People start a blog for many reasons, personal satisfaction, a way to keep friends and family informed about what they are doing, ie keep in touch, as a way to make money, a creative challenge. However, most of them have one thing in common: they want traffic. And most experience the same maddening frustration, the same rubix cube challenge, how to get it. Because traffic is the holy grail, the bubbly source for blogs and bloggers that opens doors, grants validation, and may end up paying the bills. Even if you do it for the simple reason of posting your thoughts for friends to see, it soon becomes apparent that blogging is a lot of work and if you don’t put in the effort, no one will come, not even your friends. . The little traffic soon becomes zero traffic and the blog dies. Nobody wants to go to work in a museum vault unless they are a scholar or a well-paid janitor. On the other end of the spectrum, if you blog to make money, traffic is a big consideration. So how do you get it?
The first place I launched my blog was Facebook. After doing some research, I found out that right now it’s also for most people. If your blog is a trade/business blog, Facebook has a unique business page dedicated to talking about your business. Here, you can add links to your site. Facebook was the first place that came to mind. And why not? After all, it is the number one social networking site in the world, with 500 million active users. As a novice blogger, I figured I’d post my brilliant content and ALL my friends, a puny 92 or so, would come there looking for pearls of wisdom and dazzling entertainment. And they would share it with their friends and so on. It would start a chain reaction of spells. In that sense, I also made “friends” of friends of friends (they all accepted) and of course they would be interested in what I had to say. Unfortunately, my initial optimism quickly faded.
The problem with Facebook is that you can only get so much traffic from it, even if you have 597 friends. And you have to work for that traffic. I would post my content on someone’s wall with a catchy com-on to engage them, send personal messages with content I thought someone might like, etc. My real friends have supported my blog, but very rarely have ‘friends of friends’. And even if they did, you can’t trust them to spread the word. So while Facebook is a good place to launch a blog, establish a brand, and solve problems, it’s not the place where you’ll get the most traffic.
Another way is if you are a member of a message board. I’m a long-time member of a motorcycle board. So I’ve used that place to post my blog posts. But, although they are all great friends for a long time, there are limits. You must target your audience. My blog is a city-focused topic and my most popular section is food and cooking. And while cyclists love to cook and eat, they might not be as interested in reading up on the virtues of a good French wine. So unless I’m writing about motorcycles or a great steak, I’ll get traffic, but only modestly.
What you need is traffic from the entire network, from all over the world and unique direct. And you want it to arrive 24/7, not just when you post a new entry. You want to wake up in the morning and look at your stats page and see that overnight while you were sleeping, 60 or 660 people visited your site. You want your blog to become such a vortex of energy and information that people you don’t know come to YOU.com to see what you have to say and offer. It’s been said that you don’t get respect in your hometown, and unless you’re happy to be a little fish in a little pond, you have to find a way to reach out to people in other ways. You have to venture into ‘other cities’ and you have to let other sources do the heavy lifting.
I found that submitting articles to article hubs like EzineArticles.com and Articlebase etc. It is a very good way to increase traffic to a blog. In fact, at this point, I can’t think of a better way. I have seen my stats double and triple in a very short time just by going to these sites. What they do is act as a hub where sources from all over the world go to find relevant articles on a given topic and republish these articles on their sites. They are also useful in other ways. Due to their editorial standards, they tend to hone their writing skills and increase the visibility of their content on the World Wide Web. In many of them, like EzineArticles, you can’t post the link to your site directly in the body of the article, however, they do allow it in the author bio section, and it’s from that section that readers will click through to your site. if they like what you say or what you can offer. One thing they don’t do is attract web crawlers, robots, or ‘bots’. The reason is that when you submit to a hub site, that counts as 1 web submission. So when your article gets reprinted, the site that publishes it gets the attention of the post bot. Robots are useful because search engines like Google use them to index sites and content. Many crawlers let the engines know that people are interested in your site and eventually a person just has to type ‘JohnSmith.com’ and many of his posts will show up on their own. This will result in more direct traffic and will also call submitted articles to hubs.
So bot traffic is very important in blogging and that IS where Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites help because your link posted there is always direct to your blog.
A couple of other ways are to ask friends who have sites to add your link to theirs, in a quid pro quo. The more bonding, the more attention from the robot. Posting on other sites has also been mentioned as a way to build community and reputation. I haven’t used this method myself, but I intend to. I heard that it works very well.
The idea is to do whatever it takes to get your name out there. You must write good content, you must have interesting ideas or a good product to sell, but you must always pay attention to the other part of blogging which is promotion. Even if you have nothing to sell, just the thought that hundreds of people every day from all over the world are listening to what YOU have to say, validates your dream of being a writer. Follow your dreams, but do whatever it takes to make them come true.
