The great thing about the Web is that there are countless different ways to be successful. Each man’s own talents, connections and personality gives him a unique path to success.

But I do think it pays to observe what other successful people have done and take some pointers. You won’t be able to copy them exactly and equal their level of success, but, on the other hand, every successful playbook steals a ton of pages from other successful playbooks. All art is derivative. Or something like that.

Anyway, let’s take a look at Mr. Aaron Wall’s playbook. If you need an introduction to Aaron Wall, you should probably check out this shit-tastic Wikipedia page just Google him.

I’m not going to recount what Aaron writes about–you can read over 1,000 posts for free on his blog or purchase the SEO Book to hear what he has to say in his own words. Instead, let’s look at some of his actions–what he actually did to get where he is today.

• First things first, he built his home on a good domain. SEOBook.com: it describes exactly what the product is. And quit whining “but… but… branding!!” Aaron got the best of both worlds: he took a great keyword domain and branded it. Even though other prominent dudes sell SEO books, Aaron Wall is now The SEO Book.
• He went into a crowded niche and excelled by having a unique voice. I believe Aaron started blogging on SEOBook.com in late 2003, and even then there were over a hundred SEO blogs (there are probably over a thousand active SEO blogs now, but even then, it was competitive). When you go into a crowded niche like this you have to be unique and stand out to gain any mindshare. Readers tend to go to old, familiar, trusted sources so you’ll need to be remarkable to draw them in. Aaron differentiated himself by a) being brutally honest, even at the cost of short-term profits; b) blogging about higher-level topics (e.g. capitalism, marketing), but relating them to SEO; c) giving useful, specific and timely tactical advice. A lot of other bloggers at that time were saying “get more links”. Aaron would say “Here are 13 specific places to get links”. That’s how you get bookmarks and subscribers.
• When he attained moderate success, he reinvested more time and money. I don’t know the exact timeline but I think within 6 months Aaron was selling a low–but decent–volume of eBooks. Enough to live off of. So he kept up his blogging pace, and within another year he was selling enough eBooks to live really well off of it. At that point, he could have cut down his level of posting and just sort of coasted and probably maintained his (nice) income and mindshare, more or less–but again, he kept up his furious blogging pace. The result was he had enough plenty of capital to invest in other (more profitable) projects. Another side effect was that his mindshare had grown to the point where he became a minor celebrity at SEO conferences. (If you’re into the whole “fame” and “SEO groupie girls” thing.) Anyway, the law of increasing returns holds true in competitive webmastering.
• He sold an e-product rather than selling leads or tangible goods. OK I am the first guy to stick up for affiliate marketing. I am also the first guy to say that almost all e-products are “shit-tastic crapola in a box”. However I think that a very well done e-product is one of the best possible assets to own and sell online. The margins are extremely fat. The costs are fixed, but the sales ceiling is very high. You have a monopoly on the product, and you don’t have the risk of merchants screwing you somehow (affiliate marketing), or inventory risk (tangible goods). And the instant downloadability lends itself to impulse buying, which is the easiest type of online sale to make. Bottom line: most people selling e-products really suck at doing it, but the few at the top who really excel are reaping the rewards.
• He made himself accessible. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” OK we’ve all heard that a thousand times. That’s because it’s been proven time and time again. Aaron posted regularly on every major SEO forum (under his brand name ’seobook’), attended every major conference, and answered almost every e-mail (and I assure you, a lot of annoying wankers e-mail him every day). The net effect is that almost everyone who participates in the SEO community feels like they “know” him. That leads to a lot more links, word-of-mouth recommendations, goodwill, and karma. F*ck karma, you say? Sure. But not when that karma turns into ca$h money!
• He focused on providing value for his visitors. It took me a long time to come around to Aaron’s point of view that you should always focus on providing value for your users. Firstly, I am too lazy to do this, and secondly, I am obsessed with shortcuts. But in the end, search engines want to rank those sites that provide value, and other webmasters want to link to and recommend sites that provide value. If you’re not providing value you’re swimming against the tide and playing a short term game: sooner or later you’ll drown. Ironically, creating something that people actually want is easier, more profitable, and more compatible with laziness in the long run.
• He hustled. A lot of Aaron’s success is due to the above wise decisions that he made. But remember that he also worked his ass off. Many competing SEO blogs and e-products had advantages over his (longevity, liquidity), but one thing they couldn’t do was out-work him. And remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. 4 years later SEOBook.com ranks in the top 10 for [seo] and Aaron has as much mindshare as anyone in the industry.

FYI, Aaron is my friend, but he didn’t know I was writing this post. Hopefully he doesn’t sue me for giving away his trade secrets, but then, getting sued is just another page out of his playbook!

“It’s the girth that matters.” — GoogleBot

Problem: You have an affiliate site in the tried-and-true “ads as content” (product comparison directory) format, but it’s either not indexed, or not ranking.

Solution: Make your thin site thicker. Google respects thickness.

Ways to make a thin site appear thicker:

• Remix content. The beautiful thing about datafeeds is you can take free content from the merchant (that other affiliates, unfortunately, also have access to) but rearrange it in a unique way so that the page “as a whole” is unique.
• Find and replace. Go through the datafeed. Take some common words or acronyms and replace them with words that have the same meaning to a reader but look different to a bot. Find and replace PMI with ‘private mortgage insurance’. Find and replace the word ‘mortgage’ with ‘home loan’.

OK those things are just tiny bits and pieces and obviously Google is 10 steps ahead of me in large scale textual analysis, but I believe every little bit helps. In a “signal of quality” era, slight tweaks could mean the difference between being on the right edge of Supplemental, and being on the wrong edge. Of course, appearing thicker only gets a site so far.

Ways to make a thin site actually thicker:

• Combine unique content with the dupe content. A page will still appear unique “as a whole” if you have, say, 200 words of unique introductory text above 800 words of dupe (or nearly-dupe) content.
• Tack some original, remarkable content onto the site and get it well-linked. If your site has 100 pages which are “somewhat thin” and another 20 pages which are “very thick”, the site as a whole is thicker than if you just had 100 “somewhat thin” pages. If you can get these thicker pages links and traffic from social media, the site is also going to be more defensible, period. Even if you only have one page that’s best-of-breed (a true authority/resource), Google’s results are going to be less relevant if they disinclude your domain. That’s the position you want to be in.

So, in summation, here’s my recipe to make a thin site thick: Take all those thin/dupe pages. Remix/rearrange the content a bit. Find/replace some common words. Take some new unique content and sprinkle it throughout. Finally, add a few 100% unique and remarkable pages and get them some quality links. Bam!

I have noticed several signs in the past few months that Digg has jumped the shark. Any one of these signs alone might be an aberration, but taken together I think they signify that Digg has peaked, and is now beginning a slow, gradual decline.

1. First we had a mass exodus of many of the best users when the ‘top users’ function was removed.
2. A user revolt (on account of a hand job) brought the Digg administration to its knees. Their credibility could now be questioned from multiple angles.
3. The ‘bury rate’ continues to rise (it now appears the majority of stories on upcoming/most get buried rather than making it to the homepage); I understand they want to prevent commercial content getting to the homepage but in the process they are also preventing anything remotely controversial from gaining traction, and what good is a social media site without controversial content?
4. The Digg Effect isn’t what it used to be. Rand Fishkin noticed that Digg sends less traffic these days and I can confirm this from stats on my own sites.
5. Aaron Wall notes that after training its user base to be highly hostile to commercial content, Digg now plans to extend its platform to restaurant and product reviews. Somehow I don’t see this being well-received.

Now let me repeat, I am not saying ‘Digg is dead’, only that after an initial highly accelerated growth path, it has peaked and will now slowly decline. The guys over there built a really killer app but then squandered much of is business potential because of bad decisions (and a lack of common business sense). As a marketer I believe this is a good thing, with social media we don’t want a situation like in search where one player controls 70% of the market. I would rather depend on getting my traffic from 25 niche social media sites instead!

p.s. Digg thanks for the memories (a few hundred homepage stories, a few million visitors and half a million inbound links to various sites when the going was good)

A lot of Google’s business strategy makes us angry, but I think as entrepreneurs the correct response isn’t anger, instead we should be learning from them.

When I first started in the game I ignored most forms of internet marketing aside from SEO. Firstly, I was good at SEO, so why go outside my circle of competence, and secondly, I (partially correctly) assumed other channels couldn’t touch the ROI of targeted, free search traffic. I don’t have any regrets that I followed that path: sharp SEO is still my most powerful competitive webmastering weapon, but these days I take a more holistic view.

You see, I don’t want a healthy stream of free targeted search traffic. I want a Borg.

A Borg is a large and multi-platform–but centrally managed–web presence. You can kill one part of the Borg but as long as the brain lives on it is going to survive and regenerate. A Borg’s different parts and weapons systems work together to create synergy where the total machine is much more deadly than the sum of its parts. The Borg is driven by the nerve center (you) but leverages others to do its dirty work in a dastardly Web 2.0 manner. The most powerful Borgs, Super-Borgs, have huge repositories of valuable data which they have assimilated and will use to exterminate their rivals.

The problem with your potential client base is that its made up of different species. You have your social-networking-whores and your watch-video-timewasters and your forum-dwellers and your barely-use-the-Internets. A normal Web site won’t be able to hit some of these, but a Borg can envelop and digest several different species and then have them working together, each species doing what it does best. That’s how efficient the Borg is.

The core hub of the Borg is still a domain name, Web site, and SEO. But a powerful Borg has a left arm that’s an offline conference and a right arm that is an email newsletter. The left and right arms reinforce the core hub of the Borg and also reinforce each other. They also make the core hub much more defensible from other Super-Borgs like the GoogleBorg.

The Borg realizes that many species will never accept its old platform so it assimilates these species on their own terms. The left leg of the Borg is social networking (Facebook and MySpace); entire demographics spend most of their online time on these sites so the Borg sets up a presence there and uses it to reinforce other parts of the Borg. The right leg of the Borg is multimedia, a large percentage of people dislike reading and hang out at YouTube instead. This multimedia part of the Borg became much more critical with the introduction of Universal Search.

If all you have is a nerve center and the basic hub of the Borg (site + domain + SEO skillz), building an advanced Borg can seem rather daunting. The lowest hanging fruit is probably the email newsletter, every single Web site you own should be collecting email addresses (even if it’s just a form for a fake newsletter that doesn’t exist yet, I pretty much patented that tactic), so hop over to Savicom or Constant Contact and get that rolling ASAP. Some of the other platforms might be a better fit for your business than others, but don’t take the lazy route out because each of them has something to offer if you’re smart about it; Build the obvious (and easiest) parts of the Borg first.

Here is another thing about building a Borg, you can’t spread the nerve center too thin. If you’re going to start a Facebook group you need to be active there and spend time maintaining it: send out bulletins, friend people, facilitate discussion etc. Otherwise this will just be an abandoned or even hostile part of the Borg and you won’t reap any potential synergy benefits. So add parts of the Borg once you have the necessary time and resources, but I don’t say that to give you an excuse not to act, because your competitors are going to beat you to the punch if you don’t get started ASAP.

And now I will let you in on the super secret Borg plan to take over the world. The center of the Borg’s long term strategy is the assimilation of data. Even if you’re like me–not smart enough to know how to profitably leverage all of your data–you need to at least start collecting it. You never know how you’ll be able to use it in the future but start collecting it now. I didn’t know when or for what purpose I’d ever send a newsletter for my VoIP site, but then when I did want to start leveraging email marketing, boy was I glad I’d already collected 10,000 email addresses. Email addresses are a good start, email + name + phone number + zip code is even better, offer a freebie downloadable whatever but of course the price they pay on the download page is giving over their data to your Borg.

If you don’t want to build a multi-platform Borg, fine. Just know for every dollar you make you are leaving 99 on the table. Also know that very soon my Borg will be coming into your local galaxy and will either assimilate or destroy you.

By the way thanks to Brian Provost for teaching me a lot of things which went into this post. Your knowledge has been assimilated and soon I will be the Queen of Summertime!

I came across this quote at Corante - Future Tense and I absolutely love it.

There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm…Second, there are the hard- working, intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard- working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent, lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.

General Erich Von Manstein (1887-1973) on the German Officer Corps

Now let me start off by saying, I have nothing against smart, hardworking people. In fact, that is the type of person I like to hire. They make great operations / middle management. You want someone who is detail-oriented and smart so when you assign them a large project they can actually execute it at a high level. I also think they make decent entrepreneur-CEOs (but not great CEOs).

The great entrepreneur-CEO is, at his/her core, smart and lazy. Now, that’s a bit of a paradox. If you’re starting an ambitious Web site or company get ready to work 60 hours a week for the next 3 years, doing all kinds of menial tasks you hate and even giving up Friday nights to catch up on what I lovingly call “monkey work”. But and this is a big But a great entrepeneur is working towards, and then achieving, above-average profits passively. You might continue to work the 60 hours after that, but then it’s about passion, not because profits aren’t above-average. Think Larry and Sergei, thousands of paid clicks every minute from now until forever, and they only had to write the algorithm once (now they pay people to maintain it).

Let’s make this personal. For instance, if you quit working as an account manager at a large SEO firm, and then work for clients on your own, you’re only siezing some of the benefits of the entrepeneur (the ability to set your own hours, choose your projects, etc.) But in many ways you’re still a chump. (I mean that in a nice way.) There’s a cap on how many hours you can work in a week, so in effect you’re still earning an hourly wage. And for every successful SEO campaign you manage, you receive about 5% of the profit benefit, and the client receives the other 95% of the profit benefit. Finally, don’t forget that once you stop working, you stop getting paid. That’s no way to live!

If you’re continuing to move up the value chain, there should be less “work”, and more thought and strategy, at each step along the way. Of course you still need to understand the nitty gritty details of link building and usability and social media. (Otherwise your strategies will be lacking, and you won’t know if an underling is bullsh*tting you.) But a lazy entrepreneur-CEO’s time is mostly spent attracting and retaining middle manager talent, brainstorming and reviewing new ideas (picking winners from losers), and architecting strategic plans. Plus golfing or playing video games.

Hopefully this doesn’t sound too arrogant. (Meh.) In truth I’m not “there” yet, it’s something I’m working towards all the time. But I do know I have made a lot of these changes which I originally discussed in The Lazy SEO Manifesto, and I can say the profit’s better, the lifestyle’s better, the days are more fun. Change can be painful, especially if you’re a control freak, so it’s something you have to commit to. Commit to being lazy!

I like to integrate this idea into my personal life, as well. For instance, I am somewhat messy, however I like to live in a place that’s clean. So I have a maid. You would be surprised how cost-effective it is to pay someone to clean your place an hour or two a week. Also, the maid cleans much better and faster than I would. Now, I could try and justify this by saying, I use the extra hour or two a week to work, and my effective hourly wage is higher than what I pay the maid, so the ROI is positive. In reality, this may simply be another hour or two of Desktop Tower Defense. It’s a win either way. My goal next year is a personal assistant slash secretary (maybe just part time… maybe not). Other parts of the Manifesto are still on my to-do list. I haven’t moved to a tropical island yet, but I’m moving to Texas next month (Houston–near the Gulf Coast and Mexico, at least), so that’s a start. I also do not have a mistress yet. That sounds like a lot of work.

A business mentor told me once, if you provide a service or product, you can deliver any two out of the following three: good, fast and cheap. So you can be cheap and fast, but then you won’t be good; or you can be fast and good, but then not cheap.

Very few contractors (designers, developers, SEOs) are good, fast and cheap. (In fact, many have trouble even being two out of those three!) When I find someone who is good, fast and cheap, I generally am a bad friend, and I don’t recommend them to others. Yes, it is a bastard move, but hey this is business and a good relationship with a good contractor is a profitable resource and a competitive edge. I have had it happen before where I recommend a contractor I like to a ton of people, and then that contractor gets so busy they can’t take my work anymore! So I take the selfish route and hoard them.

Well my friend Bapin (who I’ve met in person) of eBizzSol (in Bangladesh) was a huge help the other day and helped me fix several problems which resulted from being hacked. eBizzSol has also designed several sites and logos for me in the past month, and I’m always amazed at how good, fast and cheap they are. And to top it off, they can build pretty much anything you need in PHP (if you send them detailed specs it will help, of course).

So there you go, for once I’m paying it forward. If you need a good, fast and cheap web designer or developer for pretty much any type of web project, and you don’t want to play “eLance roulette”, check out eBizzSol (ask for Bapin). And no this was not a paid post. Just don’t send him so many projects he doesn’t have time for mine anymore!

So SEO Public Enemy #1 launched his future failure today: Mahalo. A cross between Wikipedia and DMOZ, except they have to pay their editors. Sweet! (Where is the sarcasm smiley?)

My question is: why bother spamming it, when it won’t gain enough users to send any real traffic?

Nevertheless, whoever writes the first ‘How to: Spam Maholo’ gets a link from this post, just trackback me.

Update: I think this IM exchange sums it up nicely:

Me: It’s seriously just About.com

AaronWall: But worse.

As I posted earlier I’m out of the client game, but I got bored this morning and checked the rankings of the old client services site (old habits die hard). I usually own the top spot for [link building] and what can I say it’s a matter of pride. Well today I was a bit perplexed that not only was AndyHagans.com not ranking #1 for [link building], it was nowhere to be found! However, the site wasn’t banned–an internal page was still ranking in the top 100 for [link building]. I figured that maybe I hit some sort of filter. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over its rankings considering the site isn’t monetized at all.

Then later today I got an email from a friendly contact letting me know I had about a thousand animal sex-related links which were hidden below the footer on the AndyHagans.com homepage. (Apparently, this contact sometimes refers to my site–which I coded myself–when showing people the benefits of clean code & the efficient use of CSS. Take that, Pearson!)

Anyway, I wonder how someone was able to hack my site and inject these links. Some sort of “exploit”? (I don’t even really know what that means.) Maybe I shouldn’t have used [password] as my password. (Just kidding.) I’ll fix it later in the week, meanwhile I am trying to figure out if any black hat SEO has a grudge against me, but honestly I’m not sure I even know any black hat dudes! Could be just a coincidence, but my instict says it isn’t.

Thibault tells me it looks like the links pointed elsewhere earlier this week, but they were updated to animal sex-related topics recently (judging from the cache). Anyone have a theory how this hack could have happened? I don’t want to fix it only to have it hacked again the next day… any help is very appreciated and will be rewarded in link equity.

Check it out: AndyHagans.com (view the source code to see the animal sex links)

Update: in case it helps, some more details on the site–it’s hosted on Dreamhost (normal shared plan), and runs on PHP (custom files, no CMS, I mainly use PHP just to include files like the header and footer).

Update2: OK so this affected another site I host on the same account. Shoemoney pointed out it only is happening on the index.* files. So either someone broke into my ftp with a script, or somehow they did it to all the files named index.* hosted on this Dreamhost box?

Update3: Frederick Townes tells me:

about the injection issue (I wrote an article about this long ago) about XSS and injections etc.

My best guess is your host has a very old copy of apache:

Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_throttle/3.1.2 DAV/1.0.3 mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.4.4 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e

That, combined with those other modules, which are also very old means that there are tons of opportunities for someone to exploit your site - it’s a matter of time and checking the changelog for those different software packages.

There also could be other holes (potentially) in you’re your web site as you seem to use PHP, for server side includes no doubt, unnecessarily. Swithing to flat HTML with Server Side Includes is a good move if you don’t want to change hosts.

You can always parse PHP files in your server side includes if you need some advanced scripting.

Ugh. Sounds about right, but still not sure what exactly to do to remove the current links and script?

Update4: Thibault is telling me he doesn’t think its the XSS thing, but instead either weak code, or they just cracked my password.

Update5: Thibault and Bapin SSH’d in and found the problem. Looks like someone just cracked the FTP password and put a file in every domain’s directory which then injected the links. Bapin is helping me fix it and meanwhile it’s a spring cleaning, we’re deleting a bunch of old junk like Movable Type test installations, etc. This was a great way to spend my afternoon!

Update6: OK Bapin fixed everything. Fingers crossed it doesn’t happen again, all the passwords are changed and we deleted some files which may have been vulnerable…Â

This quote got me thinking:

Every entrepreneur feels vaguely disreputable. Maybe you drive a crappy car. Maybe you never went to prom. There are enough stuffed suits in this world to fill fifteen Wall Street Journals a day. As anyone who watches American Idol will tell you, what this spun-out, over-hyped world is absolutely famished for is a little genuine personality. And, outside of your technology, it’s probably the only thing you have. So stop trying to be like IBM and just be yourself.

Those words really rang true. When you are first starting out as a designer, webmaster, entrepreneur, blogger, or SEO, the “industry” can seem daunting. Why would anyone take you seriously when there are hundreds of better designers, better entrepreneurs, or better SEOs out there whose names have been around for five years and who have shiny websites, portfolios and published articles to back them up?

Let me put it this way, for those of you who do client work under their own name or brand, you know that it can be humbling very quickly doing business with a Fortune 500 company. They send you a 20 page contract and a non-disclosure agreement, and demand to pay you under net-60 terms. You’re just Andy Hagans the Link Builder (or Lady Lou the Logo Designer), and they are Gigantic Prestigious Public Corporation, Inc.; who are you to argue?

My younger brother is trying to learn SEO. He sometimes seems daunted by how much there is to learn, and how much work goes into it all. He admits that he has a hard time committing because he is afraid of failure. I try to explain: this is a marathon, not a race. You’re going to be here a while, and you won’t be rich right away, but you will get there eventually. Settle in, get to work and try to have some fun on the way!

I think as an SEO or webmaster, the largest hurdle you’ll ever face is getting from $0 to $100 in profit every month. That represents doing something entrepreneurial and taking initiative, which is further than 95% of your “normal” friends will ever get. It seems to me that the initial $100 / month is harder to attain than it is to get from $100 to a few thousand per month, which is enough to live off of (though this is probably the second biggest hurdle you’ll ever face). If you can reach that point relatively early in your career and have the smarts/stubbornness/stupidity to stick with it, chances are, you’re going to be rich. The only question is, how rich?

As entrepreneurs, a lot of things are out to screw us. We don’t get a tax deduction for our health insurance, like our “normally employed” brethren do in a roundabout way. We work longer hours. We have to deal with lawyers and stupid tax forms. We have more stress. It only takes a single bout of bad luck (illness, injury, family problem, lawsuit, search engine penalty, changing external environment), and the whole thing goes bye-bye, Return to go and do not collect $200. If you’re an entrepreneur, you have self-selected yourself as having more guts or greed than the average human. Either one can get you through.

Back to that Fortune 500 company which sent me a 20 page contract, a non-disclosure agreement, and demanded to pay on net-60 terms. At that point, my business had gotten slightly off the ground, and I wasn’t exactly starving (well, if you’ve seen me, you know that I’m never starving, but I mean starving for cash ), so I asked myself, do I really want to deal with this horsesh*t? The answer was no. I replied to them: I don’t sign contracts (I know, that’s ghetto, but I didn’t want to pay for a lawyer to review it considering it was a smaller project), and I required payment upfront. I figured they would blow me off, but their response was, OK, where do we send the payment? It amazed me, but it shouldn’t have. I performed a niche service that they couldn’t do themselves, and thus I had something that they wanted. I had leverage.

So what is the lesson here? If you look at the Web as a sort of ecosystem, I think many of the nodes (and people) in the system hold a lot more value in their position than they know. As the environment evolves in the future, many of them will learn how to better unlock and monetize that value. The winners are those who decide to be players in the first place.

If you take yourself seriously, other people will. You are a CEO, and you are better than you think.

With the recent launch of CoRank it seems like everyone and their cousin is starting a niche social media site. Just like with a blog though, many will never reach critical mass (and most, in fact, will get abandoned).

However in my lifelong quest to acquire traffic and links cost-effectively, I’m seeking out those niche social media sites that appear to be gaining a user base and actually sending websites real visitors. Here are eight newer ones I’ve discovered… a few of these I’ve actually found through my referrals, which is a good indication they “actually send traffic”.

1. Babblz (Parenting)
2. Ballhype (Sports)
3. blogs4God (Christian)
4. Meme or Lame (Gadgets)
5. News Heat (Politics)
6. Plant Change (Environment)
7. TTiqq (Tips & Tutorials)
8. Tweako (Computers & Technology)

Note: Since a lot of folks bookmarked the original post I’m going to go ahead and update it with these new ones: Top 17 25 Niche Social Media Sites (That Actually Send Traffic)