How to drive traffic to your blog

I am gonna get right down to it. There will be no beating around the bushes and there will be none of me telling you that in order to drive traffic to your blog you are going to have to buy some sort of product from me. It is just not the way it is, and in fact. Driving traffic to your blog is more a test of patience than it is a test on your pocket book. At least in my mind it is. And unless you are some sort of Uber Blogger with the most wonderful idea in the world. Chances are your topic has been written about once or twice. And being that. Why would you start dumping money into an idea that is not “fresh”. It just is not worth the cost. Because reality is, your not going to make millions. Sorry. Some people may tell you if you follow them and click here and read this and sign up for this program you will also be able to make millions. But reality is, the market is saturated. New ideas are scarce and competition is unbelievable for almost any keyword worth a damn.

So what do you do? How do you drive traffic to your blog. WHERE IS THE TRAFFIC FOR YOUR SPECIFIC BLOG?

Very good questions my friend. Very good questions indeed. And the answer, of course is not black and white or cut and dry. The answer lies in this hazy area. So, even if it may seem that what I tell you is a little bit like beating around the bush. The reality is, it is reality. It is what it is.

As you see below here, I have created a basic tree of building blog traffic. You can see that at the top of the tree, Website is what I consider the apex. Not blogs. This is what it is. Although many of you will consider blog as the apex. That is quite okay. But not reality.

So, below the blogging portion of the tree. You will see that there are several categories. These are the categories that we are going to cover IN DETAIL! I am going to explain exactly what I do in order to build blog traffic using these methods.

So.....Let me stop rambling! Let's get started

1. Link Building Articles

As far as I am concerned, this is and will always be the #1 most important aspect of building blog traffic. And there is more than one way to skin a cat and there is more than one way you should be skinning your cat. There are, in fact, dozens of ways to do this.

My number one most favorite way to build links through articles is HubPages. I love Hubpages. Google gives you huge mojo for Hubpage articles. Not only that but Hubpages are highly popular and have a wonderful community. And wait, there is even more! You can include your Adsense Id and include Adsense adds on your Hub. Hubpages does keep a portion of your Adsense revenue, but what you will usually find is, you will either be paid for your article or you will get true do follow backlinks. You will usually not get both. With Hubpages you do. Not only can you use Adsense, but you can also use your Amazon Associates Id and add, Amazon ads to your blogs.

This means that You can get multiple effect from your Hubs. You can write very Sales orientated hubs in order to sell product on your hub, and slyly drop a couple backlinks to your blog. It is not so much about the traffic you directly generate from the link, but more about the Juice Google places on that link, and how much that link will help you in SERP. Some blogs I built, I have placed well in Google with nothing more that a couple Hubpages.

Now Hubpages is not the only site that is like this. Info Barrel is another winner. Not quite as established, but still a great site. And it is very important to build variation to your backlinks. You do not want them all to be from the same origin. Your backlinks will be discounted if they are viewed as spam.

Another way to build links with articles is article submitting to article directories. Specifically I am going to suggest Ezine.com and Goarticles.com. These are the two that I use and the two I find to be the best. What article directories do is, allow you to submit articles to a general, public directory. In your article you are usually able to include a backlink and also include an about the author section. Once your article is submitted and accepted by the site, anyone can use your articles on their website or blog. This can be huge. This means that you not only get the high quality backlink from the Article Directory, but you will get a link for any site that uses your article on their site. You will not make any money for these articles. But, its not about making money. It is about building links in large quantities. And it is really a must for any highly competitive keywords.

In general. There is no exact science on what to link to. What you really want to create is a web. Something like I show in this illustration. Articles link to hubs and blogs, hubs link to specific posts and to the main Url of your blog. The thing to really be considerate of is, more links per article is not better. 2 or 3 links per article really should be your max. You will start to see diminishing returns on your links if you saturate your articles with too many of them.

I have to stop. I know you want to learn more about how to drive traffic to your blog, but, this post has already hit 1000 words. Nobody likes a chatty kathy. And I would like to save more for later.

For more about links you might want to read my article about internal blog links. That is a good topic.

Thank you for reading blogging for beginners.

And I want to give thanks to Ed at Oldsputnick.com. His interest has inspired me into writing again. I appreciate that, even though he may have had no idea for what he was doing! Good luck Ed and good luck to all of you. And for anyone who would like personal help, please ask. I will always try to help.