AdSense Traffic Tip: More on cross-promotion

Yesterday's posting about generating traffic via cross-promotion (in this case, participating in a book promotion for The Ultimate Lead Generation Plan that supports Habitat for Humanity) was a bit short, so I want to discuss this concept in a bit more detail.

Although I'm participating in a big promotion, most cross-promotion opportunities are smaller and easier to handle. All you really have to do is ask the other party for an exchange of information. One of the easiest ways to do this is to ask the other party for permission to reprint an article or posting from their site on yours. They're usually quite willing to do so providing you give them proper credit and a link back to their site. Article directories do this on a bigger scale, of course, but this kind of cross-promotion is more personal and more exclusive.

Another great way to do cross-promotion is with interviews. Find a willing interviewee, send them a list of ten questions to answer about themselves, their site and/or their topic and you'll get back enough material for one or two postings of your own. They get publicity, you get content — a perfect marriage of convenience. (I've done this before and been both the interviewee and the interviewer. It can be a lot of fun. I'm still willing to do it, too, if anyone's interested.)

Successful cross-promotions work best when both parties are interested in the promotion and both derive benefits from it. This book promotion that I'm participating in benefits me because it exposes more people to my book and gets me more subscriptions to my AdSense newsletter. But it also benefits the book author because it exposes his book to a wider audience, the readers of this blog. Similarly, when Andrew Bourland asked me to reprint one of the articles from my newsletter in his blog, I said sure — again, more publicity for my site and some new content (because those articles aren't available anywhere else yet) for his blog. A win-win situation all around.

A while back I came across a term for doing these kinds of win-win cross-promotions: “loverage”. You can read about it in the article Getting Your Book to #1 at Amazon.com. That particular use was in the context of book promotion (hence why I found it — authors are always looking for good ways to promote their books) but it applies just as well to getting traffic to your site/blog. It makes for interesting reading.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google. Subscribe to his AdSense newsletter for more tips and advice on AdSense and content monetization.

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