What do you Say to Potential Clients?

I’ve had a few people ask me what I tell clients when they are interested in engaging my services.

Quite often, it varies. What you really need to do is dig down and find out what the client wants/needs.

In some cases, white or grey hat methods will work quite fine and in others, you’ll need darker black hat stuff. However, a good black hat will combine them to get the best of both worlds.

I’ll leave them unnamed but here’s an e-mail I sent out to a potential client today. Perhaps it’ll give you an idea of what you need to do for your business.

Ok. I’ve spent some time looking at your site and thinking about what would work to get your more traffic/subscribers.

You mentioned that you’d like to have 1 million subscribers.

If you assume that you’ll get a 5% signup rate of people that come to the website that subscribe, that means that you are looking at needing traffic of 20 million hits/users.

That’s a significant sum of traffic by any stretch of the imagination so to accomplish this I would think you’d need to hit it from several fronts:

1. I mentioned bittorrent when we talked last week. I still think this is a good opportunity to drive some traffic. The basic idea behind it is that you either A) watermark a video or B) put a small audio clip in an audio file advertising your site or C) put a text file in the download so that the user sees it and will hopefully go to that site. Black hat method would be to password protect the download file. Of course, this will get the bittorrent account banned so you’ve got to create a lot of accounts for this method to be effective. Also, this is an ONGOING method of traffic generation. It’s not something that is a “fire and forget” type of approach.
2. The next thing that can generate a significant sum of traffic would be to use link bait also known as viral content. The basic idea is you get something that people want to link to and it creates a lot of traffic for you. This is one of those methods that you can use to drive traffic and don’t have to constantly maintain it afterwards. I am not an expert in linkbait so if you want to do that I’d recommend checking out seomoz.org - those are good folks there and they’re great at that.
3. Now, another method that can be done - and it’s arguably annoying to people - is comment/trackback spam. This is basically using a program that will go out and put comments on relevant blogs. It’s done for a few reasons: A) drives traffic from people clicking on the links B) gets lots of backlinks C) helps you rank a bit higher in the search engines for organic search traffic. Of course, it annoys the hell outta people so if you choose this method, I recommend you use a third party who can do the spamming and you can feign ignorance
4. Along the same lines of getting search engine traffic, is the issue of your song pages. There’s no content on them! Amazingly you manage to rank about #7 for <snip> which isn’t bad. To fix this, you could do a few things. The first is a change to the title of the page. Put the <snip - name of your site> at the END of the title rather than at the beginning. This will help in ranking a tad higher. The second thing that could be done would be slightly shady but could work I think - and that would be to scrape search engine results and display them on the page - maybe hide them under a little plus button to expand it so users don’t normally see it. You could claim that it’s a meta search engine for hip hop or something along those lines. The idea is to give the search engines some food to feed upon (content).
5. Of course, you also have seen the value of spamming MySpace although, I must admit, that has become much more risky in recent months because MySpace has actually gone after some spammers on their network and sued them. Whether they’ll win the cases or not remains to be seen but I usually avoid stuff that will get me into legal battles
6. Having said that about MySpace, however, there are a lot of other networks out there that are similar to myspace that you could target and probably get backlinks as well as comments on their videos/blog pages/etc. This would require a bit of research to figure out the best networks to target as well as how to create a lot of accounts on that network, etc.
7. Social Bookmarking - I think you could probably start submitting your pages to the social networks. This could be automated so that new songs are automatically bookmarked. Not only does this provide you with backlinks but it can also generate a bit of traffic from people that use the social networks.

Those are a few traffic generation methods that you can use. Many of them will require programming of scripts and what not to tie into your site and promote it in the way you want to.

The basic essence of black hat is to find a method that works manually and then automate that process. Arguably, it’s the quantity that will win out many times over the quality.

G-Man