
Show HN: TrafficGun – Grow Your Traffic Easily - yabbadabbadoo
https://trafficgun.com
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gscott
Our Overlord Google does not approve unless if you mark all the links
nofollow.

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yabbadabbadoo
We strongly encourage all users on our platform to nofollow all links.

TrafficGun isn't about SEO/links. Its about gaining real, live visitors.

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kposehn
Encourage instead of require? Any particular reason for that?

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yabbadabbadoo
It's in the best interest of the site owner to nofollow, so we figured
encouragement is good enough :)

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yabbadabbadoo
Hi guys, I'm the co-founder of TrafficGun - a platform to make cross-
promotions b/w bloggers easier.

Happy to answer any questions.

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kposehn
Can you provide more details on one-way traffic?

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yabbadabbadoo
Sure! If you find a site who metrics - traffic, niche etc - that you like, you
can send them a request to write about your site/product in exchange for a
fee. The fee is set by the owner of the site.

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bduerst
So it's basically a link exchange for blogs?

What's the incentive for a popular blog to link to less popular or newer
blogs?

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yabbadabbadoo
When you get a request for cross-promotion, you can see the metrics of that
site (traffic, niche, age etc). If the metrics aren't to your liking, you can
simply decline the cross-promotion request.

Also, it's actually not about exchanging links - in fact, we strongly
encourage all users on our platform to nofollow the links. This is about
teling your readers "Hey! There's this interesting blog you should check out"
\- and getting the same in return.

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coderdude
This reminds me of the highly-untargeted spam emails that I get all the time
from people asking if they can write blog posts for me. Naturally, they would
contain a lot of links to some other site. The idea has definitely been done
before. Think PayPerPost, SponsoredReviews, etc. Sounds like an excellent way
to get yourself deranked by Google.

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bikerider415
I've used those sites before. This seems different in that they're not gaming
advertising but actually exchanging like-kind content. Google doesn't derank
for that.

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yabbadabbadoo
Exactly!

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stanmancan
Just created an account and ran into a bug almost immediately.

When I added my GA account it pulled all of the websites under one specific GA
account, I'm assuming the one that has somehow been marked as the default.
Within GA I have multiple accounts, but they're all under my one google apps
account. I'm unable to see (and thus add) any website that's not grouped
within this account.

For example, pretend within GA I have the following groupings:

Personal Work Customer 1 Customer 2

Each one of these 'sub accounts' within GA contains the websites I've
associated with it. With TrafficGun, it only see's the websites under
'Personal' and not Work, Customer 1 or Customer 2.

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yabbadabbadoo
Hey Stan,

pls ping me at help@trafficgun.com with your username - and I'll be happy to
take a look at your account :)

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fowkswe
"3b. One-Way Traffic Or you could just do one-way traffic. Details inside."

Can you explain?

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kposehn
(reply here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459681))

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proksoup
Reminds me of what my first impression of LinkExchange was.

Webrings! Everyone wins. No sarcasm.

~~~
jakejake
Ah web-rings! I remember they were quite fun and interesting at first. I'd
actually click from one site to the next in a ring to check them all out. Of
course that was a time when there were limited numbers of sites for niche
topics, and discovering them was a more "word-of-mouth" thing. I was also
surfing on a 56k modem.

Not to poo-poo on what seems to be an honest effort with TrafficGun, though. I
don't know if the sharing spirit of website owners is the same as it was back
then, but it would be nice.

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kristopolous
It's how it works. All the star, follow, reblog platforms basically expose
your presence on that persons "blog" in a push manner.

Twitter, tumblr, pinterest, instagram ... They all have a number of indirect
ways of this.

And as someone who has had to do icky marketing on these platforms, doing that
process is the best way to grow.

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matt_morgan
What makes "3a. Cross-Promote" something other than a zero-sum game? Does it
presume that most people have more time to devote to reading stuff online?

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yabbadabbadoo
_Does it presume that most people have more time to devote to reading stuff
online?_

On a niche-by-niche basis, yes. For instance, I keep a list of personal
finance blogs that I check out regularly. When one of those blogs features a
personal finance site I haven't seen before, I check that out as well and
consider adding it to my list.

One of the best ways to grow your blog traffic long-term is getting other
bloggers in your niche to write about you. TrafficGun makes this easy.

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kajecounterhack
> "Submit your site(s) to TrafficGun and we'll verify it's metrics - "

s/it\'s/its/r

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captn3m0
>You can also drive one-way traffic just to your site.

How does this happen? I'm guessing it would involve payments, is that so?

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yabbadabbadoo
Yes. If you find a site who metrics - traffic, niche etc - that you like, you
can send them a request to write about your site/product in exchange for a
fee. The fee is set by the owner of the site.

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kristopolous
A web-ring. How retro.

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semmem1
Any cost to this?

