About 2 1/2 months ago, I started an interesting experiment of putting user generated content on the back end of sales pages. This technique was first names "Sidetracking" by the now retired Wayne Yeager.

I thought I would share the results. First, lets look at the resources I devoted to this task:

1. I spent 25 minutes creating a suitable template.

2. I spent an average of 6 minutes per site to install my own Munius software (a very simple script that manages an article directory). I installed Munius on 11 sites that were all one page sales letters (actually two pages... the sales letter and a testimonial page).

Thats 11 sites, so thats a total of another 66 minutes.

3. Interns have spent a total of 102 reported minutes moderating the received article submissions.

So the total time involved is 193 minutes or if we express that in hours and minutes thats 3 hours and 13 minutes spread out over 2 /12 months. I generally work about 3 hours per day, so this is basically like me working one full day, but in reality interns handled 102 of those minutes.

The result? The site receiving the most articles had 326 articles submitted. Another site received 133 article submissions. Thats 133 new pages of content on a site that would normally have two pages of indexable content the sales page and the testimonials page.

So how well did it work in final goal generating traffic? Pretty darn good. I see an average of 39.875 (lets just call it 40) new daily visitors to the sales page of each site (on average) that can be directly attributed to the sidetracking technique (just installing Munius on that same domain, but not linking to it from the sales page).

So, if I had paid someone $10/hour to do all of the above, I would be out about $35. However, I now have 438 new daily visitors. If my visitor value is only 10 cents (and its quite a bit higher than that), that is $43.80 in new daily revenue.

Lets say I had to buy Munius at retail. The cost is only $105. That makes the total investment $140 for a daily revenue increase of $43.80 after only 2 1/2 months. That pays for itself in only 4 days.

I cant predict the future, but I have no reason to believe this isnt going to just keep growing. More and more folks are going to be purchasing Artemis Pro and submitting to these sidetrack content sites. More and more folks are going to be stumbling into them from the search engines and submitting articles directly using the article submission form. That is more and more content more and more listings in the search engines more and more traffic entering all of my product sites via one of these sidetrack pages which means more and more people eventually visiting the home page of those sites, reading my sales letter and purchasing my products.

I would say this was a pretty successful experiment. For 6 minutes of installation time, I started receiving free content from others. That content didn't distract prospects considering purchasing my products, because there was no link on the sales page to that content. It was all buried on the band end of the site. The only link was from the content to the sales page, not the other way around.

Is that kind of painless traffic generation worth 6 minutes of your time?