The best thing to do before you start working at generating traffic is to draw up a rough plan.
In your traffic generation plan you can allot time to generating traffic from a number of sources.
Some could include.......
- Articles
- Blog Comments/Backlinking
- Social Media/facebook/twitter
- Squidoo Lens
- Social Bookmarking
- Forum posts
- YouTube
- Viral Marketing/Ebook give away
- Video/YouTube
I think the trick is not too concentrate in a single area. It's too easy to get comfortable with a single method of generating traffic and neglect all the others. It pays to be versatile and not have all your eggs in one basket though at the same time spend enough time in each area of traffic generation to get a result then move on to another area.
Rotate between the areas until you start to see one area is giving you much better results for your time and effort. Then focus more on that area as it will obviously give you more traffic for the time and effort you put in.
Also realize that things like videos and articles generally won't give you an instant rush of traffic but rather give a more long lasting sustained traffic source as opposed to back linking or forum posts.
Though the advantage of Video and Articles are that they potentially have a compounding viral affect as people will use your videos and articles on their blogs and sites, especially when they are of high quality.
Areas like social media, (face book, twitter) are great to get quick rushes of traffic but be careful not too overuse them, if you tweet your blog everyday people will ignore you or worse still stop following you.
A great way to use Face Book is to join a group relevant to your niche and add to the discussion of the group so you become known. Then start adding people as your friend within the group and then when you start posting content to your stream, you have friends who not only are interested in your niche, but also people who are somewhat familiar with you.
Just lately I have been generating traffic from Blogged. I basically look for blogs that appear a bit under the weather and start following them. It's really easy to follow a large number of blogs in a short time on Blogged. Then I wait for the Blog owners to follow me back. To those that follow me back I then go to their blog and post a constructive comment on their blog, usually a polite and constructive comment, a suggestion or tip and of course some warm and fuzzy's for good measure.
The reason why I follow blogs that are under the weather is because my blog is about online marketing, so essentially I'm looking for people with a need (improving their blog) and I look to meet that need.
It's almost guaranteed that most if not all go to my blog, even if its only out of curiosity.
Though for all the ways you can generate content, its so important to have quality, rich media content.
There's really no point enticing people to your blog or site if they only visit once. You really have to make your site or blog as sticky as possible and you do this for three reasons.
- To get them to come back again and again
- To get them to spend as much time on your site as possible
- To make them so impressed with your site that they tell their friends
That's why you want "Rich Media" on your site (Images, Video, Audio, Downloads) because these things will do all the above!
Finally you want to analyse your traffic, know where it's coming from and if possible what you did to get it. Google Analytics is great for this.
Anyway good luck and I hope my post helps some people.
John
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