SumoMe’s Genius New Tool Could Give You Tons of Free Traffic

What if you could get hundreds—or even thousands—of new readers to your site every day for free? I feel like a snake-oil salesman writing that lede, but that’s what SumoMe is promising with a new tool called Discover, and it’s hard to not be intrigued.

Discover is simple: It’s an Outbrain-style widget you install on your site that contextually recommends articles from your publication or other sites. If a reader clicks on a link to another site, you earn credits that can be used to essentially buy traffic back from other sites that have installed the program.

“It’s a modern-day link exchange,” explained Noah Kagan, SumoMe’s founder. “A lot of people have traffic, and they want to be on other sites so that they can get more traffic, and this is the stupidest, easiest way to get that done right away.”

Anyone can access Discover for free, including the 190,000 sites that already use SumoMe’s suite of traffic-growth optimization tools.

But there’s still one lingering question that could hurt Discover’s appeal: Why would you want to send readers away from your site?

Kagan offered one plausible answer. Once someone has already visited your site to read an article and subscribe to your newsletter, it’s worth sending that reader to another site in exchange for a new reader who will also convert. In theory, it’s a win-win.

However, there’s a catch. To unlock all of Discover’s features—like the ability to customize how multiple articles look on your site—you need to upgrade to the Pro version, which comes with a 14-day free trial.

Still, for many marketers, Discover is at least worth testing out. No matter how much traffic you have, you always want more.[note]Just ask BuzzFeed.[/note] The Content Strategist gets between 10,000 and 15,000 readers most weekdays, and Kagan estimates that Discover would deliver up to 1,000 new readers each day, which is definitely an enticing prospect and is the main reason I expect to see the widget popping up across the web soon. SumoMe’s tools have a cult-like fanbase in the marketing industry—particularly their email capture tool, which you’ll encounter on just about every marketing blog, including TCS.

“The number one problem with every single site on the web, every single person, is how do we get more traffic?” Kagan said. “We’re trying to solve that.”

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