Gumroad is hot new startup that’s taking the tech world by storm. The way Gumroad works, in a nutshell: It enables members to sell digital items on social networks. This is a fantastically simple idea, but a brilliant one. If you’re a webmaster with a product – an eBook or an online course, for example – then you know just how hard it is to sell your masterpiece on your site.
You don’t have to worry about payment processors or secure delivery anymore – Gumroad handles all of that for you. Simply integrate your Twitter or Facebook account with Gumroad and share a link to your product with your network. That’s it. Gumroad does all the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting, and then the site handles payments and issues once-monthly payments to product creators. All you must do is fill out a short form with your product information in order to generate a link:
This concept is so simplistic, but it’s gearing up to cause quite the stir among the big players on the ‘net. It’s not just for eBooks and courses. Think laterally: You could sell a link to a private post with great information in it about your niche, a set of exclusive photographs on your site, a preview of a program you’re designing, or pretty much any other digital product you can dream up.
Why is this important for traffic? Simple – If you are selling a link to a digital product and it is good enough to be sold and shared, and you’ve branded the product with your site, you’re creating visitors. The more people share your work, the more chance you have of attracting fresh, targeted visitors to your site.
Traffic generation is primarily about great content and returning visitors, and underhanded tactics don’t work anymore. Above-board activities such as forum marketing, blog commenting and guest posting are starting to come under fire now, too. They’re still effective, yes, but making a habit of trying new things to generate traffic will help you immensely in long-run.