Generating Traffic For Your Blog
The life of a blog is traffic, the visitors who visit your blog day after day, sometimes even multiple times throughout the day. With millions of blogs online, the greatest challenge in generating traffic is, well, generating traffic: getting those blog visitors to find your valuable and insightful content in the first place. There are a number of ways to quickly and easily generate a lot of traffic to your blog, but all traffic is not created equal – some traffic is worth less and some is just worthless. A thorough traffic-generating campaign will ensure the first visitors see your blog and spend some time there. But remember, it’s your content that will keep them coming back day after day. Let’s take a look at some of the more popular ways you can generate first time traffic:
Traffic Exchanges
How would you like to have hundreds, even thousands, of visitors to your site, each of whom is guaranteed to spend 20 or 30 seconds looking over your content? Would you like them to review your blog? Rate your blog? How about if they voted for your blog in a head-to-head competition with the blogs of others? If it sounds great, that’s because it is.
Blog traffic exchanges are sites that guarantee visitors will visit your blog and spend a pre-determined amount of time there. But there’s a price: for each visitor that views your blog, you have to view the blog of another in the same manner.
Here’s how it works. When you register your blog on a traffic exchange, you create an account specific to your blog. You earn credits to your account by visiting the sites of others, which are displayed inside a frame with a timer that measures how long you must remain at that site. After an amount of time determined by the site, you enter a code into the frame (this ensures that individuals are actually at their computers) and move to the next site. For each site you visit, you receive credit which is “spent” by your blog being viewed by others. The more blogs you visit, the more visitors you will receive in return.
Most traffic exchanges do not give 1-for-1 credits, meaning you’ll have to visit more than 10 blogs to receive 10 visitors. In fact, the ratio is usually only a half-credit per visit, meaning you’ll visit 20 sites to receive those visitors, but free, bonus, or mystery credits may be awarded randomly to keep your ratio a little better than one visitor for two visits. The excess credits are generally sold by the traffic exchanges to advertisers who pay for visitors and save themselves the time of waiting at the various sites.
You’ll get traffic in proportion to how much time you spend surfing (and don’t tell anyone, but you can often have separate browsers open to separate traffic exchanges for simultaneous surfing), but it’s important to realize what kind of traffic you’re receiving. To learn the thoughts of your visitors, take a look inside your own head: you’re visiting, not to read the blogs, but to get visitors in return…and so it everyone else. Does that mean the traffic is worthless? Not at all. When you look at hundreds of blogs, you’ll find a lot of them with features worth emulating and content worth a link or two. You’ll also receive visitors who are looking for the kind of content you present. Like-minded and even opposite-minded readers will leave comments, link to you, and may eventually become regular readers. However, it’s important to understand that the vast majority are only visiting to get visitors in return and are probably filing their nails while they wait for the allotted time to expire. Then they move on to the next blog.
If you lack the time to sit at your PC manually generating traffic, many traffic exchanges will sell you their surplus visitors for as little as a penny apiece. Five bucks will earn you 500 visitors, a fair price since those visitors are in no way targeted to your content; they are bloggers who are trying to earn your visit in return. You can also purchase banners on many traffic exchanges, which will give you fewer visitors (they are sold by impressions, not clicks) but they will be more interested visitors.
Many traffic exchanges, like the blog directories and blog rings discussed below, will require you to place a small banner on your site, which may limit the number of traffic exchanges you join unless you have room on your page for 15 or 20 tiny banners all in a pile.
One final note: before you join a traffic exchange, try to get a feel for how established it is, i.e. how many blogs it features. A brand new traffic exchange may only have a few dozen blogs. That means not only will you to look at the same 20 blogs over and over, you’ll have the same 20 bloggers visiting you. Unique traffic is valuable traffic, so stick with those traffic exchanges that can deliver hundreds of unique hits to your blog.
Here are a few of the more popular traffic exchanges:
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