Imagine a 2 year-old who refuses to learn how to walk because he hasn’t read enough books & blogs about proper big toe placement for optimal walking and posture.  He’s concerned that when he finally takes his first step, he’ll do it wrong, look stupid, and fall down.

He says, If I just study a little bit more about proper big toe placement then I can do it right the first time.

We intuitively know that this would be ridiculous.

We’d tell our kid, Don’t worry about proper big toe placement; you’ll figure it out as you go.  And yes, you’re going to do it wrong and fall down 100 times this week.  But that’s okay – it’s the only way for you to learn how to walk -  it’s all part of the journey.

We became stupid

Somehow, somewhere, we all became stupid, and started thinking that we could learn how to do complex things by simply reading a book or a blog post.

Imagine an airline pilot announcing over the intercom that his education only consisted of reading the best books available on airplane flying and this was his first time in an airplane.  Would you fly with him and trust that he’ll land the plane perfectly?

Of course not!

But what does this have to do with traffic generation?

Stop Asking Gurus For Traffic Advice

That’s right, you should stop asking gurus for advice on how to get traffic to your site.  Stop reading blog posts like this one and stop buying ebooks that promise to show you how to rank #1 in Google.

You’re wasting your life trying to get informed instead of actually taking action and learning something.

How Gurus became Gurus, (And why they’re better than you!)

You and the gurus have a lot in common:  You both buy ebooks, follow blogs, and maybe even attend seminars.  You’re both quite educated in the academic sense; y’all have a lot of book knowledge.

But there’s something that gurus have that you lack: experience, and lots of it.

Gurus have taken action many times.  And 90% of the time they fail! Yet they keep trying because they know 10% of the time they’ll succeed.

Meanwhile you succeed 0% of the time because you spend all your time reading and trying to “learn”.  This makes gurus look brilliant and makes you look really, really, dumb.

That’s right:  They’re brilliant and you’re really dumb.  That’s the bad news.

The good news is that you can stop being really dumb and become brilliant overnight.

You do it by spending 1 hour taking action for each hour you spend reading.

That’s it.  That’s the secret.  Balance your reading with action.

Take action

Stop asking questions like, Hey Nick is it better to put this keyword in my title tag 28 times or 29 times?

Try both, measure the difference, and voila! you’ve learned something.  When you test things for yourself you have control over your education instead of waiting for someone to give you the answer (and they often give you the wrong answer!).

The truth is that you know way more about your niche than I do.  So, in many cases I’m in no position to give advice.

About Traffic Exchanges

People love to ask if traffic exchanges really work.  I think know traffic exchanges suck.  They send you garbage, untargeted, and (in some cases) fake traffic.

I know this because I freaking spent $5.95 and tested it!!  The traffic I got was garbage.  (Granted, I only tried 1 traffic exchange and there may be legitimate ones somewhere but I had such a bad experience that I won’t try it again.)

An exception to the rule

When you first start out in any endeavor you need to spend some time reading and learning that way.   For SEO, it’s worth spending 1 or 2 hours reading blogs & ebooks.  But that’s it!

After that you should spend 1 hour taking action and trying to get your site to rank high for every hour you spend reading.

For example I recommend buying Fast Attack SEO if you want to learn how to rank high in Google.  It’s a great SEO guide and you should spend 1 hour reading it and at least 1 hour implementing what you have read.

Reading is not bad but it must be balanced with action.

The real problem

People that refuse to take action are afraid to fail – this is generally understood.

But the problem is deeper than that.  These people actually prefer the pleasure of a daydream or fantasy instead of actually getting off their butt and failing 90% of the time.  Because failing 90% of the time is really, really, hard and many people prefer to keep reading and “learning” in order to keep their daydream alive.

Am I wrong?

Leave a comment below and tell us what you think!

My name is Nick and I am here to help you get more traffic. Seriously, I love helping people.

So leave a comment below, or email me, and I will get back to you within a day.

Awesome tutorials

• How To Rank #1 In Google
• Nick’s Backlink Bible
• SEO – Frequently Asked Question
• 9 Ways To Get Traffic Without SEO Or Ranking In Google

How to email Nick

1. My email is nickstraffictricks@gmail.com
2. Put the words traffic help in your subject line
3. Include the URL of your website (I can’t really help you if you don’t tell me what your website is!)
4. Include how you’re trying to make money from your website i.e. I run Google AdSense ads or I sell DVDs of cats doing ballet (If you don’t know how you’re making money then you don’t have a traffic problem.)

Please be patient

I check my email once a day and do my best to reply to all the messages.  So it may take 24 hours before you get a response.

Photo by © Salim Photography/ www.salimphoto.com

For a long time I have been using the Thesis WordPress theme and fiddling with the look and feel of my blog.

While I love the flexibility that Thesis gave me I ended up wasting a lot of time trying to improve my site design.

And the worst part is, after spending all that time tweaking my blog’s design, I was never really happy with the end product.

A smart move

Last weekend I got fed up with it and decided to switch away from Thesis and get a new pre-built theme from elegant themes. They have a good selection of various WordPress themes and I found one that I liked.

A few kinks

Installing a new theme can be a pain and I’m still working out a few kinks in my system. It’ll be a few days before everything is worked out.

Sometime early this morning my web host a serious issue and this blog went down and I could not even ssh/ping/login to my server.

I called GoDaddy and they said they were aware of the issue and would be fixed soon.

And now it’s fixed since I able to write a blog post about it. 

I just got back from a trip to California (USA) for the Thanksgiving holiday and has several new blog posts that I will be publishing in the next few days.

I also will be posting several new site reviews shortly.

October and November have been rough months with my day job consuming a lot of my time and ongoing issues with my web host (the most recent web host problem occurred while I was on vacation in California). Because of all the madness I wasn’t able to post on a regular basis.

But I think things are finally calming down.

As some of you know I work full-time as a software engineer and run this blog on the side. Each day I have a couple hours in the morning before I go to work to: write posts, make videos, reply to comments, respond to e-mails, do research on new traffic methods, and write new e-books.

Several weeks ago my day job began consuming more of my time (because of project we’re working on and approaching deadlines, but I won’t bore you with those details). This left me with little or no time to work on my blog. And this is why I haven’t posted anything for nearly 3 weeks.

But I am back

Going forward I think I will have more time to begin writing new posts and making more videos.

And I certainly haven’t forgotten about doing those free site reviews. My goal is to do two or three each week.

Over the last several months I’ve been debating with myself whether I should expand the focus of this blog to include things related to Internet Marketing.

Photo by vramak

I previously had thought that this blog should remain solely focused on traffic generation. But after considerable thought I have decided to expand my focus.

I will of course keep you up to date on the latest traffic generation techniques.

And as always, feel free to ask me any question

A few more thoughts

Since I published this post yesterday, I have been thinking about my reasons for expanding the focus and realized that I should elaborate a little more on this.

Running multiple blogs is time-consuming

A while back I started a site http://www.nicksinternetmarketing.com where I was going to focus on Internet marketing topics and leave this blog focused only on traffic generation.

But running 2 separate blogs and getting traffic to them was a lot more work than I had originally anticipated. Building back links, responding to comments, keeping up-to-date with the latest plug-ins, layout changes and optimizations, writing new posts, submitting new posts to twitter and stumble upon, etc. were way more work than I had time for.

Traffic generation and online marketing are intertwined

The other issue I ran into is that there is no longer a strict separation between getting traffic and online marketing. As time goes on search engine optimization is becoming less and less important and is being replaced by viral marketing, social media, and community building as the best ways to get traffic.

But social media, viral marketing, etc. are not simple things that you can do by following a short recipe like you do with SEO i.e. do these 5 optimizations and build a few backlinks.

To get traffic from social media you really need to look at your entire business model and presence online. You really need to know what your visitors are hungry for and how you can fill that need.

You need to understand why you’re getting traffic and actually have a plan to make money from it. You need to select a market where people are willing to pay money for products and services.

For example I have a website with 60,000 famous quotes that gets consistent traffic but I’m not really sure how to make very much money from it. I started the website as a fun side project but never really asked, “What is it that I can sell these people?” And there’s nothing wrong with this. But because the website doesn’t really make money it’s a hobby and not a business.

In short, times have changed and if you want consistent traffic you need to understand what your business model is and what value you’re giving to your visitors.

Want more traffic without any extra effort?  Simply determine what content, keywords, etc. get the most attention and then focus on doing those things.

Google analytics makes this super easy.

Best Performing Keywords

The chart above shows which keywords are generating the most traffic from search engines.

50% of the top keywords that get the most traffic relate to backlink building (#3, #4, #5, #7, #9).  I should write some more posts about that.

Top Traffic Sources

My top 3 traffic sources are StumbleUpon, Google, and my email list (direct).  80% of my traffic comes from these 3 sources.  Perhaps I should focus on these and ignore everything else.

Another interesting thing is that I’m still getting traffic from TwiTip where I wrote a couple guest posts 9-10 months back.  I think I’ll write another guest post for TwiTip.

Best Search Engine

I get 20 times as much traffic from Google as I do the next highest search engine. So any effort I spent on search engine optimization will solely focus on Google.  Yahoo, Bing, etc. are a waste of time.

Note this will vary for different sites; one of my sites gets 80% of its traffic from Yahoo.

Most Popular Content

I have a few blog posts that are wildly popular and get 20 or 50 or 100 times more traffic than my average blog post. Above you can see which ones are most popular (#1 in the list is my homepage).

These topics are the ones that go viral and get lots of traffic.  And 3 of them (#2, #3, #4) relate to building backlinks.  This is what I need to post about.

63% of my users use Firefox

I knew Firefox was pretty popular but didn’t realize that nearly 2/3 of people use it when visiting my site.

I think it’s time  to write a post detailing the different Firefox plug-ins that I use to get more traffic.

Screen resolutions

Roughly 14% of my visitors are run 1024×768 screen resolution. It’s really important to me that my visitors don’t have to scroll horizontally so I make sure my website is not more than 1,000 pixels wide.

Windows is the dominant operating system

It wasn’t really surprising that Windows is the operating system used by 3 out of 4 of my visitors.

Learn how to do awesome stuff with Google Analytics

• Google Analytics 101
• Video: How to Share Access to your Google Analytics with Other People
• 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

How much do you know about your visitors?

What do you think of the change?

Edit:  I am going back to the previous format.

Photo by Untitled Blue

As you have heard, I had to switch web hosts last Thursday and it was a bit of a nightmare.  There were a whole bunch of things I had to backup, copy, and setup on the new host, all while responding to comments & emails and suffering from a cold.

The last thing to be completed was getting the payment processing working for my 177 Traffic Videos.  I apologize to those of you that wanted to buy them but weren’t able to in the last few days.