OK, if you’ve been following this series then you already have your blog online - congratulations, you’ve just started on the path to having an online business and financial independence! However, a blog is of no use whatsoever unless it gets visitors!
Traffic literally means visitors. There are stacks of different ways of driving traffic, and they are certainly not all created equal! Some take lots of time but very little money, while others can be virtually instant but cost a lot.
Now, if you’re just getting started online you probably want to a) keep your costs down and b) learn about different techniques. As your knowledge and income grows, you can start to use paid techniques, while still keeping the risks low since you’ll have enough experience under your belt so avoid throwing your money away on PPC!
There is no such thing as FREE traffic!
One very important point to consider is the simple fact that ALL traffic costs something. PPC might cost money, but so called ‘free’ ways of driving traffic tend to cost something far more valuable – time! As a blogger you want your content to be the major draw for your traffic, but until people know where you are how do they know if your content is worth a look?
Over time, if you are writing good posts on a regular basis, and following some basic SEO practices, you will start to attract regular readers and linkbacks from other sites and bloggers. However, there are a few things we can do in order to give that process a kickstart. Tasks such as writing and submitting articles, leaving comments on other blogs and participating in forum discussions are all ways of getting your blog noticed and I’ll cover each of them in the next part of this series, but today I wanted to talk about Social Bookmarking.
Submitting a blog post to social media and social bookmarking sites is not only a great way to get a rush of traffic, but it’s also one of the best ways to get a new site noticed by the search engines. In fact, I’ve had new blogs indexed within a couple of hours using this method!
Getting indexed via social media
What you need to do is create a pillar article, a great blog post. It could be an in depth opintion piece, a tutorial, a review or maybe a list of resources. It doesn’t need to be an epic masterpiece, but it should be a reasonable length (think 1000 words plus) and it needs to be good! If at all possible it would also help it it was topical so check out the latest news on sites like Digg, Reddit and Technorati before writing your post.
When you’re done, and you’ve proof read and spell checked, submit your post (not your site, but that actual post page) to a handful of social media sites. You can find quite a list of popular sites at Social Marker and I suggest submitting to 3 or 4 main ones, and any smaller ones specific to your niche.
If you’ve done a good job of writing a suitable pillar article you’ll start to get some traffic from these sites, but more importantly the search engines like Google will follow those links and index your site.
You can now repeat this exercise on a regular basis. DO NOT submit every post that you write, that would be spammy. Instead, submit only your best posts - ones that you honestly think would add value to these social media sites. Join in with the communities too - you don’t want to simply submit your own pages then leave the site, they are called social sites for a reason! Join in, vote on and submit other people’s pages and become part of the community… that way you won’t seem like you’re only interested in self promotion and will be more likely to get submissions and votes on your own pages!
