What naughty ways are there of driving traffic?
- by Tom Wright
OK, so this is purely for my intellectual curiosity and I'm not interested in illegal methods (no botnets please).
But say, for instance, that some organisation incentivised link sharing in a bid to drive publicity. How could I drive traffic to my link? Obviously I could spam all my friends on social networking sites, which is what they want me to do, but that doesn't sound as fun as trying to game the system. (Not that I necessarily dispute the merit of this particular campaign.)
The ideas I've come up with so far (in order of increasing deviousness) include:
Link-dropping - This is too close to what they want me to do to be devious, but I've done it here (sorry) and I've done it on Twitter. I'm subverting it slightly by focusing on the game aspects rather than their desired message.
AdWords - Not very devious at all, but effectively free with the vouchers I've accrued. That said, I must be pretty poor at choosing keywords, because I've seen very few hits (~5) so far.
Browser testing websites - The target has a robots txt which prevents browsershots from processing it, but I got around this by including it in an iframe on a page that I hosted.
But my creative juices have run dry I'm afraid. Does anyone have any cheeky/devious/cunning/all-of-the-above idea for driving traffic to my page?