This was originally posted in July 2010 and is part of my Traffic Tricks Series.
For 10 years people been told that search engine optimization should be your primary focus when trying to get traffic to a new blog or website.
But there’s a huge number of ways to get traffic that have nothing to do with search engine optimization.
(And if you’re really serious about getting traffic you need to check this out because it will help you get traffic super fast!)
1. Start with really good content
I know, you are probably tired of hearing this. But it’s really true. If you don’t start with content that is valuable to the reader then no amount of traffic is going to help you.
It doesn’t matter how you get quality content; you can write your own posts, record your own videos, embed other peoples’ YouTube videos, use EZA articles or whatever. (Just don’t do anything illegal 
)
If your website lacks good content then no one will subscribe to your RSS, or stumble your site, or tweet a link to your website, bookmark your site, or tell their friends.
Traffic is meaningless without good content!!
Read more: 6 Reasons Quality Content Receives More Traffic And Makes More Money
2. Make your website user-friendly
Before you send tons of traffic to your site you need to make sure that it’s easy to use. There are hundreds of things you could possibly do to enhance your visitors’ experience but it’s not practical to do all of them.
Here are the ones that you want to focus on:
- Search Box – it’s a good idea to have your search box on each page in a location that people can easily find. This way if people don’t immediately see what they’re looking for a can use your blog’s search feature instead of leaving your site.
- RSS – Put the link to your RSS feed in a place that’s easy to find. I also recommend actually putting the word “RSS” in the link or next to the link.
There have been many times when I visited a website and wanted to subscribe to their RSS feed but couldn’t find it. I did a “find” on the webpage [Ctrl+F] looking for the word “RSS” but I couldn’t find it because they used an icon in the link to their RSS and didn’t have any text.
Read more about RSS: - Download time – make sure your website doesn’t take too long for people to pull up and view. If it takes too long people will leave before they ever see your site.
Read more: How Fast Does Your Site Download? - Google analytics – it is vital that you set up a free Google analytics account where you can track what your most popular pages are and where your traffic is coming from. This will open up a whole new world of ideas on how to improve your website.
Read more:- How I Used Google Analytics And Firefox To Improve My Blog
- Video: How to use Google Analytics to find the best keywords
- Video: How to use Google Analytics to find the best content on your site
- Video: How to use Google Analytics to find the top exit pages
- Video: How to use Google Analytics to find the best referring sites
- Why People Fail to Make Money on the Internet
- Tracking Website Visitors
- Most popular baby name origin?
3. Determine how much traffic you need
How much traffic do you want? Sure, I know you want 10 gazillion hits a day. Who doesn’t?
Let’s be serious here; you’re not going to get 10 gazillion hits your first day or your first month. So how much traffic do you really need? More traffic is certainly better but you need to have a goal.
And make sure your goals are precise. They should involve a specific number of unique visitors and a specific time.
Example: I want to have 100 unique visitors to my blog each week.
If you’re selling a product on your website and hoping to make money then that should help determine how much traffic you wish to get.
Watch: Video: How Much Traffic Do You Need?
4. Leave comments on other blogs
You can find blogs that are related to yours and leave meaningful comments on their posts. If someone asks leaves a comment with a question then you should take the opportunity to answer the question and let them know they can find even more information on your blog.
5. Go where the traffic is
It can be very challenging to get traffic to a brand-new blog. Even if you have fabulous content, can you find people that are actually interested in what you have to say? One of the simplest ways is to leverage existing traffic sources and piggyback on their traffic.
Learn more: Video: How to get Traffic – What I learned from Willie Crawford
6. Guest posting on related blogs
Guest posting is another great way to leverage other peoples’ traffic and send some of that traffic to you.
Here’s how it works: find someone’s blog that is related to your new blog and write a “guest” blog post for them. They will pay you back with a link to your website. If people like the post you’ve written then they will likely visit your website.
7. Build an e-mail list
My e-mail list is my #1 or #2 source of traffic (it depends on the day). If you don’t have an e-mail list you need to build one right away. Instead of someone visiting your website once and leaving never to return, you can invite them to join your e-mail list (and give them a prize) and then you can get 10 or 20 or 30 visits from this person.
8. Get traffic from forums
One great way to drive quality traffic to your website, although you might find it to be a small amount on a daily basis, is by forum marketing.
Remember that one hit of quality traffic is often worth as much as a few hundred hits from a non-quality source. What makes it quality is you’re getting traffic based on what you say in forum replies.
So do the following:
- Join a forum in your site’s niche.
- Login and edit your profile.
- In your signature, provide a link to your site along with a tasty blurb.
Another huge benefit of forum marketing is that you’re talking with others in your niche. At the same time you’re driving traffic to your site, you’re market researching. You’re finding out the biggest problems in your niche so that you can provide solutions in the form of info products or website content.
Tips & Tricks
- Start by finding a forum related to your niche and make sure signatures are allowed.
- Build your reputation as an expert in your niche. Provide quality information in your posts and replies. Users of a forum will only click on the link in your signature if you’ve enlightened them. One tactic you can use is by creating a new thread with pure information in your niche, almost like a blog post.
- Never link to your own site within the content of threads. Only place a link to your site within your signature.
- Be sure to read forum rules and regulations before joining any forum. Nearly all forums don’t allow affiliate links in your signature or within threads.
- Don’t spam forums!!!
9. Get traffic from twitter
Twitter has become a great source of traffic for me. Whenever I post a link to one of my posts to my twitter account I get traffic within a few seconds.
Learn more about getting traffic from twitter:
- Video Twitter Part 1: Setup you profile
- Twitter Part 4: Interacting With Followers
- How fast can Twitter send you traffic?
- How I Will Add 1,000 Twitter Followers This Year
- 7 Ways To Create A Professional Twitter Presence
- 10 Ways To Get More Traffic From Twitter
- VIDEO: The Twitter Follower Madness Has To Stop
- Video: Best Times To Tweet & Get Traffic
- Which tweets give you most traffic? Here’s a simple way to track that
10. Get traffic from stumble upon
Stumble upon has sent me thousands of visitors and can be a great source of traffic for you but you need to make sure you use it the right way.
There is way too much to cover in a single post but there are several posts I’ve written that show you how to get traffic from stumble upon:
- Traffic From Stumble Upon – Frequently Asked Questions
- My copy and paste formula for getting traffic from Stumble Upon
- Video: I got 1,300 visitors fom StumbleUpon in the last week
- How I Got 25 People To Stumble My Site And Give It A Thumbs Up
- My traffic experiment with StumbleUpon
11. Get traffic from YouTube
YouTube can also be a great source of traffic and the cost of making videos is quite inexpensive.
Learn more:
- Video: How To Get 9,000 Visits From YouTube Every Month
- Video: How To Get Traffic From YouTube
- Video: Make Better Videos: How to turn off Firefox Toolbars
12. Put your URL on your business cards
Next time I buy business cards I am going to make sure my website is listed.
Note: Make sure your URL is easy to read. So instead of putting http://nickstraffictricks.com I would put NicksTrafficTricks.com on my business cards.
13. Put your URL in your email signature
Most email clients allow you to have a customized signature that is included at the end of each email. Put the url to your website in the signature.
Read: Get more traffic from your email
Photo by Astig!!
{ 83 comments… read them below or add one }
What about offline advertising?
I don't think about advertising in print, but by putting big stickers on your car etc.
When your site/blog is covering a local interest, this can be a good way to bring visitors.
You certainly can get traffic from off-line methods. But for every effective off-line method there are 10 or 20 ineffective method. Putting a bumper sticker on your car is easy but I'm not sure how effective it is. You'd have better luck figuring out where your ideal customer goes to shop or recreate and find ways to target them there.
Hey, Nick. Good post for new bloggers. "Writing on same topic with same points but in own language" – Makes it duplicate content ?
I think being top commentator is a great way to get traffic and build links?
I would like to know How Yahoo site explorer register the inlinks to a site?
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> “Writing on same topic with same points but in own language” – Makes it duplicate content ?
Nope. If it's in a different language then it's not duplicate content.
> I would like to know How Yahoo site explorer register the inlinks to a site?
My best guess, Yahoo has some sort of crawler that finds them.
In regards to forums, I would say that being a part of community will go a long ways, by being a trusted member, the community will allow you more leeway in your posts. Definitely do not make your first post an advertisement pots for yourself, but as you build more trust in the community, you can start pushing the edge a little bit more if you will.
Till then,
Jean
This is great info, these are all great ways to get traffic to your site. I do most of these. Forums are great way to get traffic if you are an active member and give good advice. Every once and a while you can post a topic and link back to your blog post to give valuable information to the forum community.
Excellent Blog Traffic Tips Nick.
I for one,after seeing it on a collegue's site,installed Feedjit on my Blog and at first the only visitor I saw was me,but now I'm seeing a steadily increasing stream of traffic,so the list shows visitors from all over.
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That's great! I'm glad to hear you're having success.
Hey Nick..
The information you have here is VERY!!! VERY!!! MAN!!! GOOD!!!
Some of this stuff I never knew could work online. The way You write is easy to understand especially for a newbie in the online marketing game. it seem to come so easy you as if you've done for sometime now. But anyway. All this great information is going to giving me a big head start. Thanks for all your help in giving back.
Thank you for the kind words. If you ever need everything shoot me an e-mail: nickstraffictricks@gmail.com
Indeed. I may have good online experience, but haven’t really had to promote a blog or website before – so enjoying all of the posts on this site. Thx
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Hi Nick
I like to print your articles, can you use a print widget please?
Copy and paste lacks lustre, Thanks.
I don't currently have a print option available. I tried one before and it didn't work well at all. But I will look into it again.
This is great info, these are all great ways to get traffic to your site. I do most of these. Forums are great way to get traffic if you are an active member and give good advice. Every once and a while you can post a topic and link back to your blog post to give valuable information to the forum community.
Thank You for this tips, i am a newbie i am just starting my health blog i really need visitors…hope it help me..Thanks
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Nick…i should now say that i have become a fan of you. I don find any website that gives away so much to its users. I now personally visit your website on a regular basis and would love to get ideas from you in all ways. Am greatful that i came across your site. Keep buiding up great content!
Thank you very much.
I also looking for traffic to my blog, can you help me please?
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my other blogs are as …
http://image-editor.blogspot.com
http://www-browser.blogspot.com
http://tech-caffe.blogspot.com
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Content is king, for sure. However, commenting on other blogs have worked wonders for me. Not even necessarily for the back links, but more for creating relationships with others. When I started commenting on other blogs, after a while the owner, out of curiosity visited my blog. Then started commenting to return the faver. Next thing you know, there is a personal relationship, and we can now promote each other's blogs. A great way to make new friends, too.
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I think you are spot on. Developing relationships is an important part of getting traffic.
I agree with you, good quality content always brings traffic especially from the social bookmarking site or maybe we can also write about free stuff because it usually bring huge traffic too.
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How can a personal blog get more traffic?
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I have to ask, why do you want more traffic to a personal blog? If your traffic increased by 10 times what benefit would you receive? Are you selling something? Would you get some other benefit?
Once I understand what benefit you get I can better help you get more traffic.
I like # 3 the best. Everyone with a new blog or site of course wants to get the highest amount of traffic they can. But we must be realistic and should kn ow how much minimum traffic we need against what we want. I'll hop on over to the video page and look forward to another great tip from Nick.
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Great post about getting traffic. One of my preferred methods is blog commenting because I get to learn as I go along. I actually learn something new everyday from the many blog posts that I read and comment on. And yes I do actually read them and leave a relevant comment and try to be informative if I can. Another one of my favorites is reverse engineering the top websites in my niche. I take the first 3 to 5 websites that pop up when I plug my keyword in to Google and then I take their URLs one by one and then plug them into SEO spyglass and I can cherry pick their best backlinks for myself. That's how I go about off-page SEOing for the most part. I do the others to like forum posting, article marketing and social media but not to the extent that I do the first two methods.
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That's awesome! Thank you for sharing.
This is a very helpful list as almost always one of the most important things to answer and solve for a brand new release to the internet is how to get visitors. Thanks Nick.
I think you also have to include a Facebook page in the mix these days. Do you have any advice about Facebook marketing, Nick?
Oh wow, there is so much here; I'm going to be reading all night.
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Good idea. Check this out: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/the-bloggers-gu…
I agree, following your suggestions above and add FB will definitely give you the traffic you want especially doing this stuff after posting new content..
Hi Nick,
very useful collection of tips and links to related content – thanks for that.
I usually focus on your list items:
#1 really good content: makes the visitor stay, come back and recommend
#7 Build an e-mail list: not so useful in every niche I start a site in because of lack of backend products, but it can be used as reminder for seasonal events (like Valentines Day, Mothers Day/Muttertag, Christmas) when you want to attract visitors to your site with special offers by your merchants
#11 traffic from YouTube: not always that much traffic, but a backlink and listing in search results is always worth the effort
#13 Put your URL in your email signature: change this to an up-to-date landing page if you have seasonal content
Glad they're working for you!
These are great tips I can see why you reposted this article. There were a few i had forgot about as well. So thanks for the reminder!
I agree 100% with no. 1…its doesn't matter how good the optimization is, without good content a site won't get the amount and quality of traffic it wnats.
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All the ways are fully effective.I tried few from this good list.Its must read post for a newbie as well as experienced fellow.These type of tricks can chance the pattern of ranking…
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Lets just hope google doesn't revert back to the sandbox algorithm where you couldn't get rank on your site with out it having at least 2 years of history.
Hey nick, thanks for this information, it really can help me. However, it seems to have forgotten from Facebook. What if I want to get traffic using Facebook? How I do it? And is it as effective as in other media? Thank you and good day:)
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Yes, I will be posting something about Facebook soon.
What do you think about Twiends? i believe you've heard about that's program.
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To be honest I'm not a huge fan of non-organic methods of growing my twitter following. I don't want followers that are only interested in inflating their numbers.
Although the title says blog (and I have a site – yes, pure html, hand coded) I still can make use of many of your suggestions. I saved this post as a pdf for future reference.
I still have to develop additional content, so currently the site is not top quality, but that will change in a few days. Then I have to develop a bonus for email subscribers.
What do you think about offering newsletter subscriptions when they are exiting the site?
> What do you think about offering newsletter subscriptions when they are exiting the site?
Put yourself in the shoes of the reader. When you are leaving a blog it is because you are bored or you found something more interesting to do. How will you react when the site asks you to subscribe to newsletter?
I wouldn't expect your subscription rate to be very high. Instead find a way to mention something about your newsletter subscription and link to it at different places in your site.
I agree with start with a good content because I think content is the key to a good traffic. I have tried twitter, forums and other tips but I haven't tried stumbleupon, youtube and putting url on business card. But I will try to make my website user-friendly. hank you for the interesting tips.
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Superb Traffic tips nick, keep it going up, i heard that content is only not the king, the site appearance and readability level must also be good.
Video traffic is not so easy according to me.
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Local business or internet sales?
Either way, creating unique articles for your site is the best way.
If it's for local business just include the city name in your articles.
Other than that, AdWords or paid search traffic works but can be costly.
There are just so many factors which makes a site or blog successful and we have to dedicate equally on all the factors. From providing quality content to SEO works all contributes equally but I think the most important factor is also trying to make the blog more user friendly. I'd never want my visitors to struggle searching for information on my site.
> we have to dedicate equally on all the factors
Actually this is the wrong approach. You should figure out what the most important three or four things are and focus all of your attention on them.
Nick,
Recently I built a site which does not have a blog, I don't think it needs one. How would you approach this differently to get traffic to a more simple site?
Not having a blog to puts you at a big disadvantage: http://nickstraffictricks.com/4789_youre-an-idiot…
Why wouldn't you want a blog?
I think the best way to get traffic for a new blog is with really good content. Everything else takes more time. Just writing good content an pinging your blog every time you post will help get traffic to a new blog.
Really Great article Nick, i will surely use these techniques to bring traffic to my site.
I havent tried Guest posting so maybe I better start working on it and see how effective it is.
Thanks for the information Nick..
Nick, you mention
"Download time – make sure your website doesn’t take too long for people to pull up and view. If it takes too long people will leave before they ever see your site."
I found that many sites running on wordpress are too slsow for the amount of content they offer. There is often the disconnect between user (admin) friendlyness and performance. Too many put too many posts on the front page, don't use caching plugins or simply don't use compression on their servers.
Btw, how is your site tuned? Sometimes it loads very slow.
I have had a few server problems which I think accounts for much of my site's slowness. The biggest thing I use is WP super cache.
Nick, just found the post/reply I was looking for (How Nick speeds up his site).
Please allow me one question: How happy are you with WP super cache?
I tried several caching programs and found that they cause a lot of overhead especially on low traffic sites.
Did you try anything else to improve load time and reduce bandwidth usage?
Would be happy to hear from you. Thanks.
Tom
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wp-super cache seems to work pretty well for me.
Thanks for all the traffic tips. I sometimes get stuck on one or two and forget about all the rest.
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Got to fo.llow all this steps for my 4 days old domain! thanks a lot nick
you and your blog rockk!
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After following some of the advice of Pat Flynn 2 days ago, which involves making free blogs at wordpress and/or blogger to aid ranking of the paid-for domain and site, I re-read this very good post as it has relevance to that topic also. Visitors to the blogs will hopefully click through to the site, and whether or not they do it's a high PR backlink for rankings.
After about 3 months of setup and backlinking etc im hoping to have about 100 visitors a day. i'd be really happy with that.
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Hey Nick,
Thanks a lot for this. I have tried by this way as it really works for as someplace I have done wrong but later I have rectify it.
Keep sharing such type as it proves as great help for us.
That seems to be the hardest part – getting started, once the traffic starts to flow, then so does the motivation.
The thing with Forums that I find – a lot of it is not DoFollow, or it says that it is, but when you join, you find that it isn’t. How do you overcome that problem usually? Do you think the NoFollow link has enough value to warrant spending time commenting there?
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NoFollow links still matter some. But joining a forum will help you mostly with market research & building relationships.
i read all the post. You explained every methods to get traffics . I want to add something more.
I think we shouldn’t forget that the main bunch of visitors sould come from search engines. This is essential . Because all the others methods are just seem as forcing and not too much organic! For example sending posts to facebook pages by manual can take visitors but can also take reverse reactions from the members of the group if this group is not of your website. On the other hand if you stop to post your link to facebook or another social websites like twitter, visitor traffic will also stop . There is no regularity. But search engines are organic and send you regular and quality visitors. So we have to make an optimum seo. If we think that seo of our website is okey than we can share our time for other methods.
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Great tips Nick on how to generate extra traffic, keep it going up, i heard that content is only not the king. I have pages ranked on the first page that have limited – no content, yet they convert well for visitors. Video traffic is not so easy to generate either.
nice article but twitter doesnot give much of a views if posted why??? i ask queries to my follows why dont they reply do u know the answers????
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Well, your grammar needs a bit of work. You also need to build a relationship with your followers.
Useful traffic tips, Nick. Do you find that Stumble Upon traffic converts well? I guess it depends on the niche. I enjoy blog commenting. It is fun and often quite educational to become part of the conversation. Love the way you are interacting with the folks who leave comments.
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I’m still in the process of tracking conversion rates from different traffic avenues, so I don’t have any hard evidence about conversion rates from stumble upon but I suspect that the conversion rates may be a little bit lower.
Another great tips from you nick. One more thing, do not use traffic exchange to get more traffic, especially with Adsense on it. Google hate this. I love your way to get traffic from twitter and facebook. Keep the good work Nick!
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A detailed article on Boosting Blog traffic
I liked the way to present it. WordPress is SEO optimized blog platform.I love it 
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Thank you for all the tips! I just started my blog 2 months ago, and I haven’t done much marketing for it except twitter. I also tried to join Technorati and BlogCatalog, but they are taking forever to approve it, so I don’t know what will come out of that. I have zero readers and zero subscribers, and the only ones who tried to comment on it were spam bots. I’m starting to think my content is not good enough – I have 60+ twitter followers, and no one ever retweets anything or goes to my page.
I never wanted to have the best blog in the world, but I was hoping I would be able to get at least 20 visitors per day and maybe 100 subscribers quickly. Apparently, it’s not that easy. I’m thinking of giving up the whole thing entirely. I might try forums… It’s definitely a lot of work, and it’s hard for someone with a full time job and in graduate school. Oh well, nothing is easy, I guess.
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What is your website URL and who is your target audience? I might be able to help you out.
Wow, these are very doable techniques. I think it’s also going to work for my blog. I’m going to read your post on Twitter traffic next. Thank you very much!
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Hello Nick
Thank you very much for your valuable post. Will you tell me how much time a new website needs to get indexed?
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You probably just need to build a few links to it. Getting indexed by Google is not terribly hard.
It’s really hard to find suitable forums, directory etc where we submit, can you give any list of website where we should leave the links or submit site.
thks.. i need to get started with stumbleupon.
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Forums it’s a great way to create high target traffic, but requires some effort in order to provide great and helpful content. Thanks for sharing this post with us.
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Nick
Wow great ideas on how to get traffic to a new blog.
My blog is not new and I do most of what you have mentioned but, I don’t know that I do it all well. I know there are few things that i definitely do not do.
I am going to start implementing the ideas you have that I do not do.
Thanks so much!
Dee Ann Rice
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Reddit has been brining me 200+ visitors a day when i submit my articles. By google adsesne wont give me the clicks i wonder why?
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What is your site? Also checkout:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/7205_are-you-making-these-5-mistakes-with-adsense/