Techniques
"Is it wrong to give people what they want by helping remove their defenses?" - Bill Schlackman If a Craigslist poster has a shitty experience with Craigslist, is it wrong for me to send them an email letting them know about another platform where they can get exactly what they are looking for knowing fully well that some will be willing to pay for it?
The key to traffic leaks is understanding the philosophy behind the technique, identifying, watching, and studying people who are in your niche AND outside your niche doing the techniques, and morphing that same technique to fit your niche. If you think about it from a macro standpoint first, it's all about diverting traffic from one place to another - whether temporarily or permanently. Just burn this in the back of your mind: If users can interact with the website/platform, user engagement, they can become YOUR traffic - Period.
Think twitter bots that drive traffic from Twitter to an offer or website. It's the EXACT same strategy of driving traffic from Pinterest to an offer or website. Same thing for Craigslist or Gumtree. Once you understand how a method works, you will start looking at every site as a potential traffic leak, one way or another. Even using 10% of the energy SEOers waste on SEO towards this technique will give them 1000% more ROI since only the top 1% bother to even exploit these different platforms. These are the techniques you will be using: Technique: Watermarking - on photos without dropping a backlink - Increases brand awareness and direct traffic (also type in search traffic). Think Suddenly_Ass's photos, you know there are several with watermarks that we all type in to get more of that shit, let's be real.
Type in traffic works best if you have a short or simple URL - HowToMakeMoneyInTheTwentyFirstCentury.com is not going to work, too many chances of a typo (If you must get a shorter URL and 301 redirect it then do it - remember fuck that Google shit). Then there are some that we'll use Google Image search to find more from the collection. Watermarks drive in traffic - shit has been working before there was a Google.
Don't be obnoxious with your watermark, sometimes the more subtle the better. It's like you have to be cool about it. That way people like Suddenly_Ass are more likely to post it around the internet and spread it for you. ::emp:: has a great guide on taking your images to the next level: Enhance! How to turn images into killer traffic magnets | Deeper Content
Seriously think about it for a moment, what niche/subject matter doesn't have photos or imagery at some level? You can watermark everything, videos, PDFs, white papers, put your domain url/brand everywhere. Don't have photos, find some, then watermark that shit for days. We did this for an online entertainment magazine property back in the day - 2003. We went to forums that fit our demo - guys looking at sexy chicks, and just dropped image albums through the forum. It was a common thing to do, so no one thought twice. People took those photos, re-posted them, and till this day we are still getting traffic from those photos.
If you can get people to spread the content for you, that's a lot easier. A little more difficult to do with videos, and content, well that's pretty fucking boring, but photos - people will re-post them, re-blog them, share them, save them to their hard-drives, and so on.
Technique: Commenting - Interacting and dropping a link or your brand in the discussion, the more subtle the better. Appearing like a dis-interested 3rd party helps.
Technique: Videos - A little more difficult to insert into conversations except with platforms like Facebook's commenting system which allows video dropping. You can link to videos in the comments as well. Think Imgur.com or anywhere something can go viral quickly - sauce.
Technique: Content - Creating and distributing to where your target audience congregates.
Technique: Giveaways or Surveys - bait people into interacting or engaging.
Technique: Reverse - My own term, This is where you do something that so out of the box, it disrupts the foundation of the platform. It's like blowing up a dam and creating a river flowing towards your own website. When the main roads are blocked off, you have to create your own roads for traffic...