Show HN: TrafficGun – Grow Your Traffic Easily | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TrafficGun – Grow Your Traffic Easily

trafficgun.com

45 pointsyabbadabbadoo35 comments

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Our Overlord Google does not approve unless if you mark all the links nofollow.

We strongly encourage all users on our platform to nofollow all links.

TrafficGun isn't about SEO/links. Its about gaining real, live visitors.

That clarifies it a lot. Thanks

You're welcome :)

Encourage instead of require? Any particular reason for that?

It's in the best interest of the site owner to nofollow, so we figured encouragement is good enough :)

Hi guys, I'm the co-founder of TrafficGun - a platform to make cross-promotions b/w bloggers easier.

Happy to answer any questions.

Can you provide more details on one-way traffic?

Sure! If you find a site who metrics - traffic, niche etc - that you like, you can send them a request to write about your site/product in exchange for a fee. The fee is set by the owner of the site.

So it's basically a link exchange for blogs?

What's the incentive for a popular blog to link to less popular or newer blogs?

When you get a request for cross-promotion, you can see the metrics of that site (traffic, niche, age etc). If the metrics aren't to your liking, you can simply decline the cross-promotion request.

Also, it's actually not about exchanging links - in fact, we strongly encourage all users on our platform to nofollow the links. This is about teling your readers "Hey! There's this interesting blog you should check out" - and getting the same in return.

Why call it TrafficGun? Feels like a weird name and carries bad connotations.

Maybe something related to mailgun.com ?

This reminds me of the highly-untargeted spam emails that I get all the time from people asking if they can write blog posts for me. Naturally, they would contain a lot of links to some other site. The idea has definitely been done before. Think PayPerPost, SponsoredReviews, etc. Sounds like an excellent way to get yourself deranked by Google.

Hey! Thanks for the feedback :)

'highly un-targeted' is the keyword in your comment. With TrafficGun, there's no spamming ppl with unwanted requests. Every user on the platform is amenable to cross-promotion.

As for PayPerPost, SponsoredReviews etc - our focus is primarily on cross-promotions b/w bloggers who vet each other.

Finally, re:Google - We encourage all users on our platform to nofollow all links. TrafficGun isn't about SEO/links. Its about gaining real, live visitors.

Content for the sake of exchanging traffic by means of links. I'm not convinced this is much different (if any different) than what I mentioned. SponsoredReviews focuses on bloggers writing ads for products. Your idea is to have the arrangement be two-way so that both sites write about the other but then you have the issue of all these sites stacking up two-way links which looks like link exchanges. I doubt Google is going to be thrown off by the nofollow links. It's been abused to stop pagerank 'leak' to the point of losing its original meaning. I don't think emphasizing the use of nofollow is going to save anyone from Google realizing sites are putting out farm-style content.

I've used those sites before. This seems different in that they're not gaming advertising but actually exchanging like-kind content. Google doesn't derank for that.

Exactly!

Just created an account and ran into a bug almost immediately.

When I added my GA account it pulled all of the websites under one specific GA account, I'm assuming the one that has somehow been marked as the default. Within GA I have multiple accounts, but they're all under my one google apps account. I'm unable to see (and thus add) any website that's not grouped within this account.

For example, pretend within GA I have the following groupings:

Personal Work Customer 1 Customer 2

Each one of these 'sub accounts' within GA contains the websites I've associated with it. With TrafficGun, it only see's the websites under 'Personal' and not Work, Customer 1 or Customer 2.

Hey Stan,

pls ping me at help@trafficgun.com with your username - and I'll be happy to take a look at your account :)

"3b. One-Way Traffic Or you could just do one-way traffic. Details inside."

Can you explain?

(reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459681)

Reminds me of what my first impression of LinkExchange was.

Webrings! Everyone wins. No sarcasm.

TrafficGun isn't about SEO/links. Its about gaining real, live visitors.

To this end, we strongly encourage all users on our platform to nofollow all links.

Wait --- how do the real live visitors get to your site if not a link?

I don't follow how nofollow makes it not a link web ring?

No sarcasm, I used webrings in 1996 to great effect. Not for SEO. For real live visitors.

Ahh, my bad. I thought you were implying this was some sort of link exchange scheme for SEO.

But yes, cross-promotions work great for growing traffic long-term. See this comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459902

Ah web-rings! I remember they were quite fun and interesting at first. I'd actually click from one site to the next in a ring to check them all out. Of course that was a time when there were limited numbers of sites for niche topics, and discovering them was a more "word-of-mouth" thing. I was also surfing on a 56k modem.

Not to poo-poo on what seems to be an honest effort with TrafficGun, though. I don't know if the sharing spirit of website owners is the same as it was back then, but it would be nice.

It's how it works. All the star, follow, reblog platforms basically expose your presence on that persons "blog" in a push manner.

Twitter, tumblr, pinterest, instagram ... They all have a number of indirect ways of this.

And as someone who has had to do icky marketing on these platforms, doing that process is the best way to grow.

What makes "3a. Cross-Promote" something other than a zero-sum game? Does it presume that most people have more time to devote to reading stuff online?

Does it presume that most people have more time to devote to reading stuff online?

On a niche-by-niche basis, yes. For instance, I keep a list of personal finance blogs that I check out regularly. When one of those blogs features a personal finance site I haven't seen before, I check that out as well and consider adding it to my list.

One of the best ways to grow your blog traffic long-term is getting other bloggers in your niche to write about you. TrafficGun makes this easy.

> "Submit your site(s) to TrafficGun and we'll verify it's metrics - "

s/it\'s/its/r

>You can also drive one-way traffic just to your site.

How does this happen? I'm guessing it would involve payments, is that so?

Yes. If you find a site who metrics - traffic, niche etc - that you like, you can send them a request to write about your site/product in exchange for a fee. The fee is set by the owner of the site.

A web-ring. How retro.

Any cost to this?

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