to the title on the page itself. If they’re different, then it’s most likely that they are using SSP. However, keep in mind the title may also be coming from the Yahoo directory listing.
- Does the url contain an affiliate ID? This is not always an indicator of SSP, because Yahoo often grabs affiliate ids in urls and displays them in search results. However, it might be a sign of some foul play.
Example: A search for “Acai Juice” returns Vitaminshoppe.com as the Number 1 Listing.
First, by looking at the source code, I see that there are multiple redirects (and the url string is longer than the others). Note: if you’re using Firefox, you have to copy the code into a text editor and wrap the text, because Yahoo doesn’t have any wrap and it’s difficult to look at the code.
Also, you can see that the url it references in the redirect is http://booyahnetworks.com/ ; which upon further inspection, is a Yahoo SSP provider…
Next, take a look at the title: Acai Juice – 32 Fluid Oz | VitaminShoppe
Then, take a look at the browser bar title when you click to the site:
Different = Yahoo SSP. Now, if I was VitaminShoppe, and I paid affiliates for sending traffic to my site, I’d want to make sure that this particular agency / affiliate was actually authorized to use SSP by me; otherwise, they’d be cheating me out of free organic traffic.
Finally, you can see there is an ID appended to the url – if that affiliate doesn’t have permission to be using Yahoo SSP, they’re busted . (But keep in mind, if the first 2 checks don’t reveal SSP, this could be happening by another issue… and you should be using 301 redirects or at minimum, canonical tags, to remove IDs from your URLs to prevent this).
That’s not to say, however, that you shouldn’t use Yahoo SSP. As much as I’m not a fan of such a sneaky manipulation of what is supposed to be the “best results” for a query, I have and do use SSP for certain websites. If you don’t, someone else will, and it may just not be worth the competition.
