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How To Build Traffic to Your Website or Blog

Today I was browsing the Internet forums (in particular Steve Pavlina’s message board) and my attention was converging toward a post asking for help with building traffic to websites. One of the first posts written by someone who prefers to be referred to as Lucidism said something like this:

Write lots of great content about things people are searching for. Others will appreciate it and link to you, and the search engines will take care of the rest!

Which I completely agreed with. Nonetheless, I decided to add to the discussion by sharing my experience as well. This post turned into an article, which, with a little editing, I am ready to share with whoever is reading this page.

That is really it. Lucidism got it answered right. Google software actually looks out for "techniques" and either chooses to put less weight on such techniques or completely ignores them.

Do you honestly believe that Google can't draw a distinction between intentionally linked content and content that is being linked organically? They have access to all the browsing data you can possibly fetch.

Writing content for websites is not an easy job. But if you enjoy writing and if you know something about a subject you feel passionate about, and you are interested in earning some money by doing so, this may be a thing to do for you. But no one is good at anything from the very start. We might all have special abilities and slope toward specific interests and subjects, but we’re never really good at something we have not actually physically done. There isn’t a magic way to build traffic to a website, but we can experiment, learn, and execute our plan based on our new knowledge.

So, follow Lucidism's advice and get better at writing great content.

A lot of times people use the excuse of not knowing what to do with their website and asking questions. This happens when the person does not have the skill to do it. This should be one of the first realizations if one is to move forward with anything.

I'm not trying to put you down and say something like Hey, this guy doesn't know how to make websites and build traffic. But getting better at anything takes time, and a certain awareness and acceptance of the fact that you don't know how to do something. This shouldn't be a negative thing. This should influence to make the choice to get better at it.

On Getting Better at Generating More Traffic to Your Website

You probably thought of getting specific answers for example: Well, get as many back links as possible, that's what Google cares about! You can do this, if you want and see what happens. After just trying to find places to back link to your site you are going to get frustrated in under about an hour because forum moderators will disable your account and delete your signature links.

Without actual participation in a forum, chances are your links will not be accepted by many moderators, especially on most respectable message boards.

If you spam blog comments with your links, you never know for sure whether it will work or not, and what the expectations of your effort should be. Can anyone really identify the actual amount of traffic based on how many links were posted on blogs, comments or other websites?

Usually people who are not very experienced with building traffic falsely believe that traffic will grow in a linear fashion the more links you post back to your site. Whereas website traffic is much more erratic, just as human behavior is. Even though, website traffic is somewhat dependent on the number of links pointing back to your site. It is the ways in which the back links are used that matters the most.

Moreover, people naturally believe that the Internet is so vast that they should be able to easily build traffic by spamming their pages with keywords (another bad idea). I'm tired of seeing people doing the wrong thing, and then being frustrated with it and giving up.

Just knowing what it is that you have to do is not enough. But Lucidism has given you the correct answer. All you need to do is to be able to write great content. It's a short phrase, it doesn't give you any specifics, but it is the correct answer. And yes, the devil is in the details.

You must first accept the idea that you are not very skilled at creating original content that produces value for people. If you were, hey. . . they would have recognized it, linked back to your pages and you would have already been getting so much traffic and making so much money that you wouldn't even be here.

Remember that genuine back-links are actually a FUNCTION of Google’s algorithm. The sooner your site will get properly back-linked, the more people will find your pages. This is only topped by the demand. For example, if your page is about Spongebob Squarepants, and you got all the back links in the world, your traffic will still stop at a certain level, because well, not everyone likes Spongebob.

So, I'll say this again. You must first accept the idea that you are not very skilled at creating original content that produces value for people.

But that's ok, most people suck at creating great content. But guess what? Most people can also. . . get better at it. You just simply need to know what to do.

In the movie I recently saw about Columbus, a group of people along with Christopher Columbus himself sit at the dining table. One guy asks others how to balance an egg vertically on the table. They pass around the egg to all people, who mutually agree that it is impossible. Columbus takes the egg and smashes it into the table breaking the shell just at the bottom, therefore proving to everyone that it is indeed possible to balance an egg on the table.

Columbus then proceeds to tell everyone that it is easy to do something once a man is shown how to do it. We are left to assume that otherwise it's difficult.

Same thing here. First of all, you need to be more aggressive. Most of the advice on the internet is written in a very positive tone, it almost feels like they are telling you to sit back, relax, take a couple of notes from their blog, have a glass of beer, watch some FOX news while waiting for traffic to show up in your Google Analytics account, and eventually you will get there too! Meanwhile they are the ones collecting the AdSense checks from their blog/site when YOU click on their ads.

Be more aggressive. After all, you are the operator of your online business. How much traffic you are going to deliver to your website with your own effort and skill depends only on you. The more physical change you are able to create on Google's servers, on other people's websites, etc. singlehandedly the better. If you are thinking about doing something, there is no physical change involved in the mental process, other than in your head. Once you write content for your first web page, and upload it, and it becomes indexed - Congrats - you have made a contribution.

At this point you need to think about the value of your contribution. Simply putting something online with a few relevant keywords within the body of your article is not going to make a big difference on your overall (I hate the word but...) success.

People who make money on the Internet know what is required of them in order to gain more traffic to their sites, and therefore make more money. Let's be honest, all websites with large amounts of traffic eventually become commercial sites, because the owner realizes the potential and starts to put ads on his/her site. Or the site was created as an MFA (Made for Ads) in the first place. But in order to do all of this you need to define your role and stick to it. Make creating content your daytime job and get better at it.

So what does the Internet expects from you as a content creator?

You must be able to teach and educate your audience. (Suffice to say you already know that before you start a new website you must get a pretty decent idea of who these people are). In order to do that, guess what? You must know the content you write about very well. And this is where the problem lies with many people.

They don't know the subject of the content they themselves chose to write a website about! I mean, are you kidding me? People are not that shallow as to not be able to see it clearly that whoever wrote the articles on your website does not know what he/she is talking about.

It's difficult to learn new things about pretty much any specific subject. But it is also fun to learn new things when one realizes that they have actually learned something (in other words from their own experience of it). Why do people find it difficult to learn new things and feel rewarded with the newfound knowledge. Perhaps it's because their first experience with learning things is the school, where most people don't even want to know anything about the subject the school chooses for them to be taught. It teaches no problem-solving skills whatsoever (other than using the calculator).

So this is the psychological mindset that many people have from the start. Perhaps they have the false idea that most studying and learning is boring from their high school days. This means that they also probably think that creating website content is a chore. Something to do and forget about. I don't know how these people expect to collect a decent payment check from AdSense or affiliate programs if they incessantly implant into their low-traffic (or no traffic) website with ads and affiliate links.

This type of mentality must change if you are looking to make any money at all on the Internet (with a content website). You must first realize that the problem is you, not the Internet. This is easy considering there are many people making thousands of dollars every day with their websites using AdSense alone. Google loves them and lets them remove the "Ads by Google" or "Ad Choices" text from their ad blocks and allows them to use more than 3 ad blocks per page or use custom fonts.

In order to start getting there, you must change your philosophy and what you think about websites and writing content.

You must be genuinely curious about the subjects you want to learn about, so that later you can express them with enough creativity and clarity to your audience. This way, when people are learning something from your content, when they are challenged by it, and they think it's a fun read, they are so much more likely to share it with their friends. By adding more links back to your site, people have a say in deciding the quality alongside with Google popularity of your content.