Grow your site to 100k daily visitors?

Drastic said:

The Sandman - Can we add a node in the traffic section for people to network/team up? This would be more detailed and specific to traffic generation. The coop node gathers people looking for "working" tasks and random things. This would be specifically for people looking to network and work together.

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Drastic said:

Back in the day, maybe ten+ years ago, myself and some webmasters came up with a plan to get ourselves up to 100k daily visitors.

Back then it was all about "how can WE take this to the next level" - nowadays it's "how can I take this to the next level" and you look around and see the majority of new forums and blogs don't go anywhere.

People have sites that are several years old and still in the 1 million rank of Alexa or people complaining about how they hate their day job. How do you spend that much time on a project and it not go anywhere, and you don't stop to think what went wrong?

My observations, and I've only been on XF since 2014 (but have made websites since 1998ish), is that people NOW don't work together as much as people did back in the day.

The first rule is to change the way you think.

Start working TOGETHER and stop competing. Find ways to propel each other to higher levels. Challenge each other. Push each other to the next level, not hold each other down at the 1 million Alexa mark.

Here's the way to 100k daily visitors that worked for us back then. There's no reason it can't work now.

The people you once considered a competitor is now a friend.

1. Find a group of people in the same niche as you. Typically forums can almost work with anyone. My site is based on news/entertainment/viral content. I can be creative to find ways to fit almost anything into those three categories.
   
2. Figure out a schedule to mention each other on each other sites. Maybe you do exchanges daily, or once a week, or just whenever you both feel like it. It doesn't have to be super strict, but it should be reciprocal. You will promote each other like it's the best thing on Earth. All you have to do is link to a page of content that you like (or think your users will like). A simple "hey, here's a cool article/thread over at so and so's site - check it out" is all you need. Or you can put a simple link to their content in one of your articles, or feature a picture/video you saw and link them as the source. Plenty of ways to do this - just be creative and keep it balanced in terms of how much you promote each other.
   
3. That's it.

If one site is MUCH larger than another then perhaps the smaller site will plug the bigger site twice to make up the difference.

The key here is to try your best to keep it even.

If I send you 1000 visitors one week, then try to send me 1000 back. Does it have to be in one day? Nah, but you and the people you network with will work something out that's fair. Don't be a huge creep over the numbers; if they're relatively close, then that's good enough.

The key here is that you're working together, developing backlinks and increasing your audience. Back then we had trade scripts to automate the trades, but that's another lesson. They are more for banner/thumbnail trades and they manage everything. Pretty awesome, but not needed for this part of the project.

This is a slow process, but the end result is higher traffic, new users, and we let the users figure out where they want to be. Now that we have social media, we might also pick up some new members/surfers there too.

One way that might be beneficial for Xenforo users is the link directory addon by Au Lait. You could have that in your sidebar and let people submit links. Or you can do it the old school way and post things by hand.

Don't be a competitor of each other, be a friend.

Grow your sites together and everyone wins.

I'm in the news/viral/entertainment niche. I can fit just about ANYTHING into an article of mine.

My site is a blog, but that doesn't matter. Any site can work together.

If anyone wants to team up, then let's do it.

I need 100k a day and $300 income to quit my day job.

LET'S DO THIS!!!

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