Getting traffic to your blog (or any website, really) is probably the biggest challenge that you will face when you are first starting out. After the webinar last night, I decided to scour the net for some good resources to help get more traffic, and start seeing results.

Social Marketing News

If your are tired of struggling with getting traffic to your blog, your first stop should always be the Friday Traffic Report. Social Networking is one of the easiest ways to get traffic to your blog, and Jack is the best. Every Friday, he does a podcast on the latest in social media news and how to leverage it to drive loads of traffic to your site.

Friday Traffic Report Radio: New Social Marketing Tools

Friday Traffic Report Radio: New Social Marketing Tools. by Jack Humphrey on Aug 6. Twitter logo initial. Image via Wikipedia. We waxed and waned on the “loss” of Google Wave this week. Then we got on to some really cool new tools! :) …

Publish Date: 08/06/2010 15:25

http://www.fridaytrafficreport.com/friday-traffic-report-radio-new-social-marketing-tools/

The Truth About SEO

Next, I stumbled around and found a really inspiring article on SEO. I have always said that most people waste too much time on trying to please the bots, and then they wonder why they don’t get the traffic that they want (and need).

What relationship I would have with SEO in the future

Article by bigjara. Jara Johnson is a college student by day and a dynamic blogger by night. Despite his youth, he has years of experience writing, blogging, and coaching. Visit his Writing for Money blog. …

Publish Date: 09/03/2010 13:15

http://www.famousbloggers.net/seo-writing-blogging-career.html

Yahoo Answers

The best way to get traffic to your blog is to answer the questions that people have. One of the best places to do that is Yahoo Answers. Find out how you can leverage them for your site

Using Yahoo Answers To Increase Your Blog Traffic | 9DOWNSOFT Free …

Using Yahoo Answers To Increase Your Blog Traffic. September 3rd, 2010 | Admin | 0 Comments ». In terms of a social media site Yahoo has a little gem tucked away that is probably the most under utilised social media site online right …

Publish Date: 09/03/2010 8:20

http://9downsoft.com/2010/09/03/using-yahoo-answers-to-increase-your-blog-traffic/

Growing Blog Traffic

Chris Brogan has been an inspiration to me for a long time. Yesterday he posted a great post on getting traffic to your blog, and shows you some simple tactics that really shine.

How to Grow Traffic to Your Blog

People want more traffic, more attention, more awareness to their blog. It’s fair. We work hard on our blogs. We want more attention and traffic. If your business depends on volume, this is especially important (for instance, …

Publish Date: 09/02/2010 4:30

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/how-to-grow-traffic-to-your-blog/

Check out those sources of traffic and let me know what you think.

On other news, last nights webinar did go off, (although it was kind of rough, at least to me. ) I will have the replay up  by tomorrow.

Over the last few days, I have spent a lot of time at Affilorama helping out all my new friends there get started with the Affilojetpack system. One thing that is constantly coming up more and more is questions on how to increase web visitors, and get people into the traffic funnel.

This is the one thing that probably stops most people from ever getting going in IM. Website traffic is the only way you can get your site going. After all, if you don’t get visitors to your site, everything else has been a waste of time.

There are a vareity of techniques that I use to increase web visitors to my site. Although SEO is one of these, and I do recommend using it, that is not the end of the road. For one thing, you will find that although you will rank highly and quickly for some low competition keywords, I find that it usually does not stick. You can use some black hat methods to game the system, but you will eventually get caught, and you will lose it all.

That being said, you want to focus more on getting traffic early on rather than SEO rankings. The fact is that Search is looking for sites that get traffic without them. Getting good traffic from other sources will help your rankings.

here are some alternatives to Google to increase web visitors to your site without waiting on Google.

All of these are social in nature, and the basics of using all of them will be the same

Find Web Visitors on Niche Blogs

Blogs are still hugely popular, and if you can find a few niche blogs with a community, you can join that community and people will start visiting your site. It is all about engaging the people there, not just getting a backlink by posting one or two comments.  I recommend using Comment Luv blog search to help you find blogs that will also help you with your SEO at the same time.

Niche Forums: The best source to Increase Web Visitors Fast

One of the fastest ways to get traffic to your site is by leveraging the forums within your niche. Join in the conversation, become a member of the community, and within a week to two weeks, you will start to build a reputation. This can help you or hurt you, depending on how you do it. Add value and show that you are there to help people, without selling anything, and you will be accepted. Start spamming product promotions, and you will get banned. Also, remember, these people are probably members of other social communities as well, and your reputation will spread like wild fire.

Do you want those people spreading good information, and linking to your site, or destroy your reputation, and being shunned as a spammer and pushy salesman? This is an easy way to increase web vistors when you use it properly, but it can lose them if you do it wrong.

Web2.o Sites for Website Visitors

When I started out online I listened to a lot of interviews about increasing web visitors. Some of the best strategies that  I have found came from Jason Katzenbach. A few months ago he posted about the 10 most common mistakes in Website promotion, and he hit the nail on the head with every single one. I highly recommend checking out any interviews on social traffic with  Jason that you can find. They are all worth their weight in gold. He teaches a lot about using Web2.0 social sites like Hubpages and Squidoo for massive direct traffic, as well as to increase your rankings in SEO.

My Results on Social Traffic

Before you fly off into a tizzy about how social traffic does not convert let me share a little about my own experience right her in the last few weeks. When I was promoting Affilojetpack, my review page was on Page 12 in Google. However, in the end, I wound up being on the leader board(although near the end I dropped off). Now, I didn’t get massive sales, and some will say I didn’t do well enough to make it matter. I made more in the week of launch than in 2 months at my last Job that I had.

And I did  it with no search rankings, only about 40 people on my email list ( I just started building my list in the niche during the Prelaunch 3 weeks ago), and very little pushy promotions. And, this was all done with very little time actually dedicated to the promotion. I put in about 28 hours ( 2 hours/ day over 2 weeks) on  my promotion. I could have done a whole lot more.  I made so many mistakes (this being the very first product launch I have ever done seriously) that I left a lot of money on the table.  Also, I didn’t get Masssive traffic to my sites. Looking over my analytics, I converted about 10% of the people who came to my review to sales. Considering most people say a good conversion rate is 1%, that’s a pretty big number (at least to me).

I made over 2 months salary with less than 28 hours of work put into it.  Almost all of that came from the reputation that I have built up on forums, social sites, blogs  and other social networks. So if you are in the boat that social traffic does not convert, the proof is in the pudding.

The Secret to Increase Web Visitors Using Social Traffic

No matter what medium you use, the basics of social traffic that converts is the same. You need to target people that really need the hep. Spend a lot of time helping people, and not promoting anything. This will increase web visitors through your signature links that you leave behind. If people can trust you to solve the little problems, then they will trust you more when you offer a product to solve a bigger problem.

Now, I don’t know where you were raised, but in my neck of the woods, we call that common sense business. I guess being a good ole country boy helps. I grew up seeing my Granpa’s little country store, and he took time to get to know every customer that walked in the door. Every where he went in town, he got to know people, and would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it.  He wasn’t best buddies with them or anything like that, but he got to know them, and took time to help them out.

I try to find ways to apply the principles that he tought me into my business.

Zig Zigglar, a popular business and success coach, was famous for saying “The best way to get what you want in life is to help others get what they want.”

This is exactly how social marketing works. Engage the community, and help people without asking for anything in return. Yes, you will give up a few commissions up front to do so, but you will increase web visitors to your site, and drive those visitors to higher conversions.

I just got a question from one of my clients asking how much time I spend on building links, and social networking. This seems to be the biggest struggle that people have with marketing their websites.  The biggest problem is that you can easily spend 80% of your time or more building links to your site.

I started in the same boat

Now, I won’t give away all my secrets here, but I will break down some of what I do in a day.

When I wrote my website traffic secrets report, I faced the same challenges. Now, this is still a good strategy, and if you are just starting out, you should really consider getting it to kick start your business. However, I found that it was still consuming too much of my time, so I started looking for a better way.

I am now writing a new e-book, which will be more detailed, and show everything that I am doing to build traffic to my sites. It still incorporates the traffic formula, but as times have changed over the last few months, I have found some easier ways. My new strategy incorporates more time on social traffic and less time wasted on posting links on worthless sites.(all my friends who have the Traffic Formula will get  free copy before it is released, so go ahead and jump on the traffic formula for now!)

How much time do you spend?

This all hinges on the keywords that you choose. You can go after keywords with 1k-3k searches per month, and get rankings with a few hundred back links to your site. However, doing this, you still spend most of your time off page.

Personally, I want to spend more of my time building my own site.

When you cut it down, and look at keywords with perhaps 500-700 monthly searches, you can easily get page one rankings with as little as 100 back links, and sometimes even less. I have one article that is on page 1 for its keyword with 10 back links. One thing that I have found with targeting these really long tail keywords is that I also tend to rank for other long tail searches, giving me even more exposure.

When it comes to my sites, I target the home page keyword for about 5-10k monthly searches, then 500-700 searches for my internal pages. This way, I can target more relevant traffic. As I build links to my internal pages, I also link to my home page, building up massive links to that page, and getting good rankings there.

If you just look at it page by page, you will start saying, this is crap. After all, you are not targeting enough traffic. But, this is because you don’t look at the big picture. I can target a keyword with 3k monthly searches and spend the next two weeks on back link building. I would write about 30 poorly written and spun articles, and spend hours submitting those articles to get enough back links, and hope I get my rankings up.

Give up on the crap content submitted to worthless sites.

In the same time, I could have written 10 high quality articles targeting 5oo monthly search keywords, giving me a wider range of potential customers, and totalling 5k monthly searches for those terms. And that doesn’t count all the other long tail searches that I can easily rank for with those same articles. I could spend a little more time writing a few high quality articles and submitting them to sites that give me traffic, and I have saved myself hours of work.Notice, I am not doing much time on back link building here.

If you know your topic (and your customers) well, you can do all that in less than 2 days, depending on how much time you have to spend.

Now, once you get these posts done, you don’t have to spend so much time on back link building, freeing you up to socialize, and create content for your own site. If you target a niche you are passionate about, you can do this without feelling like you are working, and still be getting good traffic.

How much time should you spend socializing?

Personally, I spend about 2 hours  a day, spread out across the day reading and posting in forums. At the same time, I am usually on Facebook, talking with friends, posting interesting tips to my followers, and building my relationships there.

I spend about 1 hour per day on other social sites:

Digg, Stumbleupon, Hubpage, & Multiply just to name a few of my favorites.

I spend about an hour a day spread out among other things using the Social poster at Article Productions (not using the aff link here, but if you want to support me, use the one in the sidebar), bookmarking my sites, and other sites relevant to the niche.

Also, I will spend about 2 hours per day searching commentluv blogs related to my latest post. I usually can read and comment on 4-5 blogs in my niche.

Now all this seems like a lot of time, but I am usually doing two or three of these all at once. I often have 7 or 8 tabs open on my browser, all with different sites that I am working on. For example, right now I am reading up on forums, chatting with my girlfriend on Facebook, writing this post, and answering comments on my relationships blog, all at once.

In the middle of all this, I will research and write 2-3 guest posts for other blogs, and check the conversations I have going on other sites to keep up the reputation I have built there.

Plus I have several folders open on my desktop with other things that I am working on.

Now, not everyone can multitask this way, so do what you can. Only you know how much time you have to spend. Also, start taking the knowledge you have, and build your own personal strategy. That is how I started. Besides, I am always looking for  a way to be more efficient with building my sites, and getting more exposure.

The fact is, social traffic is hard to work for, but if you do it right, you will find that you don’t need the search engine traffic any more. It can take some work to build up your reputation. This is especially true if you run in a niche like IM where people are always pushing products, and trying to sell you rather than trying to help you.

so, how much time do you spend on back link building?

what are you doing to give your site more exposure?

leave a comment on how you go about getting traffic to your site.

I am always saying never to rely on one source of  website traffic. I guess some people just don’t want to listen.  I guess that is ok. That just leaves more for me go out and grab.  I am always looking for new ways to get traffic, and a few months ago, I hit upon the best way to get traffic to my sites.

Personally, I have found that I like my blogs. They give me a chance to talk directy to people and get in touch with the people interested in what I have to say. One great thing about blogging is that it opens the doorway to a wide community of people coming together to help everyone succeed.

So, a few months ago, I jumped at the chance to  get in a guest post on another blog. The boost that I got to my business was awesome. I got a lot of traffic, and was able to even get a few new clients under my belt.

One place I was introduced to is now one of my favorite places to hang out. It is a place for bloggers to gather and guest post on each others site. Since joining My Guest Blog, I have gotten several guest posts on some high traffic sites bringing me more visitors to my own site.

They put me in touch with Famous Bloggers, which I have a new guest post going up as soon as the moderator approves it. I also have been introduced to another great blog that I just found yesterday. I am working on a guest post for Stay On Search here in the next day or so.

Now, when you write a guest post, it is not the same as article marketing. You want  to use completely original content. In fact, most of the time my best work goes into the guest posts. I will spend 2-3 hours writing, editing, and crafting my guest post into a powerful article that is designed to help people, and drive some people through to my site.

you can also join a blog community like Blog Engage, where you can guest post on their blog, meet other bloggers who work in related niches, and build up relationships with possible JV partners for your future.

Who wouldn’t want that?

So, Guest posting on blogs has become my newest favorite way to get traffic. Granted, i only get a few links, and it wont drive your site up the search engines. That is unless you do a lot of guest posts. However, you can drive great traffic, and build some relationships with some smart marketers, and bloggers.

So, this brings me to the question for todays conversation. Other than Google, where do you look for traffic?  Don’t forget, every comment is entered into the drawing, so let me know where you go to find traffic for your websites.

Social bookmarking is a great way to build up your business online. However, too many people are  just wasting their time by spamming their own website over and over again. This has lead to many bookmarking sites locking down their rules. Utilizing social media traffic, on bookmarking sites is critical to your success, but don’t spam the net

Don’t Just bookmark Your domain

Diversity in your bookmarks is critical to real long term success. You want diversity in your social bookmarking accounts. Bookmark content for other site owners. This helps their content be found, and you get some goodwill with those site owners.

Let’s say you want to get a guest post on one of my blogs, for example. If you contact me and say,”I want you to let me post an article to your site so that I get some free back links,” your request will probably go in the trash.

However, if you contact me and say,”Hey I have been following your blog for a while, I love your blog and share it with my freinds on Digg, and STumbleUpon, and FB”, (then include a link to your profile where I can see the bookmarks), If you have joined in my community, added comments on the blog, and provided value to my site, and offer to build links to my blog, promoting your own content posted there, I am more likely to sign you up and let you have a guest spot( and yes, I am open to guest posters here).

Another thing that you can do with your social bookmarking is to bookmark your social sites, and even your bookmarks on other sites.

I have bookmarked a Digg on about 100 other sites, and see that Digg post jump in the rankings within a few hours. This gets more views, people rating my digg, and visiting my site through the link. This is leveraging the power these social sites have to get fast rankings and drive the traffic you crave to your site.

Social sites love video. I always make sure that I bookmark  my YouTube channel. Again, don’t just bookmark your own. Bookmark other videos you like, and share cool stuff that you find.

Finally, don’t ignore the social aspect of these sites. It is not all about search engines. You can get a lot of traffic to your site fast by building your friends lists on the popular social sites. This does not take long.

I spend about an hour every week on Digg, Mixx, Reditt, and other social sites, checking other bookmarks, leaving comments, and building my friends lists. By doing this, your bookmarks will be seen by more people, and you will get a lot more benefit from using these sites.

Of course, if you don’t want to do all this work, you can always let me handle your social bookmarking for you. Check out my social bookmarking packages, and let me help you today.