Shooemoney - Typos As A Source Of Free Traffic

Posted by Paul B | May 13, 2008 .

Of all the ways of getting free traffic to your website probably one of the most overlooked is going for the direct type-in traffic. This is where people type in your URL to their browser. Whilst you can’t really do anything to target your own URL what you can do is take advantage of some of the bigger sites.

The unfortunate thing is that we’re all human and sometimes we do a typo. Take me for example , the other day I was on my way to visiting ShoeMoney (I always direct type in for the A-listers) miss-typed www.shooemoney.com. Just an extra “o”, nothing much. I ended up at a “doesn’t exist” page, so I typed again, and did exactly the same typo. At this point I figured if I can do it twice so can somebody else. I went straight of to my favourite domain registrar to see if the domain was taken, it wasn’t. $7 later and I was the proud owner of www.shooemoney.com I haven’t really had the time to do anything with it yet so just decided to stick a 301 redirect on it to this site. Like I said this was 2 days ago.

The result of all this is an extra 15-20 direct visitors every day! Average that out and call it 500 visitors a month. Not bad for 2 minutes work.

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7 Comments so far

Internet Marketing May 17, 2008 9:53 am

Well done to you. Its finding these domains. Adding miss spellings to your PPC to find them rocks. I have a few hundred 301 domains pointing to my sites. 500 visitors a month is an awesome win and its Shoemoney visitors, that how I came to your blog.
google web hosting review May 19, 2008 1:12 am

Dude…nice one! hmm….waht about prooblogger or probloger?

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google web hosting review May 19, 2008 1:20 am

actually, prooblogger is available, as well as proobloger. i wonder which one would be typed in more….would more people type in proobloger because they’ve already typed in two letters and so would only type in one g? hmmm….

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google web hosting review May 19, 2008 1:38 am

alright, alright, this was probably stupid, but i went with problooger.com …hmm…should i have done .net?
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Paul B May 19, 2008 10:16 am

I generally don’t try to second guess people I rely on my own crap typing! I do like your thinking though, problooger.net, 2 o’s instead of 2 g’s works for me. As for .com or .net, I know Darren’s own official site is .net but I always type .com, I imagine quite a few people are the same.

From my Adwords keywords experiment most make money terms are going for between $0.70 and $1.50 a click. It doesn’t take too many visits from people looking for ProBlogger to get your domain purchase money back at that rate.
Web Hosting Rebates July 17, 2008 9:10 pm

That’s some decent traffic for only 2 cents a day. What’s the bounce rate and average time spent on site like for this kind of traffic?
Paul B July 19, 2008 3:58 pm

It’s a bit pointless going into the specifics (all depends on your niche and your page content) but so far for me in this case it’s roughly the same as well targeted natural search traffic i.e. a couple of page views and a few minutes.