Posted on Saturday 26th of January 2008 at 14:24 in Blogging

Get traffic for your website - introduction

Traffic is a crucial element to building a successful blog and everyone accepts this. One of the things you need to understand when trying to build your blog is which traffic sources to target your efforts towards, here is my guide.

The first question you'll have is "why do I need to target traffic sources individually?" and the answer is simple - because some offer much higher gains for proportionally smaller effort. Some traffic sources spark others, some require one-time investments of your time and some require constant attention and love. In this series of articles I'm going to be looking at these traffic sources (in no particular order):

Google
Google is my biggest bringer of traffic over the past 12 months, delivering a reported 107,228 visitors to the site and constituting 25.85% of my traffic. Fortunately there's a lot you can do to improve your fortunes with Google. In this episode I'll discuss how to make Google work for you.

StumbleUpon
Shockingly enough over the past 12 months StumbleUpon has been the second biggest traffic source - despite being Dugg/Reddited a few times and appearing on CNET - it still holds the #2 spot with 17.07% of overall visits. In this episode I'll explain why StumbleUpon is such a big player and how to use it properly.

Niche News Sites
Using news sites within your niche is a great way to get recognition and visitors. In this epsiode I'll explain how to find them and how to get your content published.

Mainstream/major News Sites
Major sites will sometimes pick up on your content if it's good enough; in this episode I'll be explaining what to expect and how this traffic source works.

Friends, Networking and Guest Posts
A key way to gaining exposure for your blog (and therefore traffic) is effective networking. I'll explain using case studies how this traffic source works and how you can improve upon it.

Other Search Engines
Google may be the market leader with a massive majority share, but you shouldn't neglect the other engines (don't put all your eggs in one basket, right?). In this episode I'll be covering how to optimise your site for the other engines and the traffic gains that are held therein.

Web Communities/Forums
In a similar way to using niche news sites you can leverage communities and forums for traffic. Not only are they a great way of gaining recognition but consistent traffic can be found from them. In this episode I'll explain how to use them to your full advantage.

Digg/Reddit and other Social News Sites
These two are massive bringers of traffic to the fortuitous. In this episode I'll cover how to leverage the sites properly and maximise your gains from these lucrative bringers of traffic. Massive traffic at that.

Stay tuned for the first episode in the series; hopefully at least one of the episodes will prove useful and allow you to maximise your traffic. If I've missed anything obvious off the list please let me know and I'll add it to the end of the series.

 

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