Critical Points For Success

inding the right kind of site is critical to the success of this method for a few reasons. When I first started setting up siphons I used to contact any and all website owners in my niche. Sending out tons and tons of content, only to later realize I wasn't actually getting much traffic from the content.

Waste of time. Waste of money.

Then I reverse engineered everything and started setting up siphons that get hundreds and thousands of visitors per month from just 1 piece of content.

Not a waste of time. Not a waste of money.

The obvious choice is that the site has to have traffic, right? The sheer amount of traffic your siphon has isn't the only factor in bringing you traffic though. Obviously if the site has more traffic, there's more potential for traffic, but that doesn't guarantee high amounts of traffic to your site.

Critical Point #1 - Website Layout

Why spend time pouring over where your content is going? Why not just spray and pray? Spending a bit of time really doing your research into the right kind of websites means you can put up significantly fewer siphons and get the same results as if you went out and put up 50 siphons on 50 websites.

Consider these 2 potential websites to set siphons up on.

Based on my experience, your overall exposure level will be significantly higher by going with site B for a couple reasons. Yes it gets less traffic, but that piece of content will be on their homepage for a longer period of time, it will be less likely to disappear in their archives, it will have more social engagement and it will show up on their "popular post" section more frequently than on the site that's posting 100+ pieces of content per month.

Site B will also probably get more social shares and have a high chance of "going viral." I hate the term going viral. Let's say, gaining a significant amount of traction on social media - and not going "viral." The piece of content on Site B will be much more prominently displayed - take for example these 2 websites:

The first is an example of a Site A - SiteProNews.com, the second screenshot is an example of a Site B - BlogTyrant.com.

As you can see, SiteProNews has TONS of content for you to get your siphon lost in. That's not saying they're a bad resource (they're pretty solid, I've used them before) - it's saying they have tons of traffic to lots of pieces of content. But look at site B, Blog Tyrant. Content is updated pretty infrequently (at most once per week) and it's prominently displayed on the front page, with large excerpts for the users to get hooked into the content immediately.

When you put together a great headline and gripping content (which we'll talk about in the next section) you'll have people engaged immediately. Give them fewer choices. Don't make your siphon have to compete with 20 other pieces of content. Make it center stage.

Critical Point #2 - Social Engagement

Social engagement is crucial for a couple reasons.

Reason 1: There is a higher chance that your piece of content will be shared -reaching an audience beyond just that blog but potentially penetrating even more places on the web.

Reason 2: Social Engagement means readers who care. When I craft content or get content crafted for a traffic siphon I consider this: Would I share this content with my friends? Is it good enough? Having quality content is just 1 aspect though. Having readers who are actively engaged and sharing the content socially, means they are actually READING the content, care about the content, and sharing the content. These are the type of visitors you want coming to your website/offer in the same niche. You want people who care, who share stuff socially and will be engaged.

Social engagement is a great sign of the health of a website. If users are consistently sharing content socially, it means the content is good. It means they get legitimate, real, users who are reading and digesting the content.

If you take a look at Site B (BlogTyrant.com) you'll see tons of social engagement, thousands. People share the content like crazy, they email it, they tweet it, it gets around. SiteProNews.com? Not as much. There's just way too much to get a lot of shares.

Critical Point #3 - Comments

Comments are a great sign of the health of a blog and the engagement of the user base. Sometimes sites get lots of pageviews and not too many comments, but it's rare. If you're consistently seeing blog post on the site that don't have comments (or the comments are extremely low quality) then it's time to move on. Look at BlogTyrant.com - each piece of content is getting between 50-100 comments on it. That's epic. And the comments are legitimate comments, not spam. They're people who actually care about the content on the site and are engaging with the writer. That's the kind of traffic you want on YOUR site, so look for those kinds of sites to setup your siphon on.

Another great sign is that the author of the post is actually responding to the comments. When the author is responding, it means overall engagement goes up on the site. People care about the content more, they trust it more, they value it more. They're going to be more likely to share and the overall weight of your siphon will be significantly higher than a piece of content that gets few comments and no real conversation.

Critical Point #4 - Content

This should go without saying. You want to ENSURE the site has good content on it. You absolutely CANNOT find sites with poor content. You want to find writers. You want to find people who care about their blogs, who truly love the content they put up and are willing to stand behind it. It will be obvious just spending a couple minutes looking around. Look at a few of their post and notice how long they are. This is a big determining factor. If you see post that are all the same length or are short (500 worders) move on to the next one.

When you're building your siphons you want to ensure you are building quality traffic. Quality traffic comes from quality blogs. Let's say you have a product around woodworking plans - you want great traffic that's interested in woodworking. To find quality traffic like this, you want to find quality websites with quality related content. Again, and I can't stress this enough, spend time to really get to know the site. This doesn't take long, but setting up quality siphons on quality websites means you don't need to setup as many, and it means they'll drive more traffic.

Critical Point #5 - Traffic

There's a reason I made the "Traffic" the last critical point. Yes it's obviously important for a website to have traffic, otherwise there is nothing to siphon from. I didn't want this to be the number 1 point because people would use this as their sole metric for success when it's simply not true. As mentioned in critical point number 1, you're looking for overall website aesthetics, not just traffic. I went over the difference between those 2 website examples to show you how you can get more traffic from a siphon setup on the correct kind of site than just sheer traffic numbers alone.

That being said traffic is important. A siphon won't work on a site that gets 100, 1,000 or even 10,000 visitors per day. Ideally you want to find sites getting 50,000 visitors per day. That's the sweet spot for traffic. This isn't ALWAYS necessary thought because many times sites have a smaller readership but one that's very engaged, or they only post content once every few days, so you'll reach a larger audience.

We're going to go over exactly how to find those siphons in the very next step but you do need to keep in mind that you're looking for high traffic websites.

I usually am looking for sites that get a minimum of 500,000 visitors per month. That's around 16,000 visitors a day. Again this is my minimum usually. I usually go after a bit higher on the traffic side but this gives you room to flex. The 500,000 visitors per month seems to be the sweet spot before they never need guest post again. After this number many seem to have full time staff writers and won't accept guest post. This is not always true though (I've got some sites in the bonus offer that get tens of millions of pageviews per month and accept guest post!) but I have noticed it gets harder to find guest posting opportunities as the sites get larger.

This can be tough and many of you may want to just start getting siphons setup and going, that's fine. Still, you want to set 500,000 as your minimum for amount of traffic.

Quick Recap

Let's review the critical points one more time before we begin finding and setting up our siphons. Remember we want our siphons to have all 4 of these elements.

Critical Point #1 - Website Layout

Critical Point #2 - Social Engagement

Critical Point #3 - Comments

Critical Point #4 - Content

Critical Point #5 - Traffic

Finding websites that hit all these metrics is key. It's a sign that the website is healthy, has a dedicated user base who is actively interested in the content that is being produced and will actually get read, meaning you actually get quality traffic. Seem like a lot of work? It's really not. Plus many times you'll be setting up multiple siphons on 1 site (I can't tell you how many times I've emailed webmasters with a few content titles and they want ALL of them, to be drip fed over the weeks to come. Jackpot.)

Now that you know what you're actually looking for, it's time to find them. I'm going to go over the steps I take to find my siphons. You may shake things up a bit when you go to find yours, but these are the resources I've used in the past.