5 Traffic Techniques For New Bloggers

I’m not yet an Internet marketing guru, and have no desire to be one, but I do have experience generating traffic to websites and blogs.  Just to give you a little taste, my very first niche affiliate site INeedVinyl.com became live in March 2008 and ended the month with 60+ unique visitors.  By the end of May I had generated over 1000 unique visitors using free, organic traffic building techniques and the count continues to rise.  I’m not the type to position myself as Mr. How-To, but I’ve recently met a pretty cool dude by the name of T over at Poverty101.net and he’s just getting started in the blogging world – so I figure I would lend what little hand I have and share some traffic tips that he can use for his super-awesome blog! 🙂  I know you guys are probably sick and tired of outdated, half-ass traffic techniques but I can assure you every technique I list is proven to work, and you will find a lot of these in the top selling “make money online” eBooks.  How do I know?  Because I’ve read them all – so lets shut up and get to work…

1. Commenting on Related Blogs – I can’t stress the importance of this method.  Will being active in the blogging community bring you hoards of traffic and make you a ton of money by itself?  Not unless you spend 16 hours a day doing so.  Listen, when I say commenting I don’t mean “hey great post, have a nice weekend” or “that chick with the three thumbs is hot” but unique, quirky and resourceful comments which clearly state your thoughts and display your involvement.  This method is the fastest and easiest way to get traffic to a new blog – just stick within your niche, and be consistent.  Not sure where to start?  Visit Google and type in “Your Keyword+Blog” for example “Vinyl Records+Blog”.  Pick 3-5 niche related blogs, visit them daily, become known in the community and make connections.  Strive to be a top commentator!
2. Article Marketing – This can be the most tedious method of generating traffic, especially if you’re lazy, but let me tell you something – it works! The trick with article marketing is you want to keep away from submitting your blog posts as articles because Google no-likey and will slap your ass for duplicate content.  What I usually do is take 1 out of every 5 posts and instead of posting it to my blog I will rewrite it 2 or 3 times and submit it to the major article directories.  Start with these to get the ball rolling EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com, ArticleDashboard.com and ArticleCity.com.  There are also sites like AssociatedContent.com who will pay you for the traffic your article receives.  Remember, BE RESOURCEFUL! No garbage content.  If you can find 150 articles on the same topic, then put a spin on it or write about something different in your niche.
3. Keyword Research – This should have been first in my opinion, but I am not listing these techniques based on importance.  When it comes to organic traffic – meaning the natural traffic sent to your blog from search engines – it all boils down to keywords, your competition and knowing what people are searching for.  Here’s an example: I have a blog in the organic gardening niche and after doing some basic keyword research I’ve found that the keyphrase “Indoor Organic Tomatoes” has high demand with little competition (which is what we’re looking for).  What I would then do is write a 3 part series on my blog spread over a week with the keyphrase being used in the title and throughout the posts.  I’ll use the keyphrase in my tags, meta description, and create a new category or sub if one doesn’t exist titled “Indoor Organic Tomatoes”.  See where I’m going with this? I could also write 2 to 3 articles using my keyphrase like “How To Grow Indoor Organic Tomatoes” or “Top 5 Reasons To Grow Indoor Organic Tomatoes” and submit them to the article directories I listed above with my blog address in the author/resource box.  Piece of cake!
4. Naming Your Image Files Correctly – This is becoming more and more important with the likes of the Google Images directory.  If you use pictures and images in your blog posts you want to make sure they are named appropriately using relevant keywords and phrases.  Within WordPress there are ready-made plugins that will make this process a breeze – I recommend using SEO Friendly Images by Vladimir Prelovac.  This plugin will give you the power to control every aspect of your pictures and images with respects to search engine optimization and how the images on your blog are indexed.  Using the organic tomatoes example, I would save the image as indoor-organic-tomatoes.jpg, and within the alt text section of the plugin put the post title.  Naming your images accordingly will ensure that they are indexed by all the major search engines, and when someone is looking for an image, your blog will pop up on the search results.
5. Social Bookmarking and Social Networking Sites – I’ve already began posting about the importance, and possible challenges with relation to social networking sites like Twitter, Digg, Myspace etc… But truth be told, these services can provide serious amounts of traffic very quickly if utilized correctly.  I think it’s safe to assume that most people reading this post have either a Facebook or Myspace account currently active, or both, in any case take some time and set up accounts for your blog.  Add pictures of yourself, give a little introduction and immediately start to add friends who have similar interest by using the search functions within the sites.  Another secret way to find your niche markets within these sites is to search within the groups – Myspace in particular has over 65,000 groups already niched out and ready for your love.  Scope out these groups and start adding people to your profile, leave comments, post threads and have your blog address in your signatures and all over your profile pages.  It’s ridiculous how fast you can get traffic to a site using services like this.  If you’re not too familiar with using the power of Myspace and social networking sites to generate traffic I highly recommend picking up a copy of Ryan Moran’s SpaceBankers program.

More traffic techniques to come!  The original title to this post was 17 Traffic Techniques For New Bloggers but I had to cut it short as it’s 2:15 a.m. and my eyes are slowly shutting.  I promise I will be getting into more detail with regards to building traffic, keyword research and overall techniques to get your blog or website off the ground and running.

Cheers,

Elijah