Using Chat Rooms to Drive Traffic

If you’re around my age, you’ll remember growing up with AOL chat rooms. After school, you’d jump on your computer, wait for your dial-up connection to catch up with your enthusiasm, and sign in to a topic-specific chat room. Well, chat rooms are still very much part of the internet, and–if you offer premium content–chat rooms are actually very good places to garner traffic.

Most sites that have free chat rooms (such as Yahoo, Wireclub.com, TalkCity.com, etc.) are sectioned off into certain areas depending upon interest: you’ll have a room for movie talk, TV talk, gossip, etc.  It may be even more specific than that.  The good thing is, these rooms are ripe for the picking when it comes to promoting your website, because the users are already “pre-targeted” – that is, they fit into your target market, depending on the room they’re in.  You have a good chance of finding someone interested in watching Gossip Girl online if they’re in an “young adults girl talk” chat room that focuses on television.  Therefore, a higher ratio of people who go to your site will actually fill out the surveys, and thus you’ll make more money on fewer visitors.

What do you actually say in the rooms?  Well, the main point is not to seem like you’re spamming your link.  You don’t need to necessarily participate in the discussions (this becomes difficult if you’re promoting 15 products in 15 different rooms at the same time), but come up with a few phrases that sound good but aren’t intrusive.  If I wanted to promote the previous example of Gossip Girl, I might say “hey ladies, don’t want to barge in here or anything but they have the gossip girl shows over at gossipgirlonline.com if you miss it, just wanted to let you guys know.” This way it doesn’t come across “spammy” and you’re very unlikely to get banned/kicked from the room.

Many of the rooms have thousands of people who go through all day long, so if you’re able to find a reliable person (or program) to do the promoting of your links for you, you can get a very considerable amount of targeted traffic and make over $100/day easy using this method.