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Building Traffic

The single most important thing that will separate your blog from the rest of the crowd can be reduced to a single word: Traffic. If your blog does not have visitors, there is very little you can do to monetise it. Income from your blog (or Web site for that matter) is a function of traffic—that is, the more the traffic, the more the potential income you can generate. If you are able to consistently increase the number of visitors to your blog your income will grow proportionately. This is a self-stoking cycle. The more visitors you have to your blog, the more you will attract!


All of the techniques discussed in this Fast Track contribute to building traffic. However, all these are secondary to the primary point of importance: high quality, focused content.


Building a blog with high quality content is the only sure-fire way to ensure that you attract traffic that will consistently grow. High quality content is something that will engage your users and want them to revisit your site again and again. This means that you will need to take the time and effort to think through each of your postings and to set high standards for yourself.


In the beginning, when you start out, the focus can be less on quality and more on just making sure that you meet your posting schedule. This is because for most bloggers the main problem is not about delivering quality content but the commitment to maintaining a consistent schedule. Once you get comfortable in your posting schedule you can then pay closer to attention to maintaining and enhancing the quality of your content.


By paying attention to the quality of your blog posts and keeping focused on your topic area, you are doing two things. One, you are consciously or involuntarily educating yourself in the subject area. This will make you something of an expert in your area of interest. Second, you are positioning yourself as a trustworthy source of information on that particular topic. These two factors will act as the reinforcing 'glue' that will keep attracting visitors back to your site.


For the first few months forget about traffic and concentrate on building traffic. Be thankful if you receive any comments-positive, negative or indifferent—on your blog. If people are staying long enough to read your blog post and comment on it, then you're doing something right.


Hook in a free program like Google Analytics (http://www. google.com/analytics) to keep track of traffic growth and to understand how your visitors are reaching your site—where they come from, how often they come—new and returning visitors, what search terms they use to find your site and what are the most popular posts they visit.


Once you get an idea of your visitor patterns, you can then go about trying to improve on this by creating more content with reference to the same thing. For example if your most popular post was about a vacation in an exotic location, you may want to do a follow up story about the same place. You could also sell advertising space to tour companies in that area. However, this decision should be consistent with your monetization strategy and your blog theme. If for example, if your blog theme is about digital photography and the vacation post is primarily to illustrate the techniques you used to in taking those awesome shots then another post on the subject of vacations maybe inappropriate.


You should also be willing to spend some time marketing your blog. Only consider paid advertisements if you have a serious plan in monetising your Web site. However, the most basic technique, which is free except for the time you spend, is to visit other blogs of interest and get involved in the comments section there. Most comments sections provide a field to leave your Web site address. Participants in the comments section who like what you say may follow back through your link for more information about your blog.


Do not, unless the conversation warrants it blindly post links back to your blog. This is considered as bad etiquette and many blog owners will remove such links. This is what is known as comment spam. For example, if a blog is discussing politics, do not drop into the comments section and say something like "Please visit my ice cream blog at xyz.com". Keep the comments meaningful and only point to content on your site if you feel that this will be better illustrated by your post on the subject.
When you find a blog post that you particularly like and wish to write a post on it yourself, make it a point to leave a track back link on the author's original post. A trackback provides a convenient method to leave links to your blog on other blogs with similar content. Similarly, visitors who refer to a post on your blog can leave trackback links on your site. Trackbacks and links from other Web sites help in improving search engines. Luckily, or unluckily—depending on how you look at it, the only way to get quality trackbacks and links to your blog goes back to the cardinal traffic building rule: provide quality content.


You can also consider taking part in blogging carnivals at http://blogcarnival.com. Blog carnivals are like a magazine listing of blogs on a similar topic in one convenient location. Having one of your relevant blog posts included in a carnival can help increase the visibility of your blog as well as provide an opportunity for attracting fresh visitors.



Next >>Technical Knowledge


This post first appeared on FAST TRACK TO BLOGGING, please read the originial post: here

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Building Traffic

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