Traffic Building

One of the primary goals after setting up a blog and creating regular traffic for it is building traffic.  Ideally the traffic will be organic, meaning readers will find your blog through a search engine or via advertising.  Organic traffic may or may not be geo-targeted but in some cases geo-targeting may be quite desirable.  That means your traffic arrives at your blog because your have targeted your advertising in such a fashion to attract readers from one particular continent, country or even city.  There are many, many, many ways to build traffic for blogs.  Some are more effective than others and each have their own unique pros and cons.  Some methods may or may not be used with affiliate programs such as Adsense.  Here are a few that I've found but I'm sure there are a lot more:

• advertising - banner, badges, text links, offline resources (newspapers, magazines, and etc.)
• purchased traffic -  guarantees a certain number of hits to your blog for a set price
• blog networks - a wide range here
• link exchanges - formal or informal (stay away from Mr. Linky and similar link farms)
• blog rolls - an organized form of directory/link exchange hybrid
• blog hops - this is a newer, more active form of blog rolls but with better traffic, a hybrid between memes and blog rolls
• blog directories - manually submit to as many blog directories as possible for exposure and traffic
• memes - participating in a weekly established meme can bring traffic
• social networking - Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Stumbleupon
• word of mouth - friends, family, and etc.
• traffic exchanges - directly with blogs not using Adsense, indirectly (advertising only) with blogs using Adsense
• banner exchanges - increases exposure which may help increase traffic (stay away from banner farms)
• blog review sites - review a blog and one or more members will review yours in return
• blog directories - submission can improve your blog traffic
• pinging - very much under rated and poorly used by most bloggers but very effective at building traffic
• SEO optimization - if you want search engine traffic then this is a must!
• signature files (sig) - add a tag line with your blog url in all your email
• forum/group participation - may or may not increase traffic but will help with exposure
• commenting - leaving comments that include your url on other blogs and websites can result in nice traffic

Garden Gnome
©2009-2011