Today I am going to give you a website traffic source that gets 12,500 visitors in just 24 hours. This how I doubled a tiny website’s traffic overnight.
I have been a professional blogger since 2004 and over the years I’ve helped hundreds of people to do the same. So here is the results of an experiment that I created for one of my students, I’m going to show you the traffic source that we used and how to use it properly.
There are two strategies but one of those is very controversial, so fair warning. This is not for everybody, but the first method that I show you is absolutely the best one to go with.
In case everything else fails, then you have the second method at hand.
Table of Contents:
Doubling A Website’s Traffic
My student kindly provided some screenshots from Google Analytics, let us look at them. What I want to do here is show you the before and after.
You can see that before we run this method, the traffic was fairly consistent, then we have this big spike when we pulled the trigger and we implemented the method, and then the traffic falls off.
But look closely, interestingly, when it starts to even out, and we look at where we started, we’ve effectively doubled the traffic using a single method.
We’ve gone from a thousand visitors a day to over two thousand and that’s the long-term impact of this.
Either way, as you can see, when we pull the trigger and apply the method, we get around 12000 visitors immediately.
On the second day, we don’t quite hit that, but we still get an awful lot of traffic. After the spike, we are getting other websites linking to us, like Pinterest, Medium, Reddit or Facebook.
What might happen for you is you will get the big spike and hopefully you’ll see some long-lasting traffic, because our goal is to create an audience from this peak, and keep promoting our website through other pages and even with email lists.
Therefore, people have now bookmarked the website and we’re getting visits and traffic from a bunch of smaller websites.
A Traffic Source With 9 Million Visitors per Month
The traffic source that we used is called Hacker News.
There’s a lot more to it than just visiting the website and then promoting your links, that will not work. The strategy that I give you today will increase your chance of success.
In SimilarWeb, we can see that Hacker News has pretty consistent traffic over the last six months and pretty good overall rankings, it even managed to get over 10 million visits a month, and it’s averaging over 9 million. 39% of that traffic comes from the United States, 5% from UK, then Canada, Germany, and China.
Creating The Right Content
We need the right strategy and it all starts with having great content, meaning that it has to be relevant to the audience or they are going to ignore it; like selling apples to someone who actually likes oranges. It’s just not going to happen.
The content also has to be unique; I cannot stress the importance of this enough.
You cannot take someone else’s content and spin it through one of those article spinners, that’s not going to work. You have to write it yourself or get someone who is a professional to do it for you.
The hook and the angle that you use has to be different as well, it needs to be interesting.
When you have all these things together, it should also be share-worthy because you’re not just going for this initial spike in traffic, you want to create something that is going to spread across the internet.
There’s lots of traffic out there, you don’t have to go viral or get millions of views. It just has to spread a little bit across the internet.
When you think about how big the internet is, it is not unrealistic to reach a wide number of people fairly quickly. For best results, your content has to be controversial as well. If you know who I am, you know I’ve done very well using this strategy.
Being honest with you, nothing is guaranteed, you could implement this and get nothing, that is because the number of variables involved in this, it’s just crazy high.
I can give you the best strategy in the world, you can repeat it 10 times and you might only get a positive hit.
There is no real telling on what kind of results you can get and hopefully you’re going to get better results than I have.
That is why I’m sharing this with you, because I want you to do really well on the internet. I know it’s possible and I know anyone can do it.
The Power Of Confirmation Bias
You have to know your audience’s values, not just the interests and the demographic information, you have to know the psychographics. You need to know what they care about.
Once you know what their values are, you also want to tap into their confirmation bias, that is what they believe in, it’s how they see the world, that way you can get in touch with their beliefs. When you do that, you will now know how to confirm their suspicions.
They suspect that the world is a certain way, they are looking for evidence to support it and you will give them just that.
It is important you know that when you’re promoting your content, do not use link shorteners, like Bitly or equivalent.
You want to promote the content on your website using the actual URL; if you use link shorteners people will immediately distrust it because they can’t see where they’re clicking, so all your efforts will fail.
Conducting Original Research
How do you get content ideas that you know are going to have some decent impact?
If we go to the British website What Do They Know, it will allow you to send freedom of information act requests to government bodies on the public sector to get data that has not been released to the public yet.
This is a goldmine of information because every single day, lots of people are sending these freedom of information act requests and they’re made public, that means we can use that data immediately.
Now, if you want to uncover your own data, that’s probably the best way to go about it, but I always use this option instead.
In What Do They Know we have a search bar, let’s say we want to uncover something controversial, maybe about the police.
We are going to get a few options; we’ve got requests, users, authorities… you want to narrow it down to requests. There we can see what question have been asked about the topic, and we want to restrict this to successful requests, so we are now dealing with answers.
You can add a filter if you want to, so you can choose if you want older or newer requests.
If we click filter, and we click newest results first, it’s going to change our search again, and now we have the latest freedom of information act requests that have been successful about the police in the UK.
This can be used to uncover very controversial information.
If you go back up to the search bar, you can put in practically anything and get data about that. If we want to go with marketing,
I will give you an example of a piece of controversial content. There are articles that were published years ago, but they are so powerful that they remain relevant.
For example, this article about voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews. It’s tapping into a confirmation bias that some people have about women being treated differently in technical interviews, so it wants to explore that and uncover some new data.
If you have a look at how this type of articles are structured, it just lays everything out, there is no real spin, just facts. It’s just presenting things as they are.
If you go through these articles like the last example, you’ll see that they’ve done a really good job on presenting the data.
It supports various confirmation biases; it presents brand new information and frames it exceptionally. If you can create content that does something similar you will do excellent.
The topic can be pretty much anything as long as it’s interesting, unique and relevant; you’re going to be okay because you have access to a whole world of information just on that website and then do take the time to explore your own country’s equivalent.
Hacker News As A Traffic Source
So, let’s go to Hacker News.
You will see that we’ve got a few options there to submit content, it’s really simple. You click submit, there you have the title, you have the URL, and then you have some supporting text.
Now, we do have guidelines to follow, so it’s really important that you take the time to read those. Don’t allow the hacking topic to restrict what you contribute on Hacker News, it just has to be really interesting stuff.
We have a couple of sections like the front page, and new. If we click new, it is going to take us to the most recent posts.
This section here still gets an awful lot of traffic.
In fact, the entire website gets a lot of traffic, so you can go to the past section and you’ll see that we’ve got things from a day or two days ago still getting a lot of traction.
You are probably wondering how Hacker News works.
How It Works For Traffic Generation
Well, it’s kind of similar to Reddit. When someone publishes or makes a contribution, it lands in this newest section here, people can up-vote the content, and you only need a handful of points to hit the front page.
When you hit the front page, that’s when things start to explode, you can get thousands of votes. This is the safest way to get traffic.
The more points you get, the higher you climb, but because of the way the system works, people figured out it was pretty easy to game the system. They figured out they could hack Hacker News.
Now, I’m going to talk about that in a second, but you have to use it at your own risk.
I’m going to share this with you, but I’m not going to encourage you to do it. This information is out there; it’s been out there for a while.
Sneaky Traffic Method
I may as well fill you in and not hold anything back.
As a fully grown adult entrepreneur, you and only you will decide what is right for your business. I will give you all the facts so you can decide for yourself.
So, this is how people have previously hacked Hacker News. The risk is that your account will absolutely get banned if you get caught doing this. What hackers tend to do is they get friends to make accounts, weeks in advance.
You really need to plan this out. You have to convince a whole bunch of people, maybe 20 or 30 people to get involved with you on this and create accounts, start seeding those accounts with activity.
Everyone needs to start voting and contributing to things that are not associated with you. And most importantly, everyone has to come from a different IP, as Hacker News has the software to detect this kind of activity.
Your friends must also post content. Finally, you post your content on Hacker News and then send your friends to the newest section that we spoke about previously, immediately after the content is published, do not link to your post.
You’re only going to need maybe five or six votes to hit the front page, maybe a bit more, but you’re going to get on the front page pretty quickly.
Hacker News is aware of this and they have software that runs to try and prevent it. They try and detect these kinds of networks and then ban people. So, use at your own risk.
What’s Next?
If you want to see how I got 30,000 website visitors every day, go to profitcopilot.com/traffic and get the free course.