Traffic Generation Cafe – Blogs to Bookmark

Traffic Generation Cafe is run by Ana Hoffman and covers all aspects of traffic generation and Internet marketing.  It’s one of my favorite blogs and I read it often.  One of the best things about Ana is that she actually cares about people and regularly takes the time to answer questions people leave in the comments and ask her on Twitter (@AnaTrafficCafe).

But instead of me droning on about how great her traffic posts are I will simply link you to a few of my favorites:

• How to REALLY Create a Popular Blog From Scratch
• Why Twitter Shut Down My Account and What YOU Can Do to Avoid It
• First Link Priority Rule: What It Is and How It Affects Your Link Building
• PDF Traffic Generation: How to Tap into the Untapped
• Conversion Optimization: How to Make More Money with Less Traffic?
• The Most Important Traffic Source That EVERYBODY Forgets
• Promote Yourself & Get a free backlink

Top 3 Traffic posts

The big 3 traffic articles you need to read today.

1. How To Get More High Quality, Natural Links – Nathan Blair explains a better way to build backlinks to good websites and asks the tough question, “Is Your Business Worth Talking About?”
2. 5 Basic SEO Troubleshooting Tips for Content Marketers – Lee Odden gives 5 tips for getting more SEO traffic.
3. Optimize Your Social Media Schedule: 4 Tips for Avoiding the Social Media Time Suck – Ashley Zeckman discusses how to be more productive with your social media efforts

Top 3 Traffic posts

The big 3 traffic articles you need to read today.

1. How An Alaskan Mom Gets Millions Of Visits To Her Carpentry Blog
2. How I Reached #1 on iTunes: A Guide to Launching a Podcast
3. InfoGraphic: The Viral Marketing Cheat Sheet

Top 3 Traffic posts

The big 3 traffic articles you need to read today

1. 4 Golden Rules to Get Backlinks in 2012 – Great post on rules for building backlinks in 2012
2. When Bing is More Important than Google – Some niches & demographics are far more likely to use Bing than Google.
3. Google Expands Test Of AdWords That Collect Email Addresses – This is a big deal for anyone who is building an email list.

Top 3 Traffic posts

The big 3 traffic articles you need to read today

1. How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse – Presidential candidates spend millions on their campaigns but they often do nothing to fix their Google ranking problems. Don’t make these same mistakes.
2. 5 Tips to Getting More Likes on Your Facebook Page – Likes are not as hard to get but you need to know certain things to get liked on Facebook.
3. 5 Ways To Drive Quality Traffic To Your Website From Google+ – Google+ may have had a shaky start but lots of people are using it to help build up a new traffic stream to their website. If you are among them, you might be wondering how you can start getting the results you want.

Top 3 Traffic posts

The big 3 traffic articles you need to read today

1. Looking Back on the Year of the Panda: Google Algorithm Changes – Affiliate marketers had their sites hit hard by the Google Panda Updates and this post gives a good rundown of last year’s Panda changes.
2. On Page SEO Elements For Success In 2012 – Good overview of how to optimize your site for good.
3. Don’t Fall Into The Made-For-SEO Website Trap – In doing Website reviews, I see a lot of people making these mistakes.

Big 3

The big 3 traffic articles you need to read today

1. How To Grow Your Site’s Audience Fast In 2012 – 12 Essential Tips for Revitalising Your Blog in 2012 – Gregory Ciotti’s list of things you should do to grow your site’s audience.
2. Link Building Strategy For 2012 – Twitter will turn out to be an incredibly useful social media website for link-building moving forward. Bing and Google both already draw on a number of different factors from social media websites to factor into the relevance of a website. It has been revealed that links propagated through Twitter will be factored into determining the overall rank.
3. 12 Steps to Financial Freedom in 2012 – Getting traffic takes time and you need manage your finances well while you’re trying to get your blog to take off and make your millions.

Big 3

The big 3 traffic articles you need to read today

1. 18 SEO Experts On How To Do SEO In 2012 – 18 SEO experts talk about how to best do SEO in 2012. Some of my favorite advice was:
   People should build websites that people want to link to. – ShoeMoney
   [Stop] Wasting your time on directory submissions…[Stop] Wasting your time on on-site optimization myths (like focusing on keyword density and trying to nofollow all your external links); – Ann Smarty
2. Search Engine Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing: The Showdown – Kristi Hines has another awesome post on why you need both SEO & Social Marketing and how they can help each other.
3. How To Maximize Conversions from Your Guest Post Traffic – Gregory Ciotti explains why most guest blogging efforts fail to get traffic & conversion and he explains how to fix it.

This is a guest post by Larry Lourcey from TheNexGoal.com.

A couple of months ago, I was chosen as a contestant in the WeBlogBetter “Survive The Blog” Contest. I was placed on a team with four strangers and we were tasked with creating a blog entirely from scratch. The results were phenomenal!

Results So Far

The blog was created in early October. By late December we had received 6,200 visits and attained an Alexa ranking of 88K!

Hard to believe. That’s an incredible amount of traffic for a brand new blog. So how did we do it?

The Team

I was lucky to be placed on a team with very talented and diverse players. Neeraj Sachdeva, Holly Jahangiri, Ntathu Allen and Brandon Freund. Our website TheNextGoal was geared towards setting and meeting your life goals. I hope you will take a minute to check it out- I think you will like it!

How’d We Do It?

There were several components to our success with the blog. A major factor, of course, is the fact that we had five people working on it. Add to that the fact that we were all motivated by trying to win a $1000 prize – and you end up with a lot of busy bloggers! This also gave us a certain amount of “built-in” audience, because we all had our own blog followers. However, since none of us were in that Goal Setting niche, we still had to do a lot of work finding new readers.

Content

I know you’ve heard it before, but like they say: “Content is king!” Part of our success came from creating a LOT of content. In fact, during the 10 or so weeks of the contest, the blog team generated almost 150 posts. We had a system setup where we would write a post and leave it as a draft. Another team member would read over the post, then release it. This extra bit of quality control made sure that we didn’t have a lot of careless typos and things.

Social Media

A great deal of our traffic came from Twitter and Facebook. We setup NextGoal accounts on both – plus used our personal accounts. This proved to be a great source of traffic.

Contests

One our best ways of promoting the blog was via contests. We would offer a cool prize, like a signed art print- and required people to leave comments, tweet about us, etc. It proved to be a very good motivator for getting people to visit and promote our site. If you haven’t tried one of these in the past, you should give it a shot. If you would like to see an example, here is a link to one of our contests: http://thenextgoal.com/2011/10/help-us-reach-our-next-goal/

Guest Posts

Over the past couple of months, we have done a lot of guest posting as well. This can be a great source of traffic, especially if you guest post on a blog in your same niche. The tough part is doing all the writing. Every post you give to another blog is one less post on your own – so you end up having to produce even more content. However, if you can do the writing, you will be thrilled with the resulting traffic!

Hard Work

Unfortunately, the biggest “secret” to our success was hard work. We were all competing against each other and that caused us to push ourselves. I know that during the contest I promoted the Next Goal website much harder than I’ve ever promoted my own site. If you are willing to put in the time, the results will follow.

YOUR Next Goal

So what is YOUR next goal for 2012- more traffic? Do you have any other strategies that have worked for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

About Larry Lourcey

Plano portrait artist, Larry Lourcey, holds the designation of Master Photographer awarded by the Professional Photographers of America (PPA) in 2007. He runs a wildly entertaining Photography Blog, as well as a portrait studio. In his free time, Larry enjoys trying to find free time. Follow him on Twitter as @larryphoto

Guest posting can be a great way to get targeted traffic but some people are wondering, “What is guest posting?”