Over the next few weeks I’m going to be sharing with you some of my favorite ways of getting Traffic. This special Traffic Series will cover many popular methods of attracting visitors to your sites and I hope to introduce you to a couple of new ones which you may not have tried out before. In this post I’m going to deal exclusively with Document Sharing Sites, these little gems are often neglected but they are one of my favorite traffic generation techniques.
Traffic Series 1 : Document Sharing Sites
Document Sharing sites are directories and are similar to Article Directories. What makes these sites such a useful part of your Traffic Arsenal is the fact that so few people have caught-on to how effective they can. It’s a far less competitive environment than Article Marketing and you have a far higher chance of getting your content seen and read.
Some Advantages of Document Sharing Sites
- Many of these websites allow you to embed live links within the documents.
- There is No Review Process – you simple submit your content and you’re good to go. Sites like EzineArticles usually take a week to review your content before a decision is made on whether to accept it or not.
- Duplicate Content is permitted – of course it’s easier to rank for unique content but you can also save a lot of time by submitting the same documents to numerous directories.
- Images are allowed – you can add clickable images to your documents. This will increase the overall quality of your work and lead to a higher click-through rate to your site.
Here are some of the Document Sharing Sites which I use.
This list is by no means exhaustive but I think you’ll agree there’s more than enough there to get your going!
scribd.com docstoc.com
smashwords.com esnips.com
4shared.com en.calameo.com
docs.zoho.com issuu.com
pdfcast.org gazhoo.com
keepandshare.com slideshare.net
crocodoc.com wepapers.com
I’m aware that many of you reading this post will have blogs of your own. So what about this for an idea…when your finished slaving away on your latest addition to your site why not open up a copy of it on your computer, do some simple edits and export it as a pdf. Instantly you will have re-purposed you content and you can upload it to these kind of sites and make it available to a whole new audience.
The beauty of Document Sharing Sites is that you can use html links throughout your work, these could be linking back to your site, your squeeze page or any affiliate offer you are promoting.
Imagine that you write one blog post per week and convert it into a quality article/document. You submit it each and every week to half a dozen high traffic document directories. Do you think this will lead to an increase in Traffic hitting your site? Of course it would, but it’s important to be consistent with this sort of method.
You will not see 100,000 visitors minutes after posting your first document, like anything else it will take time but little by little, as the weeks go by you will see results.
Document Sharing Tips
Document Length : Anything between 500 – 1000 words is perfect.
Font Size : Go for something easy to view such as font size 14-16.
Document SEO : Save your finished document with a title which exactly matches the keyword phrase which you want to rank for.
Links : Use anchor-text links around 3 times in any document. Don’t go overboard on the links as you’ll only come across as pushy…and we don’t want that!
Give Your Document Sharing Efforts and Instant Boost
As soon as your documents are online you’ll need to give them an instant backlink boost to help them on their way. Nothing too hectic is required here, any of the methods following methods will work fine and help your documents start attracting traffic immediately.
- RSS Feeds
- Blog Comments
- Social Bookmarking
- Pinging
So there you have it, it’s a pretty simple method for getting your content out there in front of a potentially huge amount of visitors. It’s a great way of re-using and re-purposing your blog writing efforts and give these entries a new lease of life on Document Sharing Sites.
I hope you give this a shot and try it out over a couple of weeks. It’s one of my favorite Traffic Methods and that’s why I put it first in this special Traffic Series.
So that’s it, thanks for reading and I’ll be back soon with another great Free way of driving Traffic to your websites.
All the Best – Noel.
Some great info here Noel and not something i’d thought of doing.
I’m sure we’re all finding getting traffic is not easy – I’m certainly finding that, so anything new (or new to me at least) is worth exploring.
I look forward to reading further posts from you on traffic generation.
Thanks
Chris
Hi Chris,
Good to hear from you! Yup, Traffic is something we all want more of. So many different methods out there and I hope to share some useful ones here. But with everything Consistency is the Key..
Hope all is well with you.Thanks for your comment,
Noel.
Great Post as always Noel 🙂
Are you completing these jobs yourself or have you outsourced them? Would love your feed back if you have found a good / great / awesome outsourcig service.
Cheers
Paul
Hey Paul, hows it going?
I outsource this kinda work although I still do it sometimes just so I understand how to explain it to my employee. I don’t use contractors, did a fair bit of research and was advised by a few people to hire my own person to help me out. There is an initial learning curve (which is to be expected) but it is a great help, especially keeping on top of tasks such as this.
Are you thinking about getting some help? Let me know and I’ll fill you in with more details on how I set it up.
Cheers,
Noel.
Hey Noel
Thank you very much that would be great 🙂
Cheers
Paul
No worries Paul – I’ll send one to your gmail account later today. Talk to ya then;)
Hi Noel,
Good post. Document sharing is something that has been around for a while but I have never really tried it to any great extent. You have reminded me to test this out again.
Thanks
Roger
Cheers Roger,
I think its well worth a look, thanks for dropping by;)
Best – Noel.
Hi Noel,
So today is a good day because I’ve learned something new. Thanks for the great info, keep’em coming 😉
Thanks Ehud,
Glad you got something out of it.
All the Best,
Noel.
Finally, a clearer explanation of what you meant by article syndication. Noel, how do you increase backlinking with RSS feeds?
Hi Miggy,
Doc sharing is different to Article Syndication but there are similarities…I like Doc Sharing better, find it easier to navigate and see results faster which is what it’s all about:)
With the RSS Feeds, some sites allow you to publish your Docs as part of a Feed – it just helps everything move along faster. The search engines pick up on your new Documents more quickly and it’ll start seeing visitors sooner.
Thanks for your comment,
Noel.
Would you explain to me how article syndication works, for learning purposes and all that? And this particular strategy is pretty interesting: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/the-backlinking-strategy-that-works/ Can we incorporate document sharing in this model? I don’t like article submissions in article directories, also using extra blogs in LiveJournal, and Blogger.
This would be great if everyone new about a better backlinking strategy than article submissions.
Hey Miggy,
For Article Syndication the best thing I could do for you is point you in the direction of Alexa Smith over on the Warrior Forum. On this thread she goes into some detail all about it. Grab a coffee and spend half an hour browsing her threads and you’ll get a great understanding of the whole process;) I’ll blog about if here if you like but Alexa will help you out for now..
I had a very quick look at your link and sure I’m sure you could incorporate Document Sharing into that strategy. What he’s proposing you build there is what I’d call a “Mini-Net”. It’s like a spiders web of websites, blogs, articles etc. all on different layers which interlink and point back to you Main Site. If you Can do something like this then it would be awesome but it will take some work, as you can see from his post.
Article Submissions IMO are worthless for backlinking, sure it’s a link but Google knows all about Spinners nowadays and doesn’t rate those links. That’s why in the Mini Net you would have Articles on a separate layer to the Web 2.0 and other sites. Used as part of an overall strategy they can still be useful but not on their own…
Hope that helps?
Talk more later,
Noel.
Great Article Noel,
I have been thinking about using this method and it is great to see your thoughts and tips on it. The list of site you have included is awesome. I am looking forward to your next Traffic Series post. BTW is this a new template? It looks great.
:)Sylvia
Hi Sylvia,
Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed it. Ya, that list is only the tip of the ice-berg really but as of last week they are all active and accepting new pieces…I’ve some pretty cool Traffic Tips coming up, some of which you’ll be familiar with but with a little twist to make things interesting;)
No, this is the same theme – I’ve probably just tidied up the site since your last visit:)
Thanks for dropping by, hope all is well with you!
Noel.
Hi Noel,
Thanks for sharing this tips. I have actually
used this document sharing method before.
I posted it on scribd and almost instantly, I
had a rush of readers reading the document.
But back then I was a little inexperienced and
the links that I had in my documents were nothing
more than affiliate links.
What would be great now is to drive that traffic
either to our squeeze page or blog. Thanks for
sharing this method, I will give this a go again
when I have the time. But this time driving it to
my squeeze page/blog.
-Muhsin
That’s exactly it Muhsin – and try and do it on a consistent basis. 1 Article posted on 10 directories per week is 40 Articles per month! Set it and Forget it! I think this type of task is best done in a block, say if allocate a couple of hours once a week to upload you pdfs. No need to be wasting time everyday uploading to one site at a time…
Hopefully you’ll see some good results this time.
Thanks,
Noel.
I’ve used document sharing for a while now and it’s a bit different from basic article marketing. You have more control over what you put up, like links to various places, pictures, infographics – you name it. The process of getting the content up is a little more involved than standard article marketing and there are no automation tools (at least none that I know of) that can blast your document out to all the document sharing sites. So this will put a lot of your competition off. Having said that, I’ve seen some junk in some document sharing sites and phony looking reviews which are just the salespage of a product rehashed. Of the sites I have used I would say scribd sends most traffic to my sites
Hi Adrian,
Good info there, thanks for sharing it with us. Your right it is a bit different to Article Marketing and I like the greater control it gives us. Sure, it takes a bit of time uploading the documents but I think if you allocated a few hours, one morning per week you should be right;) Ya, Scribd is the “mother of all…” document sites – can see some nice traffic coming from there.
Cheers for that,
Noel.
Hi Noel, thanks for the informative post. I wanted to get involved with document sharing a while ago but never got to it. I was implementing some other traffic generation methods. I kinda forgot about it, so thanks for the reminder, this will go on to my to do list for the near future.
Best wishes,
Gerald.
Sure thing Gerald, no worries… The path I’m trying to take with Traffic Generation is to just stick with a few methods and really try to implement them to the max. For too long I was the kind of guy who would try something for a week and if I didn’t see a torrent of traffic hitting the site I would abandon it and move on to the “Next Big Thing”. I know now that’s not the way to build a business and hope to avoid it from now on..
All the Best,
Noel.
I’d be the first to admit I’ve been very slack in the article syndication department and whilst I have heard for some time that Scribd et al can help you repurpose your content I never really got around to trying it.
Would love to see a case study with some real numbers just to give an idea of how powerful or useful it really can be.
I guess it goes to show, that sometimes when we have done all the hard work (writing great posts) we do not do the last part that can really bring in the majority of traffic. It’s the same content just being spread into many more different circles – it makes so much sense yet for some reason I’ve overlooked it for far too long.
Maybe you’ve just inspired me to give it a go! Thanks for the list too, it’s a great help.
Dee Kumar
Thanks Dee,
Glad you liked it – hopefully it might help you re-purpose your content and get some extra value out of it!
All the Best,
Noel.
Hi Noel
A good post and certainly one of the things I wants to try out. I’m currently working on a membership site and this will be one of the ways I try to drive traffic to it once it’s up and running – next 2 weeks I think.
I’m going to add you to my Google Reader so I can keep in touch with what you’re doing – you’re one to follow 🙂
Brad
Hey Brad,
A membership site? Hmmm…sounds interesting. Must keep an eye out for that.
Your really blazing a trail lately – well done;)
Noel.
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