Yikes! Learning from spammers? Am I nuts? Nope (at least I don't think so!). Read on, and you'll see why I feel we can learn a lesson from spammers. Spammers operate on the idea of quantity over quality. They produce huge numbers of auto generated pages filled with ads. Each page contains specific niche keywords and is blasted out on blogs, websites, comments, etc. A spammer's goal is to get as many pages out there as possible and promote them, so enough people happen to visit and click on ads, generating revenue for the spammer or their client. They play the numbers: more pages = more keywords = more visitors; someone will click the ads and make them money. They're all about bottom feeding.
So what can you take away from this?
That a substantial amount of traffic can be generated from playing the numbers. What I mean by this is creating large numbers of content targeting specific keywords and getting this content out through every channel you can (e.g., search engines, blog search engines, directories, vertical search engines).
Spammers use bad content, but the same techniques would work without any ethical violations if you used real content. The question would then become how the hell do you generate so much original content? Make it short. Create a blog, post a lot on every possible niche keyword combination in your industry, make sure the content is legitimate, and promote this content everywhere. Pick up a bunch of traffic on very niche searches and generate good information at the same time.
This isn't for everyone, but will work as long as you can produce enough usable content.
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