Need Money? How to get traffic

How to get traffic to your blog or website. These are real tips that work, not some rehash from an ebook somebody copied from somewhere else!

I have several websites. Most are blogs which I update weekly. The goal of all my sites is to make money in one fashion or another. The only way to make real money on the internet is to drive lots of traffic to your site.

This works for AdSense or other ad earnings..

For affiliate sales..

To add to your opt-in mailing list..

Most of my sites' traffic fall into these three categories...

1) 100-500 hits a day
2) 15-100 hits a day
3) Less than 10 hits a day

Surprisingly, most of my revenue comes from the middle group. Why? Because those are very narrow niche sites which answer one or two single questions for internet searchers. When they get to my site, the either find their answer or click on a related ad.

To do this, you need traffic.

The best traffic is free and related to your niche site.

Best Traffic

1) Social networks such as Digg, Stumblr and Reddit.

Write a good post, post it to Digg. Get traffic. Sometimes you can realistically pick up 40 or 50 unique hits for a normal article. I had one bag 40,000 uniques, but that was a wild curve I will probably never duplicate.

2) Social bookmarks

Del.icio.us, Backflip, Furl, Propeller, etc.

I probably pick up 5% of my daily traffic from bookmark links. The only problem is many of the links were made months ago. Social bookmarking is long term traffic, not suddent despite what the ebooks say.

3) Directories

There are two types of directories. One type is for submitting URL's to. These are for buidling backlinks and result in very little actual traffic other than organic search engine generated traffic.

The other are webring directories. I love these things as they generate as much as 50% of my traffic in certain niches. The key is to have a very narrow niche, like American coin collecting for instance, which will have a community of like minded sites. It also pays to build your own webring and have others join.

4) Comment and cross posting

Blogs benefit from these immensely. Write a good post. Comment on a related blog, more is better, like 10 related blogs. Wait for the traffic. I get some pretty good traffic, about 20% from related blogs and cross posting. Much of it is a surprise. I will see a spike and check it out. This traffic usually takes time, but is worth the work.

5) Organic traffic

Organic traffic is built entirely through key word searches. For blogs, never post an article which does not have a keyword phrase for the title. For instance, our coin collecting analogy: "How much is a 1921 Morgan silver dollar worth?" will get far more organic traffic than "The wonders of the Morgan dollar".

And never post an article with a keyword title that you have not researched first on AdWords.

Check your stats for a website and see how much is keyword generated. I can get 20-50% of my traffic through keyword generated searches so make those article titles and webpage titles count.

Those are my five ways to get traffic to a website or blog. There is no secret bullet for instant traffic unless you get real lucky through some fluke. Most traffic is generated over time and with work and patients. But you can buld a traffic stream of 100 unique visitors a day with a little work.