How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

Organic Search Engine Traffic

 One of the best ways of driving traffic is by ranking organically in Google. This is where the keyword research and competition analysis discussed earlier in the ebook comes into play.

Your blog should be properly optimized for your keywords (preferably, your keyword should appear in the URL, in the title, and around 2% density in your blog posts-- bolded or italicized).

In order to rank for these keyword phrases, you'll need to build backlinks. A backlink is an incoming link to your website. The more backlinks to your site, the more important it appears to Google and the higher it'll rank in the SERPS. It's particularly important to gain backlinks with your keyword as the anchor text.

You can gain backlinks by writing articles, posting on forums, commenting on other blogs, and using the various backlink “packages” that are available for purchase.

The higher the site's PR (Page Rank), the more weight your backlink will hold in Google's eyes. So try to concentrate on getting high PR backlinks.

If you conducted proper competition analysis, ranking on Google for your keyword(s) should be a fairly manageable (although time-consuming) task. However, if you chose keywords that are too competitive, you'll probably have trouble getting anywhere near the first page of Google.

This is why keyword research is so important for niche bloggers.

How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

Guest Blogging

You can benefit from another blog's traffic by becoming a guest blogger. Many popular bloggers have used this method to drive traffic to their own blogs.

 It's highly effective for bloggers who wish to rise from obscurity in the blogosphere.

Basically, you write a blog entry for another blog in your niche – preferably one that gets a lot of traffic. If your blog post is interesting and well-written, naturally readers will follow the link to your own blog to check out more of your stuff

How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is one of the most effective ways of driving traffic to your blog. Register at forums related to your niche and put a link to your blog in your signature.

Post regularly and become known on the forums as an “authority” in your niche – someone who knows what they're talking about. People will naturally be drawn to the link in your signature because they'll want to learn more about you.

Don't actively promote your website in your posts and definitely do NOT SPAM. Just write intelligent, concise posts on a regular basis and soon you'll begin to notice an increase in traffic to your blog.

How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

Article Marketing

A great way to drive traffic is to write articles related to your niche and submit them to article directories. Some of these directories include Ezinearticles, GoArticles, and ArticlesBase.

These websites receive thousands or even millions of visitors per month, and every article you write allows you to take a small chunk of that traffic and drive it to your website.

In order to be successful with article marketing, you need to submit lots of articles, preferably on a regular basis. Some bloggers drive their traffic SOLELY from article marketing.

Of course, it does require a bit of work. Some bloggers find it exhausting, after updating their websites with fresh content, to go back and write a bunch of unique articles on the same topic.

Driving Traffic To Your Blog

Okay, so you've got your blog up and running and ready to make money! Now how do you get people to read this thing?!

Here is a brief overview of some of the things you can do to drive traffic to your blog.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a way for web browsers to organize and share their bookmarks with each other. When a blog is bookmarked, it is referenced by a popular website, which increases its visibility on Google and also its exposure to web traffic.

Websites such as Socialmarker and Onlywire allow you to bookmark your blog to multiple bookmarking sites with relative ease. There are also programs like Socialbot that will automatically bookmark your site for you, without any effort on your part.

Selling Advertising Space

This is another option for monetizing your blog: getting paid by others, usually on a monthly basis, to place ads on your site.

However, this method also requires that your blog is fairly successful to begin with. No one will pay to put their ads on a blog that gets 4 traffic hits a day.

But if your blog is doing well, receiving a steady flow of visitors every month, and making some money on its own, then it might be a good time to consider this option.

How do you get people to pay you for adspace? Well, assuming your blog gets a fair bit of traffic, you could simply place your own ad somewhere on your blog calling out advertisers. Problogger does this.

You could also contact other blogs in your niche and ask them if they would be interested in displaying ads on your blog.

The amount you'll get paid will ride primarily on the amount of traffic you get. Your blog's Page Rank and Alexa Rank may also affect the pricing.

Another option is to join an ad network. Ad networks serve as brokers between advertisers and publishers. In order to be accepted into an ad network, your blog will likely have to meet certain minimal traffic requirements.

Blogsvertise and Blogards are two examples of these types of ad networks.

However, if you do join an ad network, be prepared for them to take a cut of your profits.

Membership Sites

One method that many internet marketers use to make a boatload of cash is to turn their blogs into paid monthly membership sites. This is a great way to make residual, auto-pilot income. You only have to convince them to sign up once and yet you get paid every month like clockwork.

It's really quite simple: All you have to do is make some of your blog's content “confidential”, only accessible to members. Obviously, you'll want to make this confidential information something that your readers will CRAVE.

For instance, if you have a blog about piano sheet music, allow the readers to access only the first page of each song. If they want the rest, they have to become a member at $5/mo (or whatever you decide to charge).

There are many different membership site models, and what you choose to do depends on your particular niche. Many popular internet marketers turn their blogs into membership sites so they can offer their readers their particular “secrets for success”.

Others choose to run PLR (Private Label Rights) Membership sites, in which they offer PLR content in the form of articles, ebooks, graphics, and even videos on a monthly basis.

I'm willing to bet that with enough research, you could even start a membership site based around fly fishing and different kinds of fly fishing rods.

Membership sites will take a lot of hard work in the beginning, but after you've mastered the initial set-up, you have the potential to make a full-time income for a comparatively small amount of effort.

However, you must be committed to providing your members with steady, consistent, valuable content, because they're not paying you for nothing.

I won't get into the technical aspects, but there's a lot of (paid) software out there that makes it quite simple and straightforward to set up a membership site.

Before you try this method, I would recommend waiting until your blog has an active readership and you've started making some money through affiliate sales or Adsense

Selling Your Own Products

Another method of making money from your blog is to sell your own products rather

than products that others have created. What's the benefit of this?

First of all, what if you can't find any good products to sell in your niche? Remember, we're trying to find TARGETTED products to sell, but what if there aren't any?

Naturally, the solution is to make your own product. This is also beneficial, because instead of making a commission, a percentage of every sale, you'll be making 100% of each sale, every single time!

With affiliate marketing, you might make a lot of money. But you'll always be making someone else even more money. With your own product, you don't have to worry about any of that. All of your profits go directly back into your pocket.

Once you have a product up and running, you can even recruit your own affiliates to do a large part of the marketing for you. In this way, you'll be making income on auto-pilot, and you won't even have to work for it. Others will be working their butts off just to pad YOUR wallet.

“But how on earth do I create my own product?!”

First of all, research your niche to find problems that other products / eBooks simply aren't solving. Browse Yahoo! Answers and popular forums to see the common concerns and issues facing every day people when it comes to your niche.

Basically, you want to find a tiny sliver of the market that has a problem that hasn't been addressed by any other products out there.

Once you've pinpointed this issue, you've found a good basis for your eBook (or software, service, etc. – I won't be getting into physical products here)

Now, you can go in many different directions here. You can write the eBook yourself. I would only recommend doing this if you are already intimately familiar with the subject matter – don't write a book about bamboo fly fishing rods if you've never touched a fishing pole in your life.

Once again, you don't have to be some kind of literary genius to write an eBook. What you're particularly concerned with is addressing issues properly – you want to make sure that your consumers feel satisfied with your eBook and that it helped them solve a problem.

To make it a little bit easier, you could use PLR content as a basis for your eBook. Of course, you'll need to rewrite and rework it into good, fresh content for your readers, since most PLR content is pretty crappy anyway. I would recommend just using it for research purposes and to make the writing come a little bit easier.

You could also hire a ghostwriter to write the eBook for you. Of course, you need money in order to do this. A 50-page eBook can cost anywhere from $200 to $2000 depending on the quality and expertise of the ghostwriter.

But if you have the cash and you feel confident that you will profit enough from your ebook to recoup your losses, then by all means, go ahead.

Adsense

Another way to monetize your blog is by using Google Adsense.

This type of ad is called Adsense. When a visitor comes to your site and clicks on one of these links, you get paid a certain amount, usually in the range of a few cents to a few dollars (although potentially much more than that, depending on your keywords).

The intent with Adsense blogs is to place the ads in a prominent area where they are likely to catch your visitor's attention. Basically, you don't want the visitor to stick around, you actually want them to click OFF of your blog, because you get paid when they do.

Generally, it's a good idea to place Adsense above the post area, and on the sidebar. Find a Wordpress theme that's designed specifically for Adsense and this will become much easier.

I won't get into the details of Adsense. Simply sign up for an account if you're interested in using this method. There are plenty of places to learn about Adsense all over the internet.