Tricks for Getting Page Views: View Trapping (aka: LinkJacking)
By Tracy on November 19th, 2009Posted In: Blog
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WARNING: THIS BLOG IS FULL OF ADVICE.
Well, How-To's, Hacks, and General Discussion, really; but also alot of guidance on how to do things, and on what not to do. It's what I've learned, and what I'm sharing with you.
Much of it is solid. The rest requires more be said. Please weigh what you learn here with other insights to see what works best for you. Thank you.
For more tips and tutorials, see: http://www.reddit.com/r/makecomics
Posted In: Blog
Online, there are many techniques to encourage people to visit your website, page or blog, one of which is the very popular practice of page view ‘Trapping’.
Trapping, as the name implies, consists of inconspicuously presenting links to your site. This definition is of course an oversimplification of the term, but in its most basic demonstration entails discreetly placing your URL or peralink in the contents of another site.
View Trapping is not the same as adding a link to your site in the comments section of (say, for instance) a forum. In a forum or in a blog’s comment section, moderators and site owners frequently invite you to optionally add a link to your website as you register/leave your feedback on their site. View Trapping on the other hand, is a usually uninvited (though not always unwelcome) medium of promoting your own site on someone else’s.
As with hunting, view traps work best when they are placed in content that viewers are already interested in. General examples of view trapping may be found in the comments section of most Reddit.com submissions, where frequently, while viewers read through the responses of a given article, they may stumble upon a comment that also contains a link that is ideally related to the subject matter at hand.
As an example of how view traps work, please see this page. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/a6163/whats_the_weirdest_thing_you_got_in_trouble_for/
Welcome back. During that foray into Reddit, you will have noted that among the comments to that article, were several links to other sites, a few of which you may have been curious enough to click yourself.
It is important to note that as a viewer you may have appreciate that even a vague description of what the link was about was included by the trapper. As you set your own view traps you may be surprised to know that when it comes to visiting websites, most web users generally do not like to be surprised. Partly because most web users are visiting sites while at work or while using a shared or public computer.
Over all, view trapping is a logical, practical, and mostly effective way to get visitors to your site and share your web content. Happy hunting!
