Basics on building traffic

Hi Mary,

Welcome to Performancing! I am by no means an expert on building traffic (my knickers weblog is still quite young itself), but i've found that giveaways can be a great tool to bringing people to, and keeping them on, your weblog. I've done two giveaways so far and saw quite big spikes during, then higher numbers afterwards. I also ran the giveaway by requiring registrants to sign up to the newsletter, so in a span of only three months, i've already got over a thousand subscribers!

It won't work for every niche and you'd have to find a company willing to donate the prize, but if you can build a good relationship or even start with smaller giveaways (like luxury travel items, say), and maybe swap the prize for x months of free advertising, it could definitely help. It's a great way to build relationships with companies within your industry, as they're usually delighted to see their name on your weblog as well.

That's just one idea, i'm sure others will have many more!
Good luck,
Nae

It might be you just need to keep plugging away and be patient, post several times a day and try different approaches, topics and post types. I wrote some advice here also.

As Nae says giveaways are good, competitions, and there are services like blogexplosion.com for untargetted traffic. It could be though you just need a really good link off a top blog to tip the balance.

Not to excessively toot my own horn, but there are a few relevant ideas in this report I've written:

Viral Copy: Trading Words for Traffic

The biggest way to increase Google visitors is to be linked to by other websites (or blogs) - Google weighs the number and value of incoming links when sorting search results, so a site with 100 inbound links is "worth" more to Google than one with 10.

Use the Technorati and Bloglines link citation services to see who is linking to you. Read your web stats to see who is referring traffic. Write content that is conducive to linking - something with broader appeal will be linked to more often than something only of interest to luxury travel seekers.

How about a Photography section? Show off photos from the trips - that appeals to everyone. Post some articles by people who are taking these trips - while they're on them, to give it some immediacy. People like to be able to live vicariously - give them ways to do that, and they will link. That will boost your Google Juice (and your karma), and will benefit the (smaller) number of luxury travellers, since your site will be more easily found by them as a result...

Wow, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for some great ideas, feedback and inspiration! Looking forward to trying a giveaway, competition, and/or photography section... I really appreciate the encouragement. Many thanks.

A cooking recipe for fast SEO results:

* Enrich your template and all your links and images with alt and title tags covering your keywords.
* Claim your blog at services like Technorati.
* Use Ping services like PinGoat or Ping-O-Matic.
* Use FeedBurner for your RSS publishing. They offer nice optimization, publishing and statistical features.
* Bookmark every article at del.icio.us.
* Use other bookmarking services to spread your articles.
* Use extensive tagging/keywording inside your articles and on services like del.icio.us.
* Use Flickr for your public photos. Link to the articles in Flickr descriptions. Again: use extensive tagging and publish to groups and picture competitions!
* Create some secondary blogs and recycle your content there with links to the original page.
* You might even think about buying traffic for ceratin keywords and phrases through Googels AdWords program.

I just made the experience with a very new test blog that MSN is responding much quicker than all the other search engines. I have more then 80% traffic right now from MSN during this early stage of SEO. Yahoo also was pretty quick but did not list my articles as high as MSN. About two month from the start traffic from Google is just starting to flow in.

As Chris said: be patient!

Update: Mary, I have just visited your corporate blog. It looks pretty good. You shouldn't have problems to get traffic in the long run if you post staedily!

I had a quick glance at the pages that linked to your blog.
Most of them seem to be from the master domain.
As someone pointed out above, you could try and see if you could get other sites to link to you. Not blog directories or something similar, but websites of magazines, hotels, tourism information desks that are related to your field.
I speak this out of real experience - my blog started getting traffic only after one of my friends linked to one of my articles. The traffic still low continues to grow at an acceptable rate.

* Bookmark every article at del.icio.us.

Does it work? It sounds very aggressive to me.

Sure does it work. Remember that you post your article link to your personal del.icio.us profile. What can be wrong about that?

I got pretty much of my traffic through people who are subscribing or clicking on certain tags and also some traffic from certain tags in my personal profile.

And all that RSS and social bookmarking promotion gives you a pretty nice chance to be picked up early by the SEs and start with a nice range of links. Google is pretty picky in some areas but there I made the experience that MSN becomes the early adopter. On my very new 'local newspaper' project I made the experience that Google kicked in almost immediately without any sandbox delay. Maybe that is because it is a German project hosted on a German server and Googles sandbox politics are different from country to country!?

And all the other sidekicks work better and much faster than I thought: I created an external calendar, a Flickr Group, some Flickr comments, a FeedBurner feed, a business profile for myself (which has other nice side effects), a Wikipedia entry ... the result is that I am already on five from 78,000 at Google for my main keywords with only a very minimum presence (only 9 articles on the homepage).

If you are getting not enough visitors my recommendation is to NOT post articles in a high frequency. Instead invest that time in creating appropriate side kicks!

Some points I forgot to mention in the comment above:

• Whenever possible you should add a link to an absolutely appropriate keyword in Wikipedia.
• If linking to somebody ALWAYS send them an email about your new link and how to see it. If it is your niche ALWAYS ask them to actively inform you by mail if they have something interesting.
• If using a photo from Flickr ALWAYS ask for permission, inform the author and after publishing the picture add a comment with a link to the article.

That all brings me to the point that it is time to post a summary about side kicks ... give me an hour and it's up on my p.com blog :-)

Great suggestions here guys,really helped,thanks! (especially the patience part I seem to be lacking,but I got 100 unique visitors only after 3 days of the blog being up so Im not that bad - my strategy was to post my link on every blog directory that has ever been created - 134 - yes,I counted - but most of them are still waiting to approve my link.) By the way try Pheedo,I just started and waiting for my ad to be approved but it looks a bit promising,it's kind of like Google AdSense.

Please write about your experiences when it is up and running. Just a nice little article on your blog here in p.com.

BTW, that blog directory list would also be nice content for the promotion forum.

Hi Markus,

Thanks for the information... It's invaluable stuff. I'd certainly like to see more reading my blog, though 300 in 20 days isn't too bad! I think I'm on the right track, but right now I'm just working hard on ensuring that I keep regular content coming out...

Thanks BlackVV for the compliment and keep in mind that people and search engines need hooks to get to your content. So, it is very important to see and analyze the search words, search engines and the referrers to not miss the 'waves of interest' ... PMetrics gives a great overview for this.

The passive way:
If you see visitors being hooked on certain search phrases then make sure to give them a nice landing page/article with a welcome message. Additionally make sure that all 'side-kicks' are properly filled with links to the main content.

The active way:
If you are covering a certain content niche make sure to have an early announcement for important dates as search engine traffic will rise when that date approaches. Then have a follow-up article for that subject and try to publish a third full featured article for that date 'just in time' for the search engines. 'Just in time' may differ for every website but you can monitor the search engines behavior by checking their cached pages. If you get the timing right you will see that you are riding the 'wave of interest' on the peak of interest. Additionally make sure that your 'side-kicks' are in synchronization with links to the third full featured article.

I have to find some time to write an article about the right timing ...

There is so much here that one wonders where to start, or what to start with.

I think one valuable point about building traffic, is slow and steady. If the content you have is truely valuable, and you take the responsibility of doing referrals and encouraging people to do the same, it's only a matter of time. It's very much like building a church, get the fundamentals right, be consistent, and truely care.

I'm in need of what to do mysefl, and this is definitely bookmarked.

I have recently posted an article on my site about google trends. I think this can be a valuable tool to check keyword interest by the public and to monitor ongoing news events and how they affect it. I am monitoring keywords that relate to my site and see what news tie in to it. another google tool i would use would be google's alerts which I reviewed here to monitor any mention of my site or keywords I wish to monitor and get immediate email whenever any site is picked up by google or a new news item.

That's my 2 cents.

Just wanted to check back in on this topic, and to thank nae for the Giveaway idea. I launched a 2-night luxury hotel Giveaway on The Informed Traveler (Junior suite in Washington DC. woo hoo!) and it's done wonders for traffic. A huge thanks.

I'm still looking at either a competition or a giveaway but I can't decide on either. I think a compo might be good for getting some new ideas generated though. I'll let you know how it goes.

Blog Directories
We ran a discussion in depth here on Performancing on the blog directories a few weeks back.

Through the effort I put together a list of all directories listed

• by alphabetical order
• by Alexa Ranking Order
• by Page Strength Ranking

They are listed in different orders so that you can better determine your priorities in submitting your blog to each directory. Some theorists would offer that blog directories with better Alexa or Page Ranking will yield better results in terms of impressions as well as with indexing. My list is currently at 127 directories listed (a few of the smaller ones have recently shut down)

PayPerPost
Also, I write freelance blog articles for PayPerPost.com.

They sponsor over 250 bloggers around the US and just added an International(English only) contingent.

If you are looking for more quality deep links coming to your site, you can contact www.payperpost.com

They charge a fixed fee per post. You can specificy the number of words in write ups from bloggers (anywhere from 10 - 300 or more) even though the standard seems to be between 100-200 for quality write ups.

As suggested above you can go through Google's Adwords for some paid advertising as well. This option allows you to put out a fixed budget amount and get deep links and relative writeups by many many bloggers all at once.

As an example, I've seen at least one law firm pay for write ups on keyword legal terms that would run for $20 per click on Adwords. They paid half that for full article write ups with permanent links to their site and pages and images within. Its a nice option to consider in a marketing campaign.

Pros compared to adwords
You don't have to worry about competitors clicking on your ads and spending your program dollars

Cons
The quality of write ups is better for higher paid rates. You get what you pay for. Write ups that pay out less than $2-5 to the blogger won't get picked up as much.

Other travel sites are already using PayPerPost for just this purpose, so it may well be worth benchmarking.

Note. I get nothing for referrals. :)