How Many Ways Can You Drive Traffic To Your Site?
Oct 9th, 2007 by Danielle
The answer: It depends on the goals of your site.
In the coming weeks and months, Gary and I will be bringing some insight to you on the different ways to drive traffic to your web site, but not in an “SEO vs. PPC” way of thinking. That’s oversimplifying internet marketing.
Let us know what types of sites you own, what questions you have, or how to approach a particular goal. We’ll do our best to help answer what we can, or shed light on these or similar topics.
Leave your questions and comments here. We look forward to providing you with some creative solutions to bringing traffic to your web sites!
How important is it when blogging to stick to one particular category, rather than writing about a larger variety of topics? I have a personal blog, and it’s hard for me to stick to just one topic all the time, since that isn’t all I think about. If I jump around, will it be a constant struggle to draw traffic?
I look forward to your insight and suggestions, Danielle. I’ve been looking for effective ways to bring more readers to my site but, aside from using the fancy katakana in my name when leaving comments, it’s been a very slow process
@travis - that’s a great question, and definitely an issue each of us bloggers need to decide early on. it’s difficult to answer shortly, so we may need to expand this into it’s own article, but i will say that you can focus on a few specific topics for your personal blog without it going too random. if it’s your thoughts that are jumping around within the content, that’s a different issue. create a small pool of topics and be focused when you write about them. great food for thought…we’ll definitely be re-visiting this topic soon!
@jason - thank you! your blog is like the diamond in the rough…great content, just need to help people find it. can’t wait to share some thoughts with you too.
Travis - I don’t think you need to stick to one particular category to become successful, I think you need to stick to one particular demographic. It’s very important to know who you’re writing to, so that you know what you can sell them on in the future. Concentrating on one category is one way of focusing on your demographic, but taking a step back and understanding that there are probably more than one categories they would like to read about is something every blogger should take time to do. So, once you’ve found out the formula of categories to write about by testing out the interest levels in your posts (usually by number of comments), then your demographic will most likely tell their friends about your site as most people are friends with people who share common interests. Hope that helps. Keep us updated on how it goes!
Jason - there’s so much more that you can do. Hopefully, you have gone through most of our posts and come up with some ideas to attract more readers to your site aside from commenting. Think of traffic building as fighting a battle where you have to man the machine gun (commenting/updating your blog often) and then lob some grenades (i.e. diggs/stumbles/SEO work/Promotions) to keep yourself alive. I just watched Band of Brothers last night, so that’s where I’m coming from right now. You’ll find I like to use analogies a lot, so I hope you get thi one. Good Luck and let us know how your battles are coming along!
I run a sports blog that I’ve been trying hard to promote. We get a ton of traffic anyways but mostly on our forum. About 10% of our traffic is on the blog, the rest forum-related.
I’d like to get more people interested in the blog side as I think it will be better financially for me.
Mike, i just checked out your blog and you really got a good direction right now. Few things that you could do real quick is to consider coming up with better titles for your blog posts and then start using social networking sites to get them more exposure. I’m a huge NBA fan, so i found your articles interesting . . .just the titles need a lil bit more pizazz . . also . . . you might want to consider a new site layout to give your new readers a better chance to find a section of your site that they are more interested in . . . i would suggest checking out www.uniqueblogdesigns.com since he’s in AZ as well . . . last thing would be to start a newsletter campaign where you put your content into the queue, much like a RSS reader, but for the less sophisticated user to use . . . . other than that . . keep on reading CTB and hopefully we can give you some brand new ideas.
Can you drive traffic by commenting? Thats one way I got some traffic
~Click For Nick, Make Money, Save Money
Hello,
I have a student help blog of sorts, where I am focusing on helping students make money online. I get traffic in fits and spurts, in low numbers each time.
I post about once a week(though I know I should do more) and I’m kind of lost in all the ‘get traffic to your site’ stuff.
I’ve looked digg, stumbleupon, twitter, you know all the web 2.0 social network stuff. I’ve tried article submission, press releases, and so on and so forth. I must be doing it wrong, because other people say those are the ways to go.
Am I just too spread out? and not concentrating enough?
Thanks in advance for your time
Tyler