Don’t blame the search engines if their updates kill the traffic to your websites and blogs. It’s not their job to get you traffic to your web business – their job is to service their users in whatever way they feel does the job best. Blaming them is a real rookie move, much like blaming gas stations if you let your gas tank run dry.
So what does it take to get more web traffic, and keep your existing levels fairly stable online as time goes on? I know what works for me, and has since the mid 1990′s… But before I start into that, if you’re not already familiar with Teri & me and our network of sites and blogs, here’s a peek at the stats for just this blog alone over the last year:

As you can see, roughly 1,000 people stop by here each day, spawning just over a million page-views in the last year. Not huge numbers, but sufficient for my purposes while keeping support and response issues manageable. Also, remember this is one of dozens of sites we own and operate along with about 2 dozen blogs. This is probably our most popular web property, with the others ranging from a few visitors a day to hundreds a day depending on the niche and topic.
Not to put too fine a point on it, this site isn’t typical – it’s our best in terms of traffic. So think instead of our top 10 sites, which include 6 Internet marketing & affiliate marketing sites and 4 niche sites. Those 10 had 1,423,653 visits in the past 12 months for 4,051,837 page views. Again not huge numbers, but somewhat above average sites & blogs online. One enlightening statistic is that our static websites outnumber our blogs, but all 10 of our top traffic-generating properties are blogs. (If you’re not using blogs to get more traffic which you then redirect to your salespages and squeeze pages, you might want to re-read that last sentence again.)
Teri & I started online full-time in 1996-1997, initially building websites for corporations and handling their ongoing SEO needs. By 2004 we had fired our clients to focus just on building our own business, and have never looked back. But we have evolved our traffic strategies from the days of only optimizing for Alta Vista to today’s online environment, probably making most of the possible mistakes along the way.
Our current strategies are working well for us, and hopefully can help you get more traffic without causing you any grief when the search engines change their ranking criteria. In no particular order, here’s some of the pillars of our traffic strategies…
1) We don’t write for SEO or search engines – we write to help our readers.
2) We don’t ignore SEO or search engines…
But that is all in how the information is presented – it has nothing to do with what is presented. Notice that every one of those points can be applied to fantasticly-actionable content or total drivel. Staying within the limits suggested by the search engines does NOT need to involve posting garbage, or even hard-to-read content. As stated above, write to help your audience.
3) We don’t buy any traffic – we use strictly the free sources that abound online.
There are dangers inherent in relying on paid traffic sources as well. First and most obvious, should the source go out of business you suddenly are left without traffic. Second, you may not always know the methods they’re using to attract that traffic or how targeted that traffic is. The visitors you receive may not even speak the language your site is written in – in most cases all you’re guaranteed upon purchase is a set number of visitors. And if you’re lured in by a ‘traffic-scammer’ those numbers may not even be human visitors, but just generated by software calling your pages in repeatedly on autopilot.
4) We don’t rely heavily on any one source of traffic.
Just some of the various methods we’ve used to attract targeted traffic are search engine optimization, blogging & pinging, article marketing, podcasts, video marketing, teleseminars, webinars, banner exchanges, e-mail marketing, joint ventures, social media marketing, giving away reports, branding software, e-books & reports, our affiliate program, radio interviews, press releases, public speaking, consulting and mentoring, etc.
It’s a pretty safe bet that if you’ve done all of the above, even in minor fashion, you’re already seeing a good level of targeted traffic that’s fairly well insulated from external fluctuations. If that’s not the case, time to get back in harness and pick up on the areas you’ve neglected.
Your first reaction is probably that you don’t have the time for all that. The truth is, without sufficient targeted traffic you’re already wasting wasting whatever time you ARE spending on your online business. But you also don’t need to master each or any of these methods – just be using a combination of most of them. Based on a 5-day work week there are about 20 ‘working’ days each month – allot 2 or 3 days to each method and build your resources empirically!
5) Use blog commenting responsibly…
And if the comments aren’t moderated on the blog, yes yours will publish – right up there with all the porn & drug comments & links that make that blog a ‘bad neighbourhood’. Just what traffic & reputation to you expect from being lumped in with them by both visitors and search engines?
Yes, I use blog commenting both for direct traffic and backlinks. But I don’t go looking for blogs to comment on, but rather will leave a comment from time to time on blogs and posts I’m reading already. If I have useful, helpful information to add on the same subject, or to congratulate a writer on a particularly insightful post. I may only leave 3 or 4 blog comments a month, if that, but each helps the blog itself and puts my link in from of a tightly-targeted audience. And the link from that site, and that post, also helps the search engines accurately refine what my site is all about.
One further tip – look at the existing comments on the blog to see what the blogger allows for identifying yourself. Take this blog for example – each comment comes with ‘do-follow’ links from the name & the CommentLuv section… But if the commenter uses a keyword in place of their name, puts a link within their comment or links to a redirect link or a bad site, the comment gets trashed without ever seeing the light of day on this site. So look to see what is being done already on the blog and, if you see unmoderated comments full of links, don’t waste your time adding your words of wisdom.
By now I’m sure you’ve gotten the picture… Use a number of the various ways to get more traffic, keep it to targeted traffic sources, and don’t rely heavily on any one method or source of your traffic. Targeted traffic is your online marketing business’ lifeblood, too vital and important to take for granted!
In closing, let me address two criticisms before they arise… Past experience has shown me two thoughts that will occur to some people – “That’s easy for him to say, he’s already a world-famous marketer who is firmly established online” and “He built his following back when it was a lot easier – like to see him try it now instead of relying on his existing traffic flow…”. Both are valid comments, and a few big-name marketers come to my own mind when I think of either of those remarks.
So in case you’re following that same train of thought, here’s your derailer – we entered the health and fitness niche, one of the most overcrowded niches online, in September last year when we launched our Flirting With Fitness website. Social media presence for it is small, about 1,000 followers at each of Pinterest & Twitter, maybe 50 at Google+ and 15-20 fans on Facebook, and we have yet to get started with our article marketing, podcasting or videos. So all promotion is a collection of most of the methods discussed above, each done to a small degree so far. And the results during the first 8 months or so?

There you have it – current results from a brand new site in a niche we were virtually unknown in online. Now you know the methods, and you know they work – put in the effort, stay focused and enjoy your new targeted traffic levels!
Technorati Tags: targeted traffic, website traffic, targeted traffic sources, search engine optimization, SEO, marketing online, online marketing business
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