Traffic

The Top 10 Ways to Get the Traffic You Crave

Sometimes I wonder if the Internet turned us all into a bunch of traffic junkies.

I mean, you’ve felt the cravings right?

Oh, sure, it starts out innocently enough.

You build a website, start a YouTube channel, create a podcast, whatever your passion may be. You create some content. A few people stop by and compliment your work, giving you that thank-God-somebody-finally-noticed-me feeling.

That’s when the cravings start. Not strong, at least not at first, but you find yourself spacing out at odd moments, like when you’re driving or at dinner or watching TV, drifting off into a silent little scheming session about how you can get more visitors.

And it gets worse.

You go from someone just toying with this whole online marketing thing to a serious student, Googling for traffic strategies on your lunch break, going to webinars instead of movies, and even studying blogs like Copyblogger (muahahaha!).

But you know what?

I totally sympathize. I’m the King of traffic junkies, going so far as to dedicate my entire blog to it, and after studying it for years now, I’ve slowly but surely figured out what works.

The next time you find yourself jonesing for a few more visitors, give these strategies a try:

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How to build traffic?

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there:  How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog).  If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.  That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors.  No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals.  Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know).  Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche.  Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free.  Submitting only takes minutes if you use amulti-carnival submission form.  Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month.  You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog.  Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss.  Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff.  I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore.  Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic.  But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start.  Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong?  Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right.  Again, making mistakes is not the issue.  Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic.  The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE.  It’s just not true.  Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site.  Nothing.  Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links.  Nothing.  I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever.  Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site.  In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout.  I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this.  It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work.  I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development.  To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it.  This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing.  I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work.  If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything.  What could be more fair than that?  The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it.  For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site.  I’ve recorded13 episodes so far.  The podcasts are all ad-free.  I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead.  More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy.  Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it:  “You know, Steve.  Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.”  Of course I’m aware of it.  I’m the one who put the ads there.  There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads.  They’re effective!  People keep clicking on them.  If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen).  Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads.  First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free.  I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart.  I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then.  For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa.  You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket.  Think multiple streams of income.  On this site I actually have six different streams of income.  Can you count them all?  Here’s a list:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
4. Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
5. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
6. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note:  If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change.  I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too.  Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations.  My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too.  It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal.  So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish.  It’s win-win.  I’m very grateful for the visitor support.  It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though.  I’ve been earning income online since 1995.  With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles).  And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous:  advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot.  Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks.  Some of them are small, but they add up.  It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones.  I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

10. Buying pay per click (PPC) ads

Listen to the prevailing wisdom, and you’d think this one would be numero uno, but here, I have it as #10. What gives?

Well … listen:

Buying PPC ads does work. I do it. I’m even starting to make money from it.

But it’s pricey. These days, many keywords run you more than one dollar per click, and if you’re going to do that for long, you’d better have a proven sales funnel optimized for particular keywords.

Most of us don’t. In fact, most of us also have more time than we do money, making the whole idea of paying for traffic unpalatable.

9. Chasing free press

If you can’t afford advertising, you’ve probably wondered how to get some free press.

You think a mention on the nightly TV news, a radio interview, or an article about you in a newspaper or magazine will send you a huge flood of traffic.

The truth?

Not really. Yes, getting free press continues traffic, but it may not be the numbers you’re hoping for, unless you land on the front page of the New York Times or get interviewed by Oprah. And obviously, those are hard to do.

To make it work, you have to put real effort into it. In my opinion, chasing free press is worthwhile if you’re trying to become a nationally recognized authority. If you’re not there yet, consider some of the other strategies first.

8. Dedicating yourself to a social network

Social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest have hundreds of millions of users that are self-organized around every imaginable topic. Having a presence on each of them must be a smart strategy, right?

Yes and no.

If you’re publishing remarkable content on a regular basis, social networks will be consistent winners in your traffic stats. You can also get massive spikes in traffic from when something you publish goes viral.

Problem is, you’ll spread yourself too thin. The only people who can effectively maintain a presence on each of them are social media supergeeks or business owners with entire teams of people dedicated to nurturing the network, day in and day out.

Most of us don’t fall into either of those two camps, so for us, the smarter strategy is picking just onesocial network where your audience seems to congregate and then putting in the time and energy to really do it right. You can focus on others later.

7. Expanding into other media

In a similar vein, a lot of content marketers think they need to dominate all media. They want to have a blog, podcast, YouTube channel, book, everything.

In the beginning, it’s a mistake, because once again, you’re spreading yourself too thin. However, once your audience is established in one medium, expanding into others becomes a much smarter strategy. Here’s why:

The audiences in each media don’t overlap as much as you’d think. The people who read blogs about marketing and the people who listen to podcasts about marketing are two relatively distinct audiences. So, by expanding into other media, you can instantly increase your potential reach.

This is what happened for Derek Halpern. He already had a successful blog — Social Triggers — and then he expanded into video by creating a YouTube channel. He essentially doubled his traffic by reaching a new audience.

6. Enlightened SEO

Most people totally misunderstand SEO.

They think it’s about technical aspects like pure keyword frequency or link architecture. Yes, those are factors, but any SEO expert will tell you they can only take you so far.

The most important factor?

Links from trusted sources.

For example, a link from Seth Godin is worth infinitely more than a link from a spammy directory site. (The spammy link will probably actually hurt your rankings.) That’s because Seth only links to stuff he thinks is awesome, and in Google’s eyes, he’s been proven to be good judge of quality content.

So, how do you get links from Seth (or any other trusted site, for that matter)?

Simple: Create something awesome.

Not just a little bit awesome, either, but so awesome that influential people can’t help talking about it.

Get that part right and the rest of SEO is much easier.

5. Guest blogging

If you’ve been reading my posts for long, you know I’m a huge fan of guest blogging. In my opinion, it’s the most effective traffic strategy there is, assuming you do it correctly.

So why is it #5?

Because it’s hard.

While the long-term results of guest blogging are stunning, most people haven’t learned to write and think well enough to land a spot on the biggest blogs in the world. They can with practice and training, but some of the other strategies here are easier to implement.

Such as …

4. Interviewing authorities in your space

What? How does interviewing a bunch of big shots get you traffic?

Well, here’s a little secret:

Traffic comes from links, and links come from a combination of two things: incredible content andpowerful connections.

By themselves, interviews aren’t the greatest content, but they are awesome for connecting with influential people. Be respectful of their time, and ask insightful questions, and you might be surprised about how long they remember you.

You don’t even need a big audience. When I was a beginning blogger, I landed interviews with about half a dozen New York Times best-selling authors, and I could count my readers on my fingers and toes.

Give it a try. This is one of the easier traffic strategies to implement, and it’s amazing how many connections it can create for your time.

3. Building your email list

What’s the easiest way to get more traffic?

Email your existing subscribers.

Let’s say you email a link to a new blog post to your 1,000 email subscribers. 20%, or 200 of them, click on the link. Of those 200, a dozen or so share it with their friends on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and so on, sending you another 100 visitors.

That’s 300 visitors from one email. You can also repeat the process as many times as you like. Publish three great blog posts per week, and you get yourself 900 visitors a week, easy as pie.

That’s why building an email list is so important. It’s traffic on demand.

It’s so important, in fact, that increasing the size of your email list should be more of a priority than just getting traffic. So, put up an email subscription box your site, pronto, preferably with a nice, juicy incentive to make joining your list irresistible.

2. Writing a big ol’ list post

Ever get a little sick of list posts?

Yeah, me too. They’re everywhere, and most of the people who write them wouldn’t recognize an original idea if it arrived priority mail from God, with neon lights and polka music.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write them, at least occasionally. Here’s why:

They get crushing amounts of traffic.

Even if it’s as boring as watching stoplights change on a country road. (Ideally, of course, you’re going to work so this isn’t the case.) Even if not a single person reads it to the end.

If you doubt me, go ahead and write a post about 50 ways to do something your audience might like. I’m betting it’ll be the most popular post in the history of your site.

1. Crafting the perfect headline for your content

If you could multiply your traffic by 50 times in five minutes, would you do it?

No-brainer, right? Well, listen to this:

A few years ago, John Wesley from Pick the Brain wrote a post that only got 100 visitors, and he was really disappointed. He thought maybe the headline was the problem, so he deleted the post, changed the headline, and republished the exact same post, and it got 5,000 visitors. You can read the entire case study here.

What’s so amazing is that type of story is commonplace. The difference between a good headline and a bad one is very often thousands upon thousands of visitors, and you can change them in minutes.