Free Traffic Tips

It’s been a while since I’ve done a quick round-up of the free information here that you can use to increase your blog traffic. So here are a few of the more useful links. Later on, I’m doing a series on 21 Ways You Can Increase Your Blog Traffic. I don’t know if later on means later this afternoon or later this week, as I have a lot of ghostwriting to do today. Your best best is to make sure you’re subscribed to the feed, sign up to get the blog posts by email, or the less-frequent updates.

You can also cut to the chase and get a guide on turning a new blog into a search engine magnet, or a specialized report about how to do so specifically for your existing site.

And of course, there are other free traffic tutorials if you need them.

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Here’s my favorite. The most common mental traffic hurdle, thinking the traffic will arrive by magic.

You can’t get a visitor to come to your site unless someone, at some time, expends either money, effort, or both for them to get there. Now, this spot started out as Free Traffic Tips for a reason. I believe that you can get a certain amount of on-going, sustainable traffic to your site without paying per head. You can start some free traffic waves that go on forever. Some of the best traffic I’ve ever gotten, that has converted the most visitors, has been totally free.

But it’s not the only way to go, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay for traffic at some stage of the game.

What I do with most of my sites is pay only for the minimum amount of traffic or help I’d need above whatever traffic method is already working, for the site to stay afloat. Then I work on implementing additional traffic methods to turn the rest of that into gravy.

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Sometimes the issue is that folks think they should get more traffic than logic can reasonably provide.

For example, a person might look up a popular keyword and see that a good ranking would get them 3300 visitors a day. So they call me up or write me and ask how I can get their site to that level.

And the problem can be any number of things. Maybe their site has nothing to do with the topic of that keyword, and so wouldn’t rank no matter what kind of tricks I did. Perhaps the competition for that keyword is so fierce that it’s practically implausible that they’d get it on their own within less than 2 years. Or maybe they want to compete a static site against top ranking dynamic sites.

I’ll never say anything is impossible. But I will give the fair odds before I’ll take on an assignment. If It can be done but I’m not the one to do it, I’ll refer them to friends or colleagues of mine, as there’s enough business in my industry for plenty of effective, ethical people and companies.

But if it isn’t probable under the current circumstances, I’ll tell it to you straight.

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So, to continue, in the first place, I often get a person who doesn’t believe that you can get 100 real visitors in a day from a site, without spending a fortune, or without the process taking less than a year.

To which I paraphrease Henry Ford by saying “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re 100% right.”

Now, I bet you’re thinking, even if I don’t believe I can get 100 visitors to my site by, say, purchasing Google AdSense, the clicks I buy will still result in visitors.

And of course, they will. But if your mindset is that those clicks don’t represent real visitors, you won’t respond to them the way you would to real people. Your site won’t be prepared for them. You won’t respond to the demand that you’ve create properly.

The thing to do in this case is to really develop an understanding that if Yahoo and Google and CNN can get millions of visitors in a day, then it’s not outside the realm of possibilities that you could get 3000 a month or even 10,000, or a million. Do some research and get an education about traffic.

Great article at Blogging Stocks, newly posted, about the idea of being able to Google in your car. I can dig it.

Now, caution, oh hasty re-blogger. This isn’t about a Google car appliance hitting the market, or anything of that nature. It’s a speculative article about where existing Google technology that is technically available when you’re in your car, could go. Dandy site, that Blogging Stocks.

What’s incredible is that over half of what I find to be the problem with solving a traffic problem is in solving the perception the person I’m talking to has with the possibility of getting visitors to their site. For whatever reason it is, they just can’t see their site on the first page of Google for their keyword, or that they could market their site to possible clients with traffic that doesn’t come from search engines.

These psychological hurdles typically fall into three categories.

1. They think any reasonable level of traffic expectation is a scam. I don’t mean the possibility of 10,000 visitors a day. I’m talking, I do a rough sketch of how to get from no visitors to a hundred visitors a day and they think it cant happen without force or bodily harm.

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I had a conversation with a friend about the pressures of being in the public eye.

Now I’m just barely known, not even what you would officially call famous. I don’t get stopped in the street and no one is trying to fly over my compound in Namibia to see if they can get pictures of my family.

Nope. Just a teeny bit of an e-celebrity, and only in my field at that. I barely even hit the worlds of marketing that neighbor my field, if you want the truth.

But the question came from a friend who suddenly got quite a bit of marketing exposure, which was followed by many different sources pulling at them. He was totally stressed out.

“I can’t win. People seem to take everything I say the wrong way. If I decide to do a favor for someone, they get mad because I don’t move fast enough. I asked my girlfriend to help me and she snapped at me because I spend too much time online. But she doesn’t have any problems enjoying the money I make.”

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