When it comes to driving traffic to a website, seemingly minor things
make a big difference. I have a fairly popular (i.e. high traffic)
website at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~navin/india/songs.
Since movie
reviews are related to the content of that site, I decided that it
would be acceptable to post a link to
http://withoutgivingthemovieaway.com on that page. Initially, I
simply put in a link that said
Check out Meeta’s Hindi Movie Reviews
This was not bad. About 3 to 5 percent of the visitors to the songs
site clicked through to this link. That gave a reasonable amount of
traffic.
Then, I had an idea. I changed to link to something that looks like
this:
Check out Meeta’s Hindi Movie Reviews (Risk, Guru, Bhagam Bhag, Dhoom-2…)
Seems like a minor change. But as soon as I made this change, traffic
instantly doubled; or maybe tripled. The click-throughs to the main
site stayed approximately the same as before. But now, in addition,
each individual movie page listed above was also drawing traffic.
Interestingly, this traffic appeared to be related to
the popularity of the movie and how recent it was.