May 24, 2012

Generating Traffic to Blogs

I have not written about traffic generation in quite a while. I read the posts I made on this a couple of years ago and realized how much my views how changed over the past couple of years. While the post is still relevant, my techniques for generating traffic have evolved over the years. The techniques listed on the Traffic Generation pages are still valid, they are just not near complete. After reading the post again I would say these are good techniques for starting a blog and getting it ready for traffic, but there are a lot more methods that are very effective for really bumping up your traffic.

I got to thinking about this from a meeting I had this weekend and the subject of traffic came up. Traffic is something everyone needs if you are going to make money on the internet, but traffic alone is not enough. A better term would be to say targeted traffic, because traffic alone is not enough for you to make money. For you to make money from your website you need targeted traffic. Personally I would prefer to have 1000 visitors who where interested in buying something from me then to have a million visitors who could care less about my offerings. I’ll make more money off the 1000. All a million untargeted visitors will do is to increase your hosting costs. I will have to quantify this because if you are getting advertising dollars by the CPM, then more would make more money, but lets assume for this discussion that you are earning your money from Affiliate type programs or selling your own product.

Okay so how do I build traffic today. There are a few tips that can help you no matter what the niche you are targeting.

Twitter – Twitter is a great way to generate traffic. Of course its also easy to make this traffic un targeted. Building a twitter following should be exact. Don’t just follow anyone on twitter. Take a look at the topics they have commented on and then follow the ones who tweet about the topics of your site. As these people follow you back then they will be interested in what you have to say. Once you have a targeted following on twitter, then you can tweet your blog post and people will come to your site from Twitter. You can even find Wodpress plugins that will automatically send Tweets to your account every time you make a blog post. I send a tweet to twitter everytime I post and it always brings me a decent amount of traffic, plus considering that Google just loves to crawl Twitter pages it helps with getting the Google bot to come by can check out your new content.

Facebook – A lot of people use Facebook as a way to stay in touch with others, but you can use it to drive traffic to your sites. A couple of features that you should be using is to incorporate your facebook and twitter accounts. Also make sure you add your blog’s RSS feed to your facebook account. These two things can help you a lot with generating traffic. Of course you need friends on your facebook account for this to help. A great way to get a lot of friends is to spend some time on facebook apps which encourage you to have friends. Be A tycoon is great for this, but you have to be careful because that is an addictive game and you may spend too much time playing the game instead of working.

In fact there are many different social media sites which you can add your RSS feeds to. Adding your RSS feeds is another great way to build up traffic to your site. I have a software app RSS Blogs that I use for this. It allows me to easily submit my feeds to a lot of directories. I also use SENuke for this purpose, but RSS blogs is targeted for just RSS feeds so its a little better for this task.

SeNuke – SeNuke is another software package I use to generate traffic. It really helps me to dominate the Search Engines for almost any term I decide I want to target. I will mention that SeNuke is a little gray hat so you have to be careful when using it on your money sites. I prefer to utilize SeNuke to build up sites that are pointing to my main sites. Regardless of how you use it, you can really bump up the traffic to a site with this software.

There are quite a few other ways you can increase your traffic, but I’ll save those for another post.

Speed Links

There are a couple of posts on other blogs you may be interested in this week.

The first comes from Common Sense with Mark. Well CommonSense meet No Nonsense.

Mark wrote a post on whether the actions of some people in the Blogsphere were of a herd mentality and just following the A-List bloggers. This does go on quite a bit, but in a manner that I see nothing wrong with. While every blog should strive to be unique in terms of content, what is wrong with trying to generate a little traffic to your blog. Afterall isn’t that why people spend time and energy creating the content. They want people to read it. Most of Mark’s post deals with the various traffic generation trends of late such as blog rush. Blog rush was touted a little before its time. I was even guilty of this in some of my posts, but the main reason people jumped on BlogRush was because of the name behind it. Its pretty much a given that round one was a bust, but I would not be surprised to see a round two implementation of blogrush.

Mark goes on to talk about the ever ending quest for more subscribers and more comments. Of course people want these things they are what helps to make a blog popular. If you are writing a blog and do not want readers or subscribers, why don’t you just keep it on your hard drive and get it off the net.

Sorry Mark, I don’t see a lot of CommonSense in this post.

My second link is on a subject that a lot of the A-List bloggers about blogging have been touting lately, but this one did not make Mark’s list and that is including images in your posts. I personally like images in the posts as long as there are not too many and the image is somehow related to the post. The problem for me has been finding the images that I can freely post without copywriting problems. Skelliewag to the rescue with the guide to find incredible Flickr images for your blog. There are some decent suggestions in the post and I will definitely be bookmarking it. I’ve been using Live Writer lately to write on blogs and it has an addon you can download to help you find Flickr Images and insert them. It works great with WordPress, but the search for images is a little awkward. This post should help me with that problem, so you may start to see more images around here soon.

Big Pimpin

Lara from I Make Money On Facebook has posted an article about traffic generated form Facebook and how its the worst traffic on the net that caught my eye. Lara provides some insight into how Facebook works in regards for utilizing it as a traffic generation technique which has some possible merit. I’ve never really got Facebook really but with Lara’s help, I’m starting to see how it could be a powerful tool if utilized properly.

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The never ending quest for more blog visitors

Well thanks to Steve and his comment on my blogrush post ( I would give Steve a link, but he failed to leave a website link in the comment), I have another method to try and increase the number of page views on this blog. They are not bad now, but pride is getting to me and I want more readers, more subscribers, and more comments. So I’m going to investigate every method I can find to help with these goals. In steps Entrecard.com. This is a basic link sharing type program where you earn credits that you can then use to advertise on other blogs. There are some big name blogs in the network, such as Shoemoney. Since you can control which blogs show your ads as well as which blogs you allow to advertise on your site, you have a lot more control than you do with a network such as Blogrush.

I signed up a little while ago and already have one advertiser requesting to advertise on my blog. I have not advertised this blog anywhere since I don’t hardly have any credits, but I will try it out on some other blogs once I get some credits built up. You can earn credits a couple of ways, one you allow others to advertise and two when you drop your card on someone else’s advertisement. I have not figured out how to do this yet. You have to see the Entrecard on a blog and then you earn one credit for each time you do this, but I have not seen a blog in the network with the drop here verbiage on the widget. I’ll keep looking to see if I can earn some additional credits. Maybe if I get enough credits I can buy a spot on Shoemoney‘s blog. right now he has a 9 day waiting list and each one costs 42 credits. I need to update my above stats in the time it has taken me to write these couple of paragraphs I already have two other advertisers waiting for space on my blog. I’m going to give this one a little of my time and see how it works out.