How many products, blog posts etc. have you seen that offered the “Secret” to wealth or the “Secret” to server crashing traffic?

Those of us who know better, know that although all of these “secrets” may not be scams, 99.9% of them do not offer any kind of secret.

Most of us know that there really isn’t any kind of secret. The absolute only thing that will make you rich (unless you win the lottery or get a big inheritance) is Knowledge!

This is really something that shouldn’t need to be mentioned. I mean, it should be common sense. But, the average Internet Marketer is constantly asking how to get more traffic.

Short-cuts don’t work. There may be some that will increase your traffic in the short-term, but if your content isn’t worth their time they aren’t going to come back.

So What is the “Secret” to Traffic Generation?

Know more about your sites topic than the average visitor!

That’s it! You don’t even have to insert a special line of markup into your pages or sign up for a $1,000 course. All you have to do is research and learn!!

How many “my journey to making money online” blogs have you seen rise to the top? I could name a hand-full and those were done by people who had already been making money. So why don’t these blogs ever see success? Because they didn’t teach their average visitor anything. If I want to make money, why would I want to follow someone who isn’t making any? It just doesn’t make sense!

On the other hand, if I want to make money and you’re making more than me and regularly share your knowledge I’ll subscribe in a heart beat and read every single word you put out!

So the next time you think to yourself “damn, my blog doesn’t get any traffic,” think about what you have to offer! Do you honestly know more about your sites topic than your average site visitor? If not, are you providing them with something they can at least use? or are you just putting on a show, like so many others? Acting doesn’t work in this industry and those who realize that are the ones who make the money!

As with anything else online or offline, knowledge really is the key!

Source: Ez-onlinemoney.com/blog

There are a handful of niche topics in the Internet Marketing field, which are always talked about more than anything else:

1. List Building
2. SEO
3. Link Building
4. Article Marketing

In many cases each Internet Marketing Strategy is used along side another in one way or another and in all cases they are used with one very simple goal in mind, to generate TRAFFIC!

It’s no secret that these techniques work, but for some reason people are always looking for top secret traffic generating methods.

So, I’d like to share with you the #1 Traffic Generation “Secret” of all time!

OK, it’s not a secret. Actually, the secret could be that it isn’t a secret at all…if that makes sense.

Are there secret gold mines out there that will drive loads of traffic to your site? Probably, but is it worth it to spend hours, day, months or even years looking for them when you may or may not find one…and if you do, will it be long-lasting or a short surge of traffic?

The most important thing I’ve learned over time is that the most important aspect of traffic generation isn’t to get loads of visitors to your site from one traffic source, it’s to get a little here and there and RETAIN those you do get!!

You can work your butt off fighting the Search Engines, Writing loads of articles, trying to convince others to link to your site etc. etc. and do it over and over again just so you can duplicate the traffic you got yesterday, today, or you can retain the traffic you get today and add it onto the traffic you got yesterday and the day before that and so on!

So, continue to write and submit articles, continue to post to forums, continue to do everything you’re currently doing to drive traffic, but get a good auto-responder so you can implement a system within your site/blog that collects names and emails and/or do SOMETHING to retain them!

Simply creating interesting, valuable content is the best way to do that, they’ll come back simply out of will, but giving away a free report in exchange for their name and email is probably the most valuable!

Any way in which you can automate contact between you and them will work. Whether you build an email list, maintain an RSS subscriber base (this blogs lifetime RSS growth in image above) or use another technique to do it, you simply MUST retain your visitors. If you don’t you have a very long, steep hill ahead of you!

Source: Ez-onlinemoney.com/blog/

Just a quick post to show some really cool stats and to introduce a technique I’m using to actually promote one of my hobby sites primarily through Twitter!

As you know, Twitter is widely recognized as a powerful networking tool. It isn’t a direct traffic or sale generator in most cases, but as I explained the other day, Twitter could have direct sale/lead/traffic generation potential!

In that post I didn’t mention a current “case study” (I guess you could say) I’ve been doing with a Geocaching hobby blog of mine. A little while back I thought of a way in which I saw (in my head) Twitter as being a powerful traffic generator.

So I spent about an hour implementing it and so far I’ve accomplished the following directly from Twitter:

1. 69 unique visitors directly from Twitter (See screenshot below.)
2. An upcoming interview with the IndyStar (a very large Newspaper publication in Indianapolis.)
3. $20.75 in sales through the phpBayPro shop I have on the blog.
4. Found and got acquainted with a Geocaching shop owner who is going to set up a custom affiliate program just for me!
5. Received at least one blogroll link from another Twitter user, who geocaches and owns a geocaching blog!

None of that is extremely impressive until you consider the amount of time and effort I’ve put into that twitter account, which you can see at http://twitter.com/MadCacher.

Here’s what I did

I created about 10 random Tweets about Geocaching then I went to Twitter Search, did a search for “Geocaching” (without quotes) and for about 1 hour I added every person who mentioned Geocaching.

After that I just updated with questions every now and then… updated when I went out and found some geocaches etc. The traffic came mostly through the link in my bio… in other words I probably could have plugged my blog a bit more and drove more traffic! But I’m trying to build authority and trust in this niche, so I don’t plug my site too often.

As you can see, I only have 92 updates at the time of writing and each update takes about 20 seconds, so the time investment is very minimal, especially when it’s in a niche I love talking about.

I invested a total of about 90 minutes in that Twitter account. So, is 90 minutes worth 69 unique visitors, an interview with a big newspaper, which WILL indirectly drive much more traffic and exposure, $20 in sales (so far,) at least one sitewide link pointing to my blog and a custom affiliate program set up just for you? I know my answer!

Will this work in ANY niche? I seriously doubt it! Twitter users tend to be more technically inclined (Geocaching is a GPS game,) so if you go searching for people talking about vacuum cleaners you probably won’t get very good results.

BUT if you’re open minded about Twitter in general, I think you’ll find that it has far more benefits than just networking!

Source: Ez-OnlineMoney.com/blog

A lot of “us” focus on Google for traffic… which is smart, but is there a point in which it might be causing more harm then good?

I am not by any means suggesting that you do not focus on Google. There is no doubt that they provide massive amounts of traffic… but what would happen if suddenly Google decided to remove you from their rankings?

Would your site or blog be dead?

Over the past 30 days, the following non Google sources have provided traffic to JohnCow.com:

• 19% –> eMail – Mailing list & RSS
• 15% –> Affiliate Links promoting my free ebook
• 13% –> Stumbleupon – Was a few times but the biggest was to my free “Planning 2009 Guide”
• 12% –> Twitter – All over but two spikes are CPA Arbitrage post and “Planning 2009″ post.
• 7% –> Digitalpoint Forum – To the post about CPA Arbitrage
• 4% –> Digg – “2009 Planning Guide”
• 3% –> Tumblr – Consistent and mostly to the index page
• 3% –> Wikipedia – I owe Ranked Hard for this one… this is a link to a guest post they did

That is 76% of my traffic for the month of December!

In fact, Google only provided 14% of the traffic(the other 10% was a bunch of little things like yahoo, msn and so on).

So, whats my point of showing this?

If you want more traffic to your website or blog, do NOT put all your eggs in one basket, DO think outside of Google alone and DO get people talking!

Here are 5 things for you to think about:

1. Are you building a mailing list (You NEED to do this for long term sustainability)?
2. Are you building up a solid presense in different social media outlets (I have over 1600 followers on twitter now)?
3. Do you create controversial content that will cause people to act (share, comment and come back for more)?
4. Do you give away valuable free content that will cause people to act (share, comment and come back for more)?
5. Do you offer an affiliate program of some sort to “encourage” people who promote you?

Ok, I know there is nothing earth shattering here… but if anything I hope it makes you think a little about how you are currently doing things and how you may be able to do things better!

The bottom line is it comes down to balance. Do not focus everything on Google… but on the other hand, do NOT ignore them either.

What are your thoughts on this?

Source: JohnCow.com

It’s the dream of every blogger to get a lot of traffic, but something first time bloggers often don’t realize is that just publishing a few posts will not get them regular readers. I am no expert in getting traffic, but I have been working on a few things which has increased my traffic a lot.

When I first started this blog I used to get only about 10-20 visitors a day. After the first few months, I started getting traffic from Google and other traffic engines and my unique visitors increased to about 100 a day. Now for the past few weeks I have been getting about 550 visitors a day.

The sudden increase in traffic I had from about 100-500 visitors was mainly because my recent posts were linked back from many sites. So yes, linking can get you traffic depending on which sites link to you. Links can be thought of as the currency of blogs.

I received a lot of emails (even while writing this) from bloggers asking how they can get more traffic, I hope this helps…

Blog Design

A good design won’t bring you traffic but it will get your visitors to stay longer. No one will stay on your blog too long if the layout or navigation annoys them. So the first thing to do is to select a good theme for your blog and then design your own header. The goal is to have a unique blog that stands out from all other blogs (making your visitors want to come back again and again).

Often bloggers select a theme and forget about the design. The problem here is that your blog will look similar to hundreds of blogs that use the same theme.

Your design should allow your visitors to access the main pages of your blog and to contact you easily. Your blog should have an about page and an author photo. The more a reader knows about you, the more they trust your content. You can find more info on this on my recent post – Common Weblogging Mistakes.

Quality Content

Your blog should have good content inorder to keep your visitors coming back. By good content I mean well written posts that are unique and useful at the same time. Writing original content is definitely the key.

Do not copy-paste contents directly from other blogs to your blog. Re-blogging is a bad thing and will kill your traffic. The solution here is to write that content in your own words adding your own unique ideas to it. And don’t forget to link to the original post.

The more engaged you are with your content, the more interesting it will be.

Get Links

The more links you have the more traffic you get. Like I said before links are the currency of blogs. So how do you go about getting links to your blog?

Well written posts are often linked back by many sites. You are lucky if you get linked by heavily trafficked sites.

Another way is to get links from other bloggers. Link to their blogs and ask them politely to do the same for you. Also visit the ‘links’ section of a blog (if they have one) and check for a link exchange form. If there is, submit your blog after linking to theirs.

You may also take part in other link exchanging programs.

Join Conversations

Most of my first visitors came to my blog because I left a comment on theirs. When you comment on a blog leave your blog address. Often people like to know who is reading their blog and will come visiting you. Readers of that blog will also pay a visit to your blog. But do not comment just for the sake of it. Make genuine comments that relate with the post. In the process you will not only get visitors to your blog but might also make friends.

Take part in Blog Top Sites

Submitting your blog to Blog Top Sites like topblogsites.net, blogtopsites.com and top100bloggers.com is another way to get more traffic. These networks make your blog easier to find and search for as well. After you sign up for an account on their website, you just need to copy a bit of code and paste it somewhere on your blog.

You can also take part in blog traffic exchange communities like BlogExplosion and BlogClicker.

To join these blog traffic exchange communities – visit the site, sign up, confirm your account, add your blog to the member directory and then start visiting other member’s blogs.

Basically, you need to earn ‘credits’ in order to get blog traffic exposure. These credits are often gained by visiting other member’s blogs. When you have enough credits, your blog becomes eligible for promotion. Usually, a link or graphic to your blog will be shown on the main site or in fellow member’s blogs. This is how other people find your blog.

Of course, the more members there are in the community, the more potential visitors. So, if you are part of a blog traffic community, it’s good to promote the communities you belong to as well. Besides, when you promote the community through a referral system, you get more credits too.

Tag Technorati

Technorati is one of the best traffic providers for bloggers. People find your blogs easily when people search by technorati tags. Technorati will rank your blog based on the number of links from other websites.The higher your rank the easier your blog is to find when people search for things.

If you do not have a Technorati account, signup here. After you have setup the main settings, such as your profile, you need to claim your blog.

Make good use of Technorati tags by tagging every keyword in each of your posts. If you use WordPress, I recommend Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) which makes tagging Technorati a lot easier.

By tagging your post effectively you will get a lot of quality traffic to your blog.

Source: JohnTP.com

It is best to follow these tips step by step starting from the top.

1. Get a good domain name – First of all if you are serious about blogging, get a good domain name that’s easy to remember. It will help people spread the word about your blog more easily.
2. Write an About page – Before you start blogging, create an “About” page and link it to every page on your blog. The “About” page must describe not only about you but also about what your blog is really about.The page should be able to provide visitors with compelling reasons to come back so as to convert them into regular readers.
3. Write Tutorial articles – Tutorial articles are standard articles that are aimed to teach your readers something. These articles form the foundation of your blog and become the main drivers of traffic to your blog. You must post a minimum of one Tutorial article per week. At the end of the month collect these articles and put them on one page called ‘top posts‘ and link it to every page. This page will provide a reason to casual readers to come back again and subscribe to your feed.
4. Write a minimum of one post per day – Every post you publish need not be a Tutorial article but you must update your blog daily with atleast one short article. This creates a feeling among first time readers that your blog is always updated and they are likely to come back again and subscribe to your feed. Blogs with a lot of readers need not be updated daily as their readers will be more forgiving even if they update once per week.But this is not true for new blogs that have few readers. They have to post as much as possible to keep their readers.

   Important- Before taking a look at the next step, continue posting Tutorial articles and regular short articles for a few weeks.

5. Comment on similar blogs – Once you have enough Tutorial articles and other short articles, you are ready to expose your new blog to the world.  Start by finding readers by commenting on blogs with similar content to that of yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog. You are likely to get more readers if your comment is relevant and valuable to what is being discussed on that blog. Comments such as ‘nice blog,visit mine’ will not help you much. And please do not spam other blogs. That will only make your blog look bad.
6. Link to other blogs – When you write an article and link to another blogger’s post, a truncated summary of your article is left on their post usually in the form of a comment called trackback. This is very useful as it helps you gain readers and the attention of the blogger you linked to. The other blogger is most likely to visit your blog to find what you wrote about their post. If your content is good, they might become one of your blog’s regular readers and might even link back to one of your posts bringing you more readers.
7. Encourage comments on your blog – If visitors to your blog sees other readers commenting, they will get the feeling that your blog is important and will stick around more to read other posts. If they like the content they are likely to become regular readers. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. When you get comments respond to them to keep the conversation going.
8. Take part in Blog Networks – Submitting your blog to blog networks like topblogsites.net, blogtopsites.com and top100bloggers.com is another way to get more readers. These networks make your blog easier to find and search for as well. After you sign up for an account on their website, you just need to copy a bit of code and paste it somewhere on your blog.
9. Take part in Blog traffic Exchange communities – You can also take part in Blog traffic Exchange communities like
   • Blog Explosion
   • Blogazoo
   • Blogmosh
   • Blog Advance
   • Blogmad
   • Blog Clicker

   To join these blog traffic exchange communities – visit the site, sign up, confirm your account, add your blog to the member directory and then start visiting other member’s blogs.

   Basically, you need to earn ‘credits’ in order to get blog traffic exposure. These credits are often gained by visiting other member’s blogs. When you have enough credits, your blog becomes eligible for promotion. Usually, a link or graphic to your blog will be shown on the main site or in fellow member’s blogs. This is how other people find your blog.

   Of course, the more members there are in the community, the more potential visitors. So, if you are part of a blog traffic community, it’s good to promote the communities you belong to as well. Besides, when you promote the community through a referral system, you get more credits too.

10. Submit your Tutorial articles to a Blog Carnival – A blog carnival is a blog post that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea here is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and the people that have articles featured in the carnival receive a few new readers. You can also find a list of all the carnivals to submit your articles at the Carnival Submit Form.
11. Submit your articles to EzineArticles – Submit your Tutorial articles to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish them on their website or in their newsletter while linking back to you. If your article is republished on a site with good traffic, you will get a lot of new readers at once.
12. Tag Technorati – Technorati is one of the best traffic providers for bloggers. People find your blogs easily when they search by technorati tags. Technorati will rank your blog based on the number of links from other websites. The higher your rank the easier your blog is to find when people search for things. If you do not have a Technorati account, signup here. After you have setup the main settings, such as your profile, you need to claim your blog.Make good use of Technorati tags by tagging every keyword in each of your posts. If you use WordPress, I recommend Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) which makes tagging Technorati a lot easier.

    By tagging your post effectively you will get a lot of new readers to your blog. Selecting the right tags is not easy though. You can use the Tag Suggestion Tools for good suggestion of tags.

Source: JohnTP.com

Have you ever wondered how you can generate more traffic to your blog/websites using forum signature area? I have wondered that myself for awhile now and finally found a few ways to optimize it.  It took a bunch of trial and error but here are a few points I came up with that have help me generate traffic to my blogs:

1. Install Google Analytics
You have to have Google Analytics installed on your websites to be able to optimize your signature.  Without having it installed you cannot tell where the traffic is going. So once you have Analytics installed on your websites what you do is login and go to Traffic Source > forum_name (referral) > looks for Dimension: and select Landing Page instead of Referral Path.  In here you can tell exactly where all your traffic is coming from in your forum signature.  So if you have say have 3 keywords in your signature and they all link to different pages on your blog you can tell which keywords get clicked on more than others. This is very important in choosing which keywords to put in your signature.  In addition to putting keywords in your signature you need to make sure these keywords relate to the topic of the forums.  If the keywords do not relate then the likelyhood of someone clicking on the links will decrease significantly.

2. Create Threads with useful information
You need to create threads with useful information for people to notice your forum signature.  If all you do is respond to other peoples threads with your 2 cents which isn’t that exciting and useful like “thanks” you aren’t going to have people noticing your forum signature.  You need to start threads that people like and are intrigued by and lots of people will view and respond to it.  Those people are than more likely to view your forum signature and click on your links.

3. Make the keywords in you signature catchy / interesting
People have a very short attention span so you need to grab their attention quickly.  So if you have a very interesting keyword in your forum signature they are more likely to click on it than pass it by.  If they can live without clicking on it than you haven’t chosen the right keywords.

4. Make the keywords in your signature colorful and attractive
People like colors! They will notice it a lot more if it has colors and is bold. If it just blends in with the rest of the posts in the thread it doesn’t stick out and therefore will not get clicked. Play with the appearance of the forum signature and make sure it stands out so people will see it right off the bat!

5. Formatting is important
In addition to above you need to make sure the formatting is good. You can play with alignment (centered / right aligned / left aligned).  You can play with adding in smiley faces or other emoticons to see if that helps. You can play with underlines, *, !, etc to help grab the readers attentions.

So hopefully this list will help you optimize your forum signatures so you get the traffic you are looking for to your blog/website!

Creating traffic to your blog can be a difficult task. While doing some research and looking at my Google Analytics stats I realized there is another way to generate traffic to your blog. This is something most of you probably have never thought about and I didn’t think about it myself until I started getting traffic to my website through this method. Everyone knows that getting traffic through search engines is great because it usefully converts better and you don’t need to advertise your blog all the time to get this type of traffic. Have you ever thought of the possibly of getting traffic through the Google image search feature? If you haven’t this might be something to look into. Let me explain a bit further.

When you add a image to your blog you think you are doing this mainly to create an attractive website that people will be interested in; however there are other beneficial reasons why you may want to add pictures to your website.  This other main reason is because people can find your blog through the Google image search feature.  Have you ever seen the Google Image search feature?  There is a button at the top left of Google to search images when you search for topics and in the search feature you sometimes get Image results showing at the top of the search results.  See example below:

So how can you optimize your images so they show up in the Google search feature?  If you can get in one of these top spots when people do regular Google searches you could potentially generate a lot of traffic to your blog.  So how is it done?  Here are a few steps you can take to optimize your images so you can get some better traffic to your blog through Google Image search feature.

1. Insert keywords into your Alt tags – this should be pretty self-explanatory.  If you put descriptive alt tags on your images you are more likely to come up in the search results
2. Name your Images with Descriptive titles - this as well should be pretty obvious.  If you have unique titles for your images then you are more likely to come up in the results.  If you have a very generic title for your images then the likelihood of it being the same as other images is very good and therefore giving you bad image search results
3. Use relevant text around the images – It is helpful to have relevant keywords around the images because those keywords will likely show up in bold as well and the user who searches will more likely click on the images
4. Optimize the title and meta tags of your pages – this is something you should already be doing for all of your pages.  You should especially be doing this for the pages that have the images so that they come up in the results a bit more easily
5. User anchor text keywords in links to images – what this means is if you have a hyperlink to an image and its text make sure the text is descriptive and not something generic like “Click for full size image”.  That type of thing is generic and will not help.  If you put something like “Jessica Alba Hot Picture” you are more likely to get the right results
6. Make Your image folder accessible to search engines – you need to make sure that your images folder is accessible by search engines.  If it is not then the images will not get indexed by Google and you will not get in the search image results
7. Enable Google Image Search in Webmaster Tools – this is one that I just recently found.  If you are signed up with Google Webmaster tools what you can do is login to your account and go to the Tools tab on the menu bar and find the option to enable enhanced image search on the left sidebar.  Once you do this your images will hopefully be indexed a bit more easily
8. Monitor the Number of Google Images Indexed – this is an important step because if none of your images are indexed then you are not going to get any traffic from Google image search.  You can do this by going to Images button at the top left of Google and then typing – site:www.yoursite.com or site:yoursite.com.  It really depends on how your site is indexed for if you should have the www or not.  If it brings up results then those are the images indexed by Google.  If you get no results then you have no images indexed by Google and you need to work harder on the steps above to get your images indexed.

So hopefully these tips above will help you generate some extra traffic to your blog.  I know it has worked in the past for many other people and can work for you if you just give it a try and try to follow these guidelines.  Good luck and let me know how successful you are at this technique!

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.

So after doing a lot of research and testing one technique for generating traffic that I found to work best for me is to generate traffic through forums. It is important however that the forums that you do participate in are do follow forums.  You can find a list of them here in one of my previous posts.

So how do you generate traffic with forums?

There are a couple ways you can generate traffic with forums.  The main ways you can generate traffic are through links in signatures, review links (in particular threads), and through increased rank from search engines because of the do follow links in the forum.   When trying to generate traffic with forums you need to be careful though not to get banned.  This is something that can happen easily if you do not follow the rules of the board.  This actually happened to me recently because I posted a link in the body of a forum post and they deemed it as self promotion and didn’t take to kindly to it.  So I was given a temporarily ban on that forum.  So be warned that you do need to follow the rules if you don’t want to be banned.

So what forums work for me?

After trying a few ones the two I find that I like the best are DigitalPoint and SitePoint.  The reason why I like these two in particular are because they are do follow forums and they have a lot of traffic.  The type of forums that have very little visitors are very unlikely to send you a lot of traffic to your website.  So what I do is try to be as active as possible in these blogs and as a result get traffic from the members of the forums.  Also a neat feature of DP (DigitalPoint forums) is that if you have an Google Adsense account you can also get a share of the ads shown on an thread you participate in.  Therefore if you are a very active member of the boards you have a chance to make money with your Google Adsense account on the forum as well.  Usually you don’t get a ton of earnings but it is still worth setting up.

So test this out for yourself.  Market your blog with forums.  If done right it can generate plenty of traffic to your blog and you will be on your way to a successful career as a blogger.