There are many ways to generate traffic to your blog and I have mentioned plenty of them on my blog already, but what I plan on doing today is giving you a list of the methods I found work best. I have tried many different ways and some of them give short term results while others have given long term results. I think it is good to have a little bit of both so you get the maximum amount of traffic to your blog. So below I will split my traffic generation into two categories: short term and long term traffic generation results.
Short Term Traffic Generation:
Yahoo Answers - If you are interested in driving traffic quickly and easily this is a good one for you to try. What you do is you post answers or questions with links back to your website and write them in a way that interests readers to come visit your website. You will get hits right away but they usually don’t visit again after the question is gone.
Facebook - I would say that the links you put in your profile are short term. The reason that is is because all your friends will check out the new link to your blog / website when you first post it up because of the news feeds but then after that it will die down and you usually won’t get anymore new traffic.
Forums - Posting on forums can be a good way to get short term traffic to your blog. As long as you are posting useful information on the forums and have a good signature with links to your website you will usually get some decent traffic back to your blog. Usually a lot more traffic then some of ideas mentioned above but then again it is still only be short term traffic. However one of the other benefits of this type of traffic is the linkbacks to your website which can help raise your PageRank.
Blog Comments – This is pretty similar to forum posts. Basically you can get a bit of traffic to your blog / website but you are better off doing this to increase your linkbacks which in turn will hopefully increase your PageRank.
Link Exchange sites – Link exchange sites such as linkreferral will generate traffic to your blog as long as you are using them but once you stop so will the traffic. Most of the traffic generated with this method however is not very good traffic because people are just interested in getting more traffic to their own website. Since everyone has the same idea in mind no one really sticks around a website to see what it is about.
Twitter – As far as I can see so far this is a short term way of generating traffic to your blog. May be after getting a very large follower base you can get long term traffic from this but in the mean time you get hits every once and awhile from this.
EntreCard - This is like linkrefferal in that it is basically a link exchange type program. You can advertise on other peoples blogs and they can advertise on your blog. It does generate traffic but majority of it is just traffic where people are interested in getting points so they can make more traffic. It is worth a shot to try but it might not be the best solution in the long run.
Social Networking - This is a awesome way to get a ton of traffic to your blog. If you can get to the front page of some networking websites you can see up to 50K unique visitors in a day! This traffic is awesome but it will not last forever and its not easy to get to the front page. I definitely recommend doing this step but don’t expect to see traffic for months and months after you post something on the website.
PPC Advertising - This is not something I have tried on this website but is something I have done with my full time job. PPC stands for Pay Per Click advertising and what that is is when you pay for each click you get on your advertising to go to your website. An example of this is Google Adwords where you see advertisements on the right of the search results. If you click on them the advertiser has to pay for each click on their advertisement. This is a very good way to get traffic fast to your website but it will cost you and you will only get it when you pay for it.
Long Term Traffic Generation (The Good Stuff!):
Search Engine traffic – This is really good traffic. If you can do a bunch of SEO on your blog/website and get a bunch of your pages ranked highly in search engines for key terms then you will get a lot of traffic to your website without a lot of work. This will always be constant traffic as long as you do not get banned from search engines. So just be careful not to employ black hat SEO techniques and you should be fine.
Article Directories - This is another way to get long term traffic to your blog. Once you have submitted enough quality articles to article directories you will constantly get traffic from them to your blog and it is good traffic because people are interested in what you have to say. So if possible try to always add more articles to article directories.
Link Exchanges - As long as the sites you are exchanging links with do not go under you can usually always get traffic from the links you have exchanged with other websites. There are rumors that Google doesn’t like this type of traffic generation but I think if you do a little bit of it it cannot hurt your website rank and will bring in some more traffic.
Link Baited Websites – There might be another term for this but this is what I want to call it. Basically what this is is websites that have linked to your website because they found it interesting and wanted to link to it. If you can write blog entries that are very interesting to users they will most likely link to it and refer to it in their website. This is great traffic because it is free and you don’t really need to work for it.
Banner Exchange - This is similar to link exchanges in that you exchange a banner with another website and there is a link on the banner. It is good for long term traffic as long as both websites stay up and active you can always send traffic to each others websites.
So that is it
For now this is the list of things I have tried so far to generate traffic to my blog. As mentioned in a lot of the paragraphs some of the traffic generated to the website is a lot better then other traffic but all of them are worth a shot. I would try some of them yourself and see what works best for you. And remember as long as you write quality content, lots of content, and do some SEO on your website you should get decent traffic from search engines.
Also if you guys have any other traffic methods you would like to suggest feel free to comment below and I can add your recommendation to my list and link back to your website since you are the contributor of the idea.
Nice article. Have you tried Yahoo Answers? Any tips? I had my 2 accounts banned by Yahoo although I play it safe.
Ezines seem to be the only way on the Long-Term list that will actually give you the qualified traffic, while at the same time building your knowledge on the topic and site content.
How much traffic do you get to your blog? I don’t know if people know this just from the outset…but can you give us a ball-park figure? 100 hits a day? 1000?
Hi Small Host.
Yes I have tried Yahoo Answers a couple of times. Like I mentioned in the post it can bring you some traffic quickly. What I like to do is write a interesting question that will get a response and put in the additional details information a link to my website saying I found this information do you think it is useful?
It usually gets a bunch of clicks. Just be careful with your questions though because if you phrase them wrong they will get deleted or you could get accounts banned like you have in the past.
Hi Daniel,
Yes EzineArticles is definitely a great way to get long term traffic to your website. I use it a lot myself and it seems to work. The more articles I put up there the better. As for traffic I am getting around 50 unique visitors a day right now since my blog is only a bit over a month old.
My Alexa rank has gone from over 7 million down to around 795K now and my traffic keeps building from week to week.
So if you have any other ways to build traffic feel free to share. I would be glad to hear.
I never know Ezine before, thanks Michael. Gonna give them a try.
Yup EzineArticles is an awesome way to get long term traffic. Send your articles to their directory and if you add enough articles you can get some really good traffic and backlinks.
Thanx a lot for the tips Michael.I read on some forums that Google now advises against submitting articles to article directories as their servers are removing duplicate content from their database.
Thanks for the comment Jhangora. You might be right about Google being against submitting articles to article directories because of the duplicate content. However I have also done some research about duplicate content and found that Google normally does not penalize you for duplicate content. Google can tell which is the original content and which is new. So for now I think I will content to submit to article directories
U r right there.I am not a professional blogger & still learning tricks of the trade.I’ve created two mirror blogs.I post around 5 best posts from my blog on them each month.When I did a search I found the articles on those mirror blogs rated higher than the original post.
Hey is creating a mirror blog a good idea?Those sites have higher traffic but eventually I’d like to monetize my blog & those sites have their own ads.
@Jhangora – Thank you for the second comment to this post. I don’t think having a mirror blog is a good idea. There is just way too much duplicate content for no particular purpose at all. If you put the content somewhere where it will get a lot of traffic that is a good idea but not just another website that won’t get much traffic. So I think the way you are doing it it would actually be worse off for your blog if you did that. I would recommend concentrating on one blog and getting lots of traffic to it.
Quality content is very important to getting lots of traffic. If people like the content they will come a lot through search engines and links.
Hey very nice blog!! Man .. Beautiful .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your blog and take the feeds also…
@Janardhanaya – thanks for the comment. Glad to hear you like my blog.
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
@RaiulBaztepo – Thanks for the comment.
I am glad you liked my post and thought it was interesting. Hopefully it will help you with your websites or to help you further expand your knowledge of generating traffic to websites! Good luck with your websites.
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.
Glad you liked my post Kammajakaaya. I will continue to work hard to generate lots of traffic to my blog and wish you the same luck as well.
Hi. I read a few of your other posts and wanted to know if you would be interested in exchanging blogroll links?
Thanks for sharing your methods. This is a very good method classification (ST / LT).
I have started a blog yesterday and written 6 posts till now. Writing can be very hard and tiresome when english is not your first language… do you know of any resources or sites where you can perfect your writing (style, tone, structure, etc.)?
And for traffic, most of the time i use Yahoo Answers and forums. I’m still beginning, i’ll try to find a way to integrate your methods here.
And you forgot one interesting, and sometimes very good source of traffic – youtube. It can do wonders for PPA & MFA + PPA combination sites and boost your CR very much if you manage to make a popular video which can generate some targeted traffic towards your site.
ohhh nice info
thanks !! very helpful post!
You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree with your blog.
I dont usually post but this time I will,Thanks alot for the great read
Of course, what a great site and informative posts, I will add backlink – bookmark this site? Regards, Reader.
Hey I want to follow up on this discussion, but I am new to all of this blogging. How do I subscriber to this? Is it through an rss or something? Please help. Thanks.
@Acai – yes you can click on my rss feed at the top right there and you can follow my posts on my blog if you like. Hopefully I can teach you some new things about blogging and making money online.
Hi, I cant understand how to add your site in my rss reader. Can you Help me, please
Hi Risa Andy. All you need to do is click on the button/graphic at the top right for the RSS and there is a button to subscribe. It should bring up a bookmark in Firefox that you can save.
The other option is to take the URL – http://www.mindofmichael.com/feed/ and put it in a program you use to read feeds like Outlook.
Hopefully this helps.
i prefer with twitter and entrecard method. It fast and works.
Anywhere, thanks for your tips.
@abrablog – It is true that twitter and entrecard work fast to get you traffic but it is not lasting traffic. The traffic I like the best is search engine traffic since you get can get that all the time as long as you don’t get unindexed from Google.
Hi there I like your post, hope my comment will keep up your good work with your blog SPARTAN!
@Colin – thanks for the comment. Your comment definitely inspires me to work harder on my blog and make it a huge success online! Thanks again for the comment.
Wow! what an idea ! What a concept ! Beautiful .. Amazing
Excellent site, keep up the good work
Cool site, love the info.
question: where are the best places to create blogs (i.e. google blogspot?) I am new to this & I want to generate traffic to the travel blog that I’m working on but where to actually post it is also confusing. should I find a blog site for niche blogs? I’m very excited but also confused. any insight?
Hey Marly – thanks for the comment.
I think if you are very interested in creating a blog I would buy a domain name (namecheap.com or godaddy.com), get some hosting (hostgator.com), and get a blogging platform (wordpress), and start blogging.
Otherwise if you aren’t very serious I would try something like blogspot like you’ve mentioned. It is free and very easy to use.
What I would do is learn as much as you can about blogging by following people in your niche and then replicating that process on your own website.
Good luck!
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.
That you mention above is targetted traffic that can bring buying visitor to our blog
Wow, what a helpful article. I am just starting with my online business and have quickly learned that there must be a great number of things to do in order to get traffic. It would appear that article submission would be the best way of achieving long term results.
The question now remains, how many articles and how often should I post new articles? Would it be better to post 5 articles now and then wait or should I post every second day for the next 10 days?
These are some pretty nifty ways to gain traffic. Nicely done explaining and categorizing the short-term and long-term. I agree for most of the methods except for the one with yahoo answers though(just my opinion). Generally, I find this post useful, thanks Michael!