Where to find those Hidden Referral Gold Mines?

[Brett_Tabke]

Every now and then you will run into a link back from a site that generates high volumes of traffic. I had one the other day that did 1100 referrals in one day. It was an innocent looking little no name page, but man could they crank out the referrals.

How do you find those pages? How can you target them?

[dwedeking]

I've found discussion forums are great for this. Works specially well for hobby type products (for example my cousin owns a company that makes seats for dune buggies. A message posted on a desert discussion board sent tons of targeted traffic).

[Brett_Tabke]

I'll try to hold off the moderators dwedeking - run dude - run while you can ;-)

Url dropping is an artform - me and the mods could write a thick book. Seen it all, but an alert group of mods can catch anything. Doesn't always mean a site will do anything, but there is little that slips by.

I'm trying to figure out how you can find those little traffic power house sites. Is there a way?

[dwedeking]

Yea probably painted a HUGE red and white target circle on my chest with that post :)
(I'll be the guy in the corner at the BarConference that no one will talk to :) )

I think these "gems" really take a lot of research and time to develope. While bumping into one and dropping a URL can do a spike in your traffic, actually being involved and providing advice on the subject matter will pay in the long run. I encourage clients of ours that are in these industries to talk to people at trade shows etc and find out where they frequent online.

Another is constant monitoring of your log files. A post or link may only last a short time and your reaction time means the difference between capitalizing or being left behind. For example a project picture from one of our clients sites was posted in a forum. Instead of blocking the image usage I threw a watermark w/ domain name on the side of the image.

[agerhart]

Finding them is tough. I suppose that they can be found by searching through your stats and logs. When researching a market, or working on link popularity, take note of which sites are linked to the most. It is an obvious solution, but I think that it works.

Once you have your target sites picked, it is best to develop a relationship with them. I think that this is more than link popularity, and with sites that have high traffic, they will probably be more reluctant to link to you. You need to find a way that your site, your articles, your content, or some part of your site can fit into theirs. What is the potential connection?