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

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

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!

Guest post by Adam Snyder of DormRoomCash.com.

Are you tired of having the same amount of visitors to your site month after month? Are you taking steps towards increasing your visitor count?

In order to take your blog to the next level you have to increase your visitor count, but how? Most people think that the only way to increase their website traffic is to rank well for a particular keyword, although this is one of the best ways, it takes a lot longer.

Being that most bloggers don’t want to wait a year to rank well for a few good keywords they should use a few other methods as well.

4 Ways To Increase Blog Traffic

1. Article Marketing

Did you think article marketing was dead? Trust me, article marketing is still a great way to increase blog traffic and it works well to increase your search engine rankings. What most people don’t realize is that writing 1 article every week is not enough, you need to write 5-10 articles per week. The reason you need to write so much is so that you can get more than 10 new visitors a week. How would you like to get 100 more visitors per week?

2. Forum Posts

As most people already know, forums are a great way to interact with other people. Depending on what your blog is about, you can find a forum that relates to what you are talking about. The best part about a forum is that when you give great advice or help somebody then their will more than likely click through to your website. The key here is to simply lure your visitors in by giving them some help that nobody else wanted to give them.

3. Blog Comments

If you are like most people then you will comment on a blog post every now and then. This is a great place to give the readers everything you have to offer. When most blog readers are done reading a post they don’t always comment on it and this is a terrible idea. Even if you don’t have much to say you still should comment on the blog because it only takes 1 blog comment to get you more visitors.

Challenge: Starting right now I want you to comment on every blog post that you read. My advice is to read at least 10 different blog posts and see how much more traffic you have at the end of the month. I guarantee you that you will have at least 1 new visitor for every blog comment you leave.

4. Guest Posts

Do you know the benefit of writing guest posts? One of the things that you need to understand is that a guest post can be written for almost every blog out there. Another thing that you need to know is that a guest post will help you get more direct traffic from that particular blog and it will help you increase your search engine position. All you have to do is find a few good blogs to guest post on and then start writing.

Tip: Write on relevant topics. If you have a blog about making money online then you have no business writing a guest post on a website about cervical cancer. Think about it, if you want to get people to click through then your website needs to have something to do with what you are talking about.

If you don’t know how to write a guest post then make sure you read a guest post I did here called Guest Post Your Way To Loads Of Traffic, trust me, this is a very useful piece.

Stick to it

Two things that I know about increasing your blog traffic month after month is that it will take a while to get to where you want to be but that should not stop you. The other thing I know is that the longer you stick to a plan, the better the results will be in the end.

When I say plan, I mean that you actually should have a plan in place. If you take the above 4 methods to increase blog traffic and put those into a plan then you should be doing something like this – 2 articles per day, 5 forum posts per day, 10 blog comments per day and 1 guest post each week. If you can stick to this plan then you should see a substantial gain in traffic.

Before you hopefully get started on your blog comment challenge I want to make sure you understand one thing – consistency is the key to all successful blogs. Not only will you need to consistently write great articles for your blog, you will need to grow your following into the following that your blog deserves.

About The Author

Adam Snyder is the blogger behind DormRoomCash.com. He spends most of his time writing about different ways to earn cash online but he also blogs about other things. If you want to learn more about what Adam talks about then make sure you follow DormRoomCash on Facebook.

Photo by John Althouse Cohen

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

What’s your blog about?

Our blog is about helping people reach their next goal in life – whatever that may be. We are participating in a blogging contest, patterned after TV’s Survivor where we had to start a blog from scratch.

We thought the concept of “leapfrogging through life’s challenges” would be something that would interest a wide range of people.

What’s your overall traffic generation strategy?

We are trying to really diversify our promotion of the website. Instead of putting all our eggs in one basket, we are trying to utilize as many different techniques as we can. It is easy to put too much into one specific area, like Twitter for example. Everyone has different ways that they use the internet and we are trying to reach as many of those as we can.

How are you using social media to get traffic?

We setup accounts with all the major social media places – Facebook, Twitter, etc – and have been posting our blog updates there. From there, we branched out to places like Google+ and BlogEngage. Like most bloggers, we were trying to get the word out as fast as possible – to as many people as possible.

What is BlogEngage and how does it help?

Honestly, I had never heard of BlogEngage when the contest started. I’m on board now, however! I guess I would describe it as an online community for bloggers. When you publish a new blog post, you add it to the site and other bloggers and comment on it and vote it up or down.

The more votes you get, the more visibility you get. Its also a great place to get exposed to new blogs. Every once in a while, I will just browse through and read other people’s posts. Very cool site.

What is your comment posting strategy to get traffic?

I’m not a big fan of just sitting down and going to 100 blogs to leave a fast comment. I know it is a viable link-building strategy, to a certain extent, but I like to interact a little more. I’m generally just visiting the same blogs I would normally visit – but instead of using the address of my photography website (lourceyphoto.com), I’m using the address of our website – TheNextGoal.com.

I’m also always on the lookout for Tweets, BlogEngage posts or other announcements that involve goal setting, motivation, etc. I’ll usually end up visiting those sites and reading a few of their posts. I’ll leave a comment, especially if I feel like I can add to the discussion. As a blog owner myself, I know how frustrating it is to get generic post comments!

How are you using interviews to get traffic?

We thought the concept of building a blog from scratch – under the pressure of direct competition – would interest a lot of people, so we reached out to the various people we knew who might be interested. I have several bookmarked blogs that I check out all the time (yours is one, of course!) and knew their audience would have similar interests. Our hope is that people will read the interview and be interested enough to check out the site. In a roundabout way, it is kind of like guest posting.

What about SEO?

SEO is always a big part of traffic. From our domain name, all the way down to the title of the posts, we are trying to keep a uniformed theme. The blog-based format gives us a good head start on making things search-engine-friendly. Brandon is kind of our resident design guru and he has done all the on-page fine tuning. That’s the great part of having a team to work on your blog.

Are you building an email list?

Absolutely. We have an email opt-in list very prominently displayed on the front page. People who sign up get enrolled in a series called “14 Days To A Better You” – great stuff! I’ve been meaning to make a better effort to build a mailing list on my own blog, so this has definitely been a great learning experience for me. Definitely going to add it to my own To-Do List.

When you look at Google Analytics, what’s your best source of traffic?

Facebook has been really good for us. I know I’m personally more involved in Facebook than I am in Twitter, so that is probably why it is getting better results- at least from my friends. After all, social media is all about relationships.

Will you come back in a few weeks and update us on your best source of traffic?

Absolutely! Hopefully I won’t have been voted off at that point.

Our site is still very new, so we are in the middle of trying out a bunch of different strategies. Once we can determine which ones are working best, we will likely revise our plan. Of course, I’ll keep you posted…

Are there any traffic strategies that aren’t worth pursuing?

In my opinion, there isn’t any reason not to try any strategy you come across. The key is to not spend too much time on it if it doesn’t work. From my experience, different niches get better results from different sources. While blog commenting may be great for one site, Twitter might be much better for another.

You just have to try things out and be good about tracking the results. If you aren’t tracking the results, it is really hard to improve.

People often ask: How do I get free/cheap traffic to my site?

Here’s the problem:  There is no one-size-fits-all traffic method.

Every niche is different and methods that work for some niches will likely not work for your niche.

The solution

The solution is to figure out who is your ideal visitor is, where they can be found online (in high concentration), and look for ways to leverage the traffic of those sites.

I explain more in this video.

Guest post by Amy Young.

There are so many tips and pointers out there telling you just how to get more traffic to your website or blog. What many forget is that the content of your website is just as important as link building. Building a high traffic site takes commitment from the beginning.

As you build your blog, focus on your content so that you can start of on the right foot. The content of your blog should have three qualities; it should be valuable, original, and timeless. People will only want to come back to your site if they think the content is worthwhile. Therefore, in order to keep readers coming back, you need to really think about the information you put onto your blog.

Create Value

To create value in your content, think about what effect you want to have on your readers. Do you want to inform, persuade, or help them achieve a goal? Maybe your purpose is entirely different, but if your writing doesn’t achieve this goal, it does not create the value you intended.

Focus on providing real value instead of just posting something forgettable. It will always be better to write one good article that you are proud of instead of ten small, meaningless posts. Your readers will notice your effort and recommend your site to others online, creating more links to your site. Other bloggers may even comment on something you’ve written, providing new links as well.

It is very hard to come up with strong content, but it will generate more long-term traffic through referrals and loyal readers. Quantity without quality is much easier to accomplish, which is why so many blogs try to post something every day, no matter how small or uninteresting. However, quality is always going to be more important to readers than quantity. In order to be a step above the rest, you need to make sure your site stands out, and gives readers a reason to come back. Every time you sit down to write an article, focus on doing the best you can no matter how long it takes.

Be Original

It may be easier to build traffic in the beginning when you post content from others, but original content sites have the potential to create solid, long-term relationships with readers. This helps build traffic at a steady rate, and will help maintain that traffic in the future.

It will take more effort to come up with original content, but you don’t want your blog to be based on someone else’s work. Your readers will start to notice, and you will probably loose traffic. Readers who like your original work will want to hear what you have to say, not someone else. After a while, you will have created enough articles to keep your readers entertained for hours, and then they will want to come back for more. These are the people you should be focusing on when you are writing your blog posts. You have a chance to change their lives with your words, so take pride in what you share.

Write Timeless Articles

Many of the articles you write today may be read many years from now, so you want the content of your blog to be timeless. While this may be hard for some sites (i.e. technology information), it is the best way to maintain traffic to your site for years to come. You could have the ability to influence future generations, so think about what information you would like to pass on to them.

Timeless content will connect with your readers now more deeply than content meant just for today. Therefore, it will make readers connect with the blog and make them want to come back again and again. Most of what is covered in the media today will be completely irrelevant next week. We will all probably forget today’s top news story, but we will remember those things that make us think and truly matter to us in the long run.

If nothing else, remember to focus on your readers while you are starting your blog. If they believe that you truly care about them, their needs, and ways to help them, then your site traffic will see a positive effect. Using other link building and SEO techniques will also help, of course, but when you start from scratch with the right frame of mind, building a high traffic site can be a lot easier.

About the author

Amy Young is an author working for a company that tries to educate others about managing their personal finances. Her articles relate to finance, marketing, and helping small businesses achieve their goals.

Every so often I see ads for services that Guarantee Traffic and I shake my head in disgust.

I can’t help thinking of greasy salesmen and I’d never recommend them to anyone; instead I tell people to run away from them, very, very fast.

But Nick, what’s the problem?  Don’t I want guaranteed traffic?

More targeted traffic means more sales, which is what you want.

But these guaranteed traffic services NEVER send you targeted traffic; they send you untargeted traffic, or worse yet they send fake traffic (a computer program visits your site 1,000 times).