How To Get Long Lasting Traffic From Wikipedia

I know right now everyone is crazy about Twitter including my self but on my music site Music Video Cast , Twitter doesn’t drive any traffic to that site at all. This might be due to the fact that I haven’t incorporated Twitter into the marketing efforts for Music Video Cast. None the less one of the largest traffic sources to that site is Wikipedia. I’ve been experimenting with Wikipedia for over a year now and I’ve pretty much figured out what works and what doesn’t.

The key to getting traffic from Wikipedia is to simply post external and reference links. I’ve spent quite some time posting up many different types of links to see which ones would get removed and which ones would remain. In general as long as the content is related to the topic the links will usual remain on the Wiki page. Now of course there are some exceptions to the rule for instance if your linking to copyrighted content the link will quickly be removed by a moderator, Try to keep post rejected links to a minimum be eventually those links will automatically get remove and if they will you’re a spammer they will ban you by your IP address so you can’t edit and Wikipedia articles anymore. Judging by how quickly I’ve seen links removed from Wikipedia I figure there has to be at least a thousand moderators at any given time of the day to handle the millions of submission they receive daily.

Since my site is music related I was mostly on the artist’s song pages. Once I started getting traffic I needed somewhere to send that traffic which is when I decided to start promoting music affiliate programs specifically ringtone affiliate programs. I’ve had some success with driving traffic to ringtone affiliate programs but it’s a bit tricky, for instance I send traffic to ringtone affiliate programs for Fontonia, Thumplay and SendMeMobile. I split test to see which one converted the best and to also see what links would get removed. Fontonia turned out to be the preferred choice because they had the highest payout.

The moderators removed all the links that pointed directly to ringtone sites, so that was out of the question. I found a way around this by adding a song section to Music Video Cast song whenever a new song was released I would write a small review about it then add affiliate links to purchase the song, album or ringtone. I would then go to Wikipedia place the link in the “Reference” or “External Links” section with the title “Artist X new Single Review” or something to that effect. These links were never removed and over time generated referrals through affiliate programs as well as more visitors to my site and  more click through on ads.

So just like Pay Per Click or anything else you have to have a landing page of some sorts to send the the visitors to , The sites that usually get the most traffic from Wikipedia are usually blogs and news sites, whenever I would make a blog post about a artist and then list it on Wikipedia those link would never get removed. There are rules to blogs as well though for instance your site has to be a top level domain (i.e. yourwebsite.com) and not yourwebsite.blogspot.com, yourwebsite.typepad.com or yourwebsite.wordpress.com. I use to do this with my old blogspot blog and those links always got removed, in some rare cases they remain due to moderator oversight.

One of my colleagues drives a large amount of traffic to his video game blog using the same technique I use by posting video game reviews then submitting it to Wikipedia. The advantage of using Wikipedia as a traffic source is that it’s instant, there is no need for you to rank in the search engines for any keywords since Wikipedia has done all the hard work for you.

Music Video Cast is currently averaging 1500 referrals monthly for iTunes now of course those referrals are usually only 20 to 70 cents each. I also average 150 referrals for Amazon MP3. The cool thing about Amazon is if that if you send visitors to purchase a product and they don’t but end up purchasing later on you still receive a commission. I think but I’m not sure I think that last for ninety days so if they buy a book next week and then a DVD 3 weeks after that you still get credit even though you originally sent them there to go purchase a MP3.

The amount of traffic you can receive from Wikipedia is not to be taken lightly and even though Twitter is the new marketing craze don’t forget include what still works into your website promotion efforts.

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