Getting Traffic to Your Blog

So is getting traffic to your blog a black art or is there a secret formula that guarantees you success. Perhaps just paying Google for position is the answer. I attended an advanced tips and techniques webinar with Google the other day discussing lots of different ways for getting a better click through rate on your Adsense ads. There were some really good techniques shared but not much said about getting traffic to your blog, a little bit to be fair but really not that much.

Now for me the biggest influence on Adsense income is getting traffic to your blog in enough quantities that you get a reasonable number of clicks. So when they opened the webinar up to a questions and answers session, I asked one simple question. I basically put up the question what is the most important feature of a blog that will result in Google placing it high up on the search engine results page, the consequence of which is getting traffic to your blog.

I was playing devils advocate a bit, because I pretty much knew what the response to that question would be…..

There was no response, they went through loads of other questions that had been asked, said they were also answering some questions on a one to one basis and collecting a bunch of questions together that were related so they could answer them as one. But what about getting traffic to your blog, not a dickey bird, never mentioned, I didn’t get a private answer and basically they ignored the question.

I was of course not surprised by this, because one of the main features of this blog is looking at what Google are saying and doing when it comes to SEO search engine optimization. You don’t have to investigate very deeply to realise that Google gives out a lot of information on the subject but that it is always a little bit subjective and not really too specific. They always speak in generic terms to describe what they consider an optimized website or blog to be. It is then down to you to figure out the details when trying to follow these broad guidelines and latch onto what particular combination of techniques will work to get you traffic.

The video below is an example of the type of help Google gives out.

This is the Google ‘Add URL’ page mentioned in the video

You can’t really knock what is being said here it is good information about getting traffic to your blog, but these techniques are all pretty well known and a lot of people are doing all of these things and very well.

The Biggest Challenge a Blogger Faces

The biggest challenge any blogger faces is finding a way of standing out from the crowd. With so much information on the Internet it is difficult to find a single topic that hasn’t been already written about extensively. If you can find a topic that hasn’t been covered and you are effectively first to market, then even better; this will make getting traffic and keeping it so much easier.

Engaging in a dialogue with other bloggers through comments will bring you some traffic, as will engaging people on social media sites and participating in forums. But you then still need to convert that little stream of traffic into a river, which brings me back to my point.

If the visitors you attract land on your blog and think I have seen, heard or done that before, then they are unlikely to share or promote your information and they will probably not come back again either unless you can be that crowd pleaser.

So what are you left with, well basically you need to have your own way of saying the same things that are funnier, wittier, is done more professionally or you use a different preferred media; actually its probably all of these things. You effectively have to create your own brand and or style and if you do it well you will have an appeal and attract more followers though the promotion you will get from the visitors you do attract.

If you take the advice of the Problogger he states that getting traffic to your blog is through a balanced approach to 4 key areas of promotion: –

• search engine optimization
• social media sites
• interacting with the blogging community
• working on great content

This is great advice and pretty essential for pulling in those initial visitors, but then it really is down to you finding a way in which to stand out from the crowd so that those visitors return and promote your blog to their friends and communities.

The other essential factor is getting their attention in the first place, and the best way of doing that is get your site, articles out there in numbers, i.e. utilising all the tools available to you to get noticed and bring traffic to your sites. Traffic Anarchy is a new tool that is available and which I have decided to evaluate. You can either take a look at it now or wait for my review, your choice.