If you have ever tried to do any SEO I am sure you will have tried to optimize your site for Google as it is the biggest search engine. But there is a definite problem with this in the sense that you can become too reliant on getting organic traffic and forget about all of the other ways that people can find your site. If you don’t learn to spend the time to develop other sources of traffic then Google can drop your site without warning and then your number of visitors can fall through the floor.
That’s what happened to me after the most recent Google penguin update but luckily I am using several sources to drive traffic. Let me share a few of them with you.
Guest Posting
When you guest post on other blogs you are getting the chance to talk to another blog’s audience who are definitely interested in the same topic that you write about, provided of course that you choose the right blogs to post on.
This is not only a chance to get traffic straight from the link that the guest blog will provide you with, it is also a great way to convince your audience that you know what you’re talking about which can only be a good thing!
Technorati
Technorati, for those of you who don’t know, is a website that lists lots of different blogs on it. It ranks all of the various blogs that have been submitted by authority. To increase your authority you have to do things such as comment on other technorati blogs, build links to your site and keep focused on a very specific topic.
If you work hard and manage to get into the 100 blogs in your particular niche then it can mean large amounts of traffic are coming your way.
Social Networking
There are a few ways to go about getting traffic from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can post a link to your most recent blog post on lots of related pages and this will often create lots of ‘social proof’ to your post in the form of likes and retweets.
From my experience however this just looks good when people visit your blog but doesn’t get you many visitors. The way to get really high value traffic is to simply comment on relevant pages and tweets and allow users to follow you and find your profile. This way people come to the decision on their own and trust you more but it could take a little while for this method to see results.
Stumbleupon
Although stumbleupon has lost a certain amount of popularity over the past couple of years you would still be a fool to ignore it as a traffic source as it gets 1000’s of hits every day. If you are going to target stumbleupon users you are going to have to create something that is very visually appealing because users aren’t likely to stay on your site for very long unless you quickly catch their attention. One way that you might do this is creating an infographic on your topic. People like attractive pictures and interesting facts all blended into one.
Another technique would be to use a video or a controversial title. Either of these should have a good chance of making sure that the reader stays on your page.
If you employ all of these techniques along with high quality content on your site then you will be able to get all the traffic you need from sources other than google and keep your readers coming back.
Keep up with it and your Google rankings should begin to take care of themselves.
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