Since my last post on incent traffic, I wanted to revisit the discussion of not only where Incent traffic is today, but also site examples of successful marketing tactics involving incentivized techniques. Companies from gaming to coupons are instilling reward based advertising to help engage, increase, and ultimately monetize their users. There is limitless potential as advertisers look to monetize in this manner, and the growth of portals and in-game/online currency become more and more successful. Here are some examples of successful execution of Incent traffic that can be models to follow for your own marketing efforts.

Points and Rewards based Virtual Currency

One of the pioneers of maximizing a user base with incent traffic is Zynga. Zynga made a big splash with Farmville, and many wondered how they were able to make such profits off a free game. One of the answers is virtual currency. In one of Zynga’s games, CityVille, users can refuel their energy levels by having an interactive experience with advertiser ad placements. When your energy level decreases, ads are shown with an attached task, and once completed you reboot your energy. While it may seem like a small thing, this model of gaming where you achieve rewards or boosts for completing tasks, is becoming one of the base strategies for in game monetization.

Content Gateways / Content Unlocking

While content unlocking is becoming a more commonplace and accepted form of traffic, even two years ago this traffic method was very much unknown. Site owners and marketers with valuable content were able to see huge gains by placing an advertiser offer as a popup, to allow access to the sites content. Often time’s content can be music, torrent files, or even high quality articles that people would desire access to. Advertisers are becoming more and more open to working with the content locking industry, but it is a constant back and forth between low cost and compliancy.

Social Incentives

With the explosion of social marketing through fan pages and viral movements, applying social incentives to your market base can achieve long standing users, and high profits.  A social incentive can range from rewards for a testimonial, to offering prizes and gifts. The key is to make it an interactive experience for the person you are marketing to, not a quick bribe for publicity. Often times a good testimonial can get published or shared and hit a much bigger audience, than a paid PR piece. If you can get your customers adamantly vocal about your product or service, you can take a digital spin on word of mouth marketing to acquire new clients.

Offer walls

Monetizing through Offer Walls is a great way to get the most out of your traffic. Essentially, you are capturing leads by sending visitors to a landing page that contains CPA/CPL/CPM advertisements. What makes Offer Walls effective is that they are applicable to almost every traffic source. Ideally when the user hits the landing page, and they are prompted with multiple offers that are relevant to the page they are viewing, and therefore will fill out multiple offers. Paid survey sites are a very common place to see offer walls, because they entice the person to fill them out, in addition to prompting them with similar surveys to make more gains. Offer Walls should not be limited to survey offers however, as it is crucial to be testing new offers, and optimizing based off the results.