If you have been puzzling over what the secret is to getting traffic to your blog, this is the article for you!
Over at Yaro Staraks’ excellent blog (yes, my lovely readers, I am pretty much stalking him now!) he’s just done a blog post called “How I Make Money With My Blog” and you can read it here >>>
He’s included over 15 examples of other people who make serious money with their blogs too, along with video, audio and transcribed interviews, where those people share with Yaro how they make money with their blog.
The most intriguing thing happened in the comments section though – a chap posted a comment that said “Very interesting read Yaro. I have been reading lots of information on your site and have found it enthralling and have learned a lot. One thing that is yet to assist me though is traffic, I understand the money making activities and we are very slowly implementing some of these on our site however getting the traffic to a stable number of visitors is currently eluding us. Any general advice for increasing traffic?”
I read that comment and thought to myself, doesn’t this chap realise that you create traffic to a blog by actually BLOGGING!
Just think about that for a moment….I know that the word blog has almost become synonymous with website, as you use the software for one to create the other, but the very word blog does imply there is blogging going on.
(I found out very early on in my online career, by writing a weekly ezine and archiving that ezine as a blog page, on my site, that the search engines love “constantly updated relevant content” and this was an early form of blogging. The Money Gym blog got up to over 1500 unique posts over the years, before “Big Brother” stopped us blogging because….. well, that’s another story).
So if you have a blog, it stands to reason that you will be blogging. And the very act of blogging, if you have the All-In-One-SEO and Google XML Sitemaps plugins installed, will get you some search engine attention and traffic.
Yaro came back and said, in his very patient reply “Hey guys, the answer to the traffic question is right in front of you…go listen to all the interviews with the people above. I linked to an interview for almost all of the case study people, and in those interviews they detail exactly what they do to get traffic, which is different for each one. The answer to these questions are everywhere, but you need to put in the effort to study what others say and then go out and test it for yourself”
So, it’s not JUST blogging that brings those successful sites their traffic but if you are talking about a blog, it almost goes without saying you are going to be blogging.
So get on with it!
Instead of looking for the next big secret to how to get big traffic to your blog, just blog.
Every day, for five years, like Yaro did and like I’m trying to (nearly there this week!).
And you will see your traffic grow and grow and grow.
And listen to all the interviews Yaro has done, to find out how the other top earning bloggers did it.
And why not share what your biggest issue is with blogging regularly and consistently – I might be able to help as I’m on a quest to do that too!
Use the “share your thoughts” link there – I’d love to hear from you!
When I do blog regularly my reader count goes up, so I know this strategy works.
The next thing is getting people to subscribe to my opt-in list. That’s more difficult.
What’s a good conversion rate from reader to subscriber? (I’d like to know if I’m doing well or badly on this.)
Dear Margaret, well, every site is different but I’m convering at 3-5% on average (unique visits to subscribers, it’s 6% if you only count unique visitors rather than visits and even higher if you only count new unique visitors!). I have three different offers on my site all feeding into the same mailing list. It’s definately gone up since I added the Pop Up Domination lightbox. You can get one here http://bit.ly/ncpopupdom. Michael Dunlop has got some very strong strategies for turning visitors to subscribers and his site is here http://IncomeDiary.com – read it from cover to cover and watch all he does. Cheers, Nicola
When i’m searching on buysellads.com i found a lot of sites having scary amount of traffic, it makes people like me feel like we are no match.But if minimum one post gots 10 viewers/day, than 500 posts will get 5000 viewers/day .So it’s pretty logical that more posts will get more traffic.
In the end i got a question, is it a good idea if i hire a professional blogger to write posts for me on ezinearticles, hubpages, squidoo and such social sites and mention a link to my blog.
Is it worth it?
Thanks Nicola!