How to Increase Traffic to Your Website
If you found this article, then you probably are experiencing what I refer to as Traffic Fatigue. Traffic Fatigue is a condition that happens to millions of websites hosted on servers all over the world. You have written content, you organized your site, you have put your 110% into it. Still, it receives little to no traffic.
This situation can be extremely discouraging and many people give up right there. Some people spend years trying to learn as much as possible about making high-traffic websites, and still they get little to no results followed only by frustration.
But why do you believe that your website should receive any traffic at all after you have done all that work? The mechanics of the Internet are not designed for well-made, easy to navigate and well-written articles to instantly become popular online. The emphasis here is on the word instant.
Everyone who mastered the skill of building traffic to their website has gone through similar transformations. These transformations were psychological, they are to do with problem-solving and general outlook on achieving something great.
Because making a website is usually the job for one person there are literally billions of websites out there. Some people and companies own more than one website. If you find that it is difficult to build traffic to your website, you are most likely right in your observations. But you are not alone. Most of these websites also experience Traffic Fatigue.
What are all of them doing wrong? Honestly I don’t know what the specific answers to this question are in each particular case. But for the most part, the problem is their short-term approach. I know this, because most websites are forgotten about within weeks or months after being built. Sometimes it’s a year or two, but they are still forgotten. People walk away from what they started. They will never talk about their failure to others and simply forget this attempt ever happened.
I am certain that the main ingredient of increasing traffic to your website is the ability to look at your website through the fish eyed lens of the long-term mindset. When you do this, you align your method of thinking with what is actually happening to the data of websites on the Internet today.
It is reasonable to believe that to prevent cheating (also known as black hat SEO practices) Google uses time as part of their algorithms. An example of that would be something like this. 1000 back links pointing to your site in one day have less value than 1 links posted every week for 1000 weeks.
Please note that by this I don’t mean that you should go out every week and post 1 link back to your site from other sites for one thousand weeks. That is not what I mean by developing a long-term mindset.
You can say that we can only speculate that Google uses time intervals as a metric for content quality, but given my experience with software engineering, I can guarantee that parts of their algorithm not only track how many links are being posted back to sites and how often, but also how often your website is updated with new content. If Google doesn’t do that, they are being very foolish indeed. But I don’t think they are.
Most people want everything right now. They even want their websites designed in one day, and they want their content to start generating traffic in one week or one month. They attempt putting as much effort into producing as many sites with as much content as possible. Probably because they are in a hurry to make money, or even seek popularity. But because of this short-term thinking, they often will get frustrated about why things aren’t happening for them.
Unless you are extremely lucky, website traffic will not increase for as long as you keep thinking about your work in short-term sense. If you are looking to increase traffic to your website, you must change the way you think. You must take the red pill, so to speak.
What Happens When You Change Your Mind from Short-term to Long-term Thinking?
Your productivity will increase tremendously. But why? You see, when you set yourself up for no short-term expectations, it is very difficult to be disappointed. This disappointment is what leads people to quit what they are doing. But they are doing the wrong thing in the first place because nobody is out there to tell them what the right thing to do is. And even when they do come across such people who are genuinely trying to help and even after they learn about what these right things are, what’s worse, is they continue doing the wrong thing because it’s easier than the right thing.
If you are looking to increase traffic to your website I urge you to begin thinking about your work in terms of long-term achievement.
Earlier I mentioned that most websites are started by individuals. This means that each website is created and moderated by just one person. This situation puts a tremendous amount of responsibility on just one person. People begin to procrastinate and lose their focus. They begin doing nothing for days. Without being stimulated by the phenomenon of results it is difficult to keep on going. Research shows that this is exactly why people love to clean their houses. It’s a rewarding experience because the results are instant and self-evident. Lack or complete absence of results is the single most important factor in discouraging people from doing something. But you can’t expect results from doing the wrong thing. It’s easier to just clean you room.
Yes, it’s difficult to put your effort into something you will never feel is paying off. In other words there is nothing rewarding about it. It’s difficult to continue working on things that, well. . . don’t work out. This is a sign that you must change the way you think about what you are doing. Changing your mind is also not an easy task. This means that you have to tell yourself that whatever you were doing before was wrong. Not many people are able to face their own egos. But it is the necessary step.
It is possible to overcome this if you think about your work in a different way, in many cases one that seems and feels counter-productive. In many cases, I noticed that the quality and effectiveness of my results were not triggered by some ideal I followed. Great results were not preceded by something I expected to have a certain effect on something else. In fact, most of the articles I have written myself that became popular (in terms of website traffic they would receive and still are receiving) felt like accidents to me.
Over a long period of time (no pun intended), I realized that I had little control over the specifics. But I also realized that there were things I was also in control of. These things I could control were simply unrelated to the actual reasons for why my websites would start receiving more traffic. Yet, they would relate to the overall popularity and success of my websites.
As I began to change my mindset that would support long-term thinking, and as I began to realize I had no direct control over increasing traffic to my website, that is when things started to get really interesting.
Instead of focusing on building traffic, I decided to focus on writing content. I stopped caring about the specifics I now knew I had no control over. There was no way I could feel good about myself by spamming blogs or forums with links pointing back to my site. But what did it mean to focus on things I could control? What were those things?
These questions led me away from website design itself, and even Search Engine Optimization entirely. . . and straight into the territory of creative writing. It occurred to me that I could control the quality of my content by increasing it. In a round-about way it would increase the traffic to my website because people would link back and share my content with friends, co-workers and relatives.
In order to do that, I decided to learn how to write captivating stories about my experience with various things. The experience that I actually had. I stopped thinking about pursuing money by attempting to write about subjects I knew nothing about.
On the contrary, I started a website about playing Starcraft 2 and learning new game strategies that includes my observations about the game. I decided to put more effort into writing about the Internet, web hosting servers I’ve dealt in the past, etc. My goal was to start teaching people about all of the things I have learned over the past 10 years about making websites and maybe get a little creative about it.
I began focusing on the power of the written word. I started to pay attention to how to write in a way that would entice my audience. I would actually care about things like: how many horizontal lines of text should there be in a paragraph at its maximum allowed length.
It occurred to me that paragraphs containing only 2-3 lines are much more appealing for people to start reading due to their perceived short length. This prevented me from writing text that looked elaborate and that looked boring.
Were my first results phenomenal? Of course not. But I continued to do things I had control over. The long-term mindset allowed me to improved the way I think about all aspects of making websites. I started to make improvements to the layout of my websites every week or so, whenever I felt like doing it.
I kept on doing things that seemed like they had nothing to do with increasing traffic to my website. I didn’t even know I was writing great content, whatever it might mean. I wanted to express my knowledge in a way unique to me. In a way that I felt was the right way.
Nobody can ever write the same exact words I can or explain ideas using exactly the same sentence structure. I was creating unique content. In return, people sensed my honesty and that increased the chance of my content being linked from other sites or passed on in an email message.
How Long Exactly is the Long Term?
When someone asks this question, it is like going back to short-term thinking habits. It doesn’t matter how long the long term is. It’s as long as you want or need it to be to accomplish what you want.
We are all limited by the span of our lifetime. There is no longer term than that of a human life. The longest long-term for everyone is different. For some it is 60 years, for others it is less, or more.
Is it a down-side that the long term is uncertainly long? This might make people feel anxious. To a mind whose curiosity is aroused enough to the point where anything can be learned thoroughly, this psychological barrier will be easier to overcome than to one who doesn’t really care about their work.
Google doesn’t like it when webmasters intrude into the workings of their inner algorithms. It makes no sense to spam blogs or forums and other sites with back links, or buy links that people are willing to share for free. . . with the intent of putting that content into a system that does not reward such tactics. This is why your website’s traffic is not increasing.
Website Traffic Will Only Increase in the Long Term.
While short-term tactics may work, you may not always be able to keep the results. The great thing about long-term way of thinking is that usually the things you earn, you get to keep them for a very long time as well. The overall process in acquiring them may be slow, but it’s well worth it.
Do you have the commitment to learn how to write content that people will link back to? Are you willing to spend hours of your time learning a skill and then effectively using it in order to achieve something? If you are, then I highly recommend starting to think about your work as long-term production. Make this change today and see what happens.
It might seem counter-productive, but when you start seeing your first results, you will be so much more motivated to do more of it. At one point, your long-term thinking will cease to be an annoyance and you will start looking at it as an advantage. Let all other sites created by web masters with short-term thinking die off and have your content rise to the top of search engine results.
One person can accomplish so much using this tactic. The more you learn about creative writing, building sites, and even psychology, the more effective you will be as a content creator. Using the skills you have gained over the years, you can make a serious impact on increasing and keeping your traffic.
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