Traffic Secrets My Grandpa Whispered

I built my first website when I was 14 years old, this is back in 96, and it was nothing more then a basic “Hello World” sentence with a picture of Bugs Bunny. My grandfather taught me how to build that website.

You see my grandfather was WebMD before WebMD was even around. He ran what I now know as an information marketing company in the niche of medical research. Why does all of this matter? Well the Internet was an entirely different beast back in those days.

There were no PPC programs, affiliate marketing, Google, Yahoo, or even MSN. Getting traffic to your websites was a whole different ballgame. This blog series is how my grandfather made things work back before there was such a thing as SEO.

Where Did The Traffic Come From?

What I’m about to share with you can only be found in a handful of places and possibly not in any books, ebooks, or courses. Frankly, because most Internet marketers are either not “old enough” in the industry to know these things or because just about everyone is barking up the same tree (SEO, PPC, Banners).

Even I, am only privy to this information from a second hand source…

Back before there was any of the traffic methods we were familiar with there were what is called newsgroups. These newsgroups were a lot like what we know today as “forums” and were usually on the Usenet system.

Basically, these were groups of people who shared a like interest in specific topics ranging from science and mathematics to comic books and porn. In order to read these newsgroup messages you needed to subscribe to them with a newsreader, which is much like an RSS reader.

If you had a website (almost purely hobby based back then) about let’s say “tomato growing,” then you would look for and subscribe to gardening or tomato growing newsgroups. You would then share what information you had and could also tell people about your website.

From here you would be basically hoping that your other newsgroup readers would start talking about your website with their friends. If you were lucky you could find someone else with a website and you both would link to each other in hopes to “recycle” some of your traffic to each others websites.

The Birth Of Webrings

Some brilliant webmasters started noticing how effective it was to cross link their sites with other websites on the same topic. They then started to create what’s known as a webring where a whole group of related sites were all interlinked to each other.

To be a part of the webring, each site has a common navigation bar; it contains links to the previous and next site. By clicking next (or previous) repeatedly, the surfer will eventually reach the site they started at; this is the origin of the term webring. However, the click-through route around the ring is usually supplemented by a central site with links to all member-sites; this prevents the ring from breaking completely if a member site goes offline.

Eventually webrings started getting to big and gave birth to directories and bookmark lists of all sorts. Which is where Yahoo comes into the picture. Yahoo and Best Of The Web were two of the biggest all purpose web directories.

Fast forward a little more and you start to get directories that are so big people start needing search engines to find the specific sites or topics they want in these directories. I remember before Google I was a huge AltaVista fan but then eventually Google came into the picture and they were just so much better at finding the RIGHT results faster.

Now with search engines having so many millions of websites indexed we have search engine optimizers to help us get our websites to the top of the search engines. My question is… What’s next?

It’s said that Google indexes millions of new webpages per day, so when do they get too big that something new is needed to manage them?

We’re already seeing social media marketing and social bookmarking. Is that the future? We’ll just be able to connect directly with our markets through sites like Facebook and Twitter? I don’t know but I do know that I can setup all kinds of alerts to “hear” when people are asking about my topics and then respond directly to them… Which is quite effective!

Anyhow, those are the secrets my grandfather whispered to me and he swears they’ll still work today. He says if he wasn’t so happy tending to his Bonzai tree’s, that he could build a website, find some webring partners, and be getting plenty of traffic within 1 week that he’d never need to use PPC or SEO.

Now a days we have affiliate programs too so it’s even more incentive for related websites to link to you. All you have to do is go out there and start setting it up. However, like everything else nothing happens from reading alone. It’s not hard either, all it takes is action and action builds confidence.

In the next part of this series I’ll tell you the secret my grandfather told me about how he maximized the traffic he got from being a webring member.

Go Bigger,
Justin Brooke

Tagged as: newsgroups, old school traffic techniques, usenet, webrings