Drown The Competition
Wonder if you can drop traffic leaks when your competition is getting bashed, Hell yeah. Get Google alerts on your competition, anywhere they are getting bashed, let the people know there is an alternative that you've found, you can drop a link if they are not sophisticated, but you can also just drop the domain, the brand, or a photo.
The key is to go where the audience is, and funnel that traffic to your site. After a certain point, that audience will start automatically going to your site, and you can move on to the next target. Rotate them, throughout the weeks, months, and using your analytics, tap the traffic source that brings you the best Revenue ROI, or stickiness in terms of emails.
Every single website is a potential traffic leak, that's the beauty of the web. It's literally a web of pages that interlink together. Your job and goal is to connect traffic sources with your web properties that brings your good ROI. That's how you have to approach every property website, as potential traffic leaks. Sometimes, you can just straight up as the webmaster for a link or even a "guest post", or whatever the kids are calling it now-a-days.
Everything is a traffic source, Go with that mentality, and start exploring the top 100, 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 Alexa sites. Input your keyword, Alexa - The Web Information Company, and see how people interact on that site, can you use that traffic, can you leak it? Do you even have a God mode switch?
Coattail The Competition
This one is for competition traffic leaks, Ride them beyond the point of annoyance. If they aren't talking smack about you, you aren't pushing hard enough. Setup Google Alerts for every one of your competitor's brands, websites, and domains. You can do the overall niche, but a direct one on one comparison is more focused and has better impact.
Whenever you get a Google alert, you can do one of two things, come in as a concerned 3rd party with a point of view or directly comment as your brand.
3rd Party: Whenever something about one of your big competitors gets alerted to you, drop your brand/link and state, "yeah this is great, BUT has anyone tried YOUR BRAND, it's suppose to be a better alternative, does anyone have experience with it?" - Traffic Leaks.
Switch up the style and flow. To make sure you aren't posting the same thing over and over, try coming up with 20 new catch phrases/intros once a week as practice.
1st Person: The direct route is you come in as a representative for your brand to comment accordingly - tell the brand they did a good job and tell them as a competitor we plan on doing a better one.. You can also act as if you were to confront your competition in a public debate like a politician in one of those town-hall debates. Have your rebuttals written out, and catch phrases ready. The attack can be in the style of a question and answer in comparison to your brand.
If you want to get elaborate, do what Israel is doing in social media Israeli Government Paying Students To Make Positive Comments About Israel On Social Media Sites - YouTube. They are hiring people to comment and curve online views in the comments for positive views on Israel.
If you have a team asking questions and commenting that looks impartial and sometimes asks you the hard questions as well and you answer them with enthusiasm, while the other party doesn't even answer, it only makes your brand look more powerful.
The best scenarios are when the competition is being shitted on.
"If any of my competitors were drowning, I'd stick a hose in their mouth" - Ray Kroc - Founder of McDonald's. 1902-1984
Use the skills from the past in the new digital world. As your competition is drowning, use that advantage to ride the coattail and get new support for your brand by telling people you are completely different. At the fever high pitch of anger towards your competitors, people want answers, if you can use that mob mentality to steer press, traffic, and sales your way you're an exploiter
Obviously, if you do it wrong, there can be some consequences - I like the 3rd party approach in the beginning of campaigns. As you get more and more used to doing these guerilla warfare marketing attacks, you can evolve to using a representative from your own brand in the mix of things. Do what the politicians do, you've seen the TV ads. The controversy creates dialog, which, if you are prepared, can take full advantage of.
Traffic Leaks at the expense of your competition's reputation.
