This is a guest post by Himanshu. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
Experience really counts! I’ve been blogging for a while on many different blogs. Before turning into a partial-pro blogger, I did some research on ways to get traffic my blog, and I would like to share my points of view with you. What is the good, what is the bad and what is the ugly way of generating traffic.
Natural Back links
Every blogger dreams about this. As the number of natural backlinks increase, your authority will also increase. But the point here is, are those natural backlinks really worth it? The answer is yes. It is a kind of virtuous circle. The higher the number of backlinks you have, the higher your authority, and the higher your authority, the more natural backlinks you will get.
In my blogging career, I’ve learned only two ways to get good backlinks: hard work and patience. By hard work I mean the content you write. Blogs like SixRevisions and Hongkiat are among the most popular design blogs. If you visit them, you will realize the reason: the publish a lot of high quality content on a very frequent basis.
Comments
I think I don’t need to tell you why you should be commenting on other blogs. For instance, I still remember the articles TechCrunch articles where I managed to leave the first comment. At that time, my blog used to get around 40 visitors a day. On that particular day (when I left the comment) my visitor count increased to around 110 visitors.
Some tips while commenting on other blogs:
1. Try to be the first one to leave a comment. Definitely it requires you to be pro active or to have some luck.
2. Try to ask a question on your comment. This is a 100% proven way of getting traffic. But of course I am not telling you to ask “How you doing buddy?” but something which will make readers think and incite them to visit your blog.
3. Try to keep it simple. Never write lengthy comments. Nobody has time to read a comment by someone they don’t even know.
Forums
Forums are always a good way of bringing in traffic to your blog. You can either ask your blog related question there, or you can put your signature as your link there.
Things to remember:
1. Never ask useless questions just for the sake of getting some extra traffic. There are always smart people who can ban you from the forum forever.
2. When you put your blog link as your signature, try to use some eye catching anchor text. For example, “How I earn few extra bucks working part time” sounds way better than “Click here to earn money”.
3. To take maximum advantage of forums, be regular. Devote 5 minutes every day to post there or start a new thread. This means 5*30 =150 minutes a month. It can get you at least 300 visitors a month and is very good in the long run.
Twitter has always been a very good friend of mine for getting Traffic. Mostly the traffic depends on the kind of content you write. Twitter traffic is crazy about social media. If you are writing something like “10 tips that can make you Twitter rich” then I am sure your followers would love to retweet it for you.
One thing I really like about Twitter is that your articles which never get attention on social bookmarking sites can also drive you a lot of traffic.
TIP: Twitter will only pay you off if you are regular. Try starting from 10 minutes a day and keep ReTweeting stuff. Most of your followers will reciprocate you and will RT your links too.
Search Engines
This requires no clarification. But before starting your blog, you have to decide whether you really want organic traffic or not. If you do, you will inevitably need to play around with SEO. It is also worth remembering that some blogs will naturally perform better than others as far as organic traffic is concerned. This is usually the case with tech related blogs, for instance.
Buying links
If you are really passionate about blogging and following “natural standards” without any black hat tricks, then buying links is BAD. Period!
Social Bookmarking
There are multiple ways of looking at things. Some think it is good and some think it is bad. Let us know the reason why is it so.
Why social bookmarking traffic is bad for my blog?
Social bookmarking traffic is very smart. If you are trying to make money with contextual ads like Adsense, for example, you will notice that such traffic will covert very poorly, if at all..
And why is social bookmarking traffic is good for my blog?
This is no brainer. More traffic means people like your content. Just imagine even if 1% of those visitors link to your article from their blog. Also imagine if 1% of of those people visiting your blog for the first time become your subscribers.
TIP: If you want to have success with social bookmarking sites, work on the quality of your titles. They can literally make or break your social media success.
Family and Friends
If you are deliberately asking your mom to visit your blog and check out some geeky stuff over there, then I think you need to go back to Blogging School and try harder.
On the other hand, it also depends on your niche. If you are writing about cats and dogs and your content is making your family and friends at least grin, then you’ve done a very good job.
You can read Himanshu’s take on technology on his blog, Whibb.com
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About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
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