In the previous part of this three-part series (link to that is right here) we discussed the general business model of blogging for profit and how to treat it not only as a hobby but a profitable business, or a profitable hobby if you’d prefer. It’s necessary to build a blog that your target demographic is going to want to spend time reading, that’s what will keep them coming back. Eventually your traffic numbers will begin to grow and this will typically lead to a positive boost in revenue generated by one of many different monetization methods such as ads, affiliate promotions, or through direct sales of one of your own products or services.
Quick Tip: If you’re wondering just how often you should publish new content to your blog it’s really up to you. A common suggestion is 1 to 4 times within a month. It really depends on a number of factors so don’t feel like you absolutely MUST publish once per week because you simply don’t have to if it doesn’t make sense for you to do so, or if you just can’t do to any number of factors. What really counts is the quality of your blog, the keywords used within your articles and the quality and amount of traffic you draw to your pages.
Here Are Some Good Ways To Generate FREE Traffic
Below this quick blurb you’re going to see a number of suggestions on places & ways you can start getting free & quality traffic to your blogs. It does take work, you don’t have to overwhelm yourself by trying to hit all of these in a single day, just pace yourself and remember that it all adds up over time and will increase in momentum as times goes on if you keep at it.
Answer Questions on Quora
Head over to the Quora website and create your profile making sure to insert a link back to your website / blog within it. Once your account is set up you can then locate questions related to subjects written about in your blog and offer help. Don’t spam your links here, ever… instead be sure to insert them where appropriate and only if they truly will offer additional or more in-depth insight to the question at hand. Doing this for a couple weeks will let you spread links across many different questions and that opens things up to more traffic through your included links. You have to play this one with class for it to work so be ready to put in an honest effort, it could be very well worth it in the end.
Share Articles to Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn
We will cover some of this in greater detail to follow but the general concept here is sharing your stuff on social media sites using things like hashtags in relevant niches, interacting with groups and pages and even individual comments by others who are frequenting pages & groups related to your blog’s niche.
Social media marketing has become more sophisticated than it used to be, you must be savvy when going this route. Gone are the days of link spamming for tons of traffic. Now you have to put the time in and become part of the conversation (in a manner of speaking).
Post Videos on YouTube
Video is responsible for a very large chunk of all internet traffic thanks to things like bandwidth expanding and internet service becoming more widely available to the globe as a whole. Just about anywhere you go these days you’re bound to see a video embedded from YouTube if you’re not actually already on the YouTube website itself. Thanks to this fact, and the ever-growing numbers of video related traffic it’s safe to say that having your own active YouTube channel with videos related to your blog posts (which use proper YouTube SEO practices) you’re bound to see a very steady stream of traffic when you put in the effort.
A lot of people think that the way to go with YouTube is to monetize the videos with Google’s partner program… it’s not. You can make 10x the amount of money by creating informative and/or entertaining videos which offer what your demographic want to see and then linking to some sort of web page in the video description. On that linked web page will be a blog with ads on it, or a sales page or lead-capture page if you’re building an email list. Doing this will generate much more positive results than just trying to monetize your videos, though you can do that too. Just keep in mind you must have at least 10,000 over-all views on your channel before you can monetize anything.
Publish on LinkedIn Pulse
The idea here is similar to using LinkedIn Pulse to publish your own works with the difference that you’ll be interacting with other people in active groups so be sure to use proper group etiquette. Back in 2014 LinkedIn let the public use their ‘Pulse’ platform to publish their own works which has opened up a very handy spot to pull some great traffic back to your own blogs. LinkedIn is a website for professionals so your articles must be crafted around this idea. You’re going to be putting your work out there to a bunch of potential “big time players” in your market so be sure to put your best foot forward with each article you publish to Pulse. Here is something I found which will help you get started, it’s a very helpful article… Helpful Article Right Here
Post Your Content to LinkedIn Groups
Have a look at the LinkedIn groups and interact with the ones which make sense for your target market. This is a really great way to get free traffic over to your blogs which is not only high in quality but also laser targeted. Here Is A Quick Link to the official help page for LinkedIn Groups, you may find it useful before getting started on this method of driving traffic.
Link from Other Niche Social Networks
Track down other smaller social networks such as forums which revolve around your blog’s niche. One way to track down forums is to perform a simple Google Search which looks like this:
Affiliate marketing +forum
This will typically get you a bunch of search results with some curated blogs that have lists of forums related to your chosen niche. Alternatively, you can also use the following website which is a large database of active forums spanning across many markets & niches… http://www.findaforum.net
Share to Google+ Communities
Google Plus Communities is another great way to publish your own articles for the masses to see in an effort to drive more traffic back to your blogs. If you’re unfamiliar with how it works then the process goes like this:
- Be sure you have a Google account already made
- Navigate to the Communities page, here is a link
- You can create your own community, though it may not do so well at first
- Instead, up at the top of the page perform a search for your chosen niche
- Once you’ve picked a niche, you can browse other articles or…
- Publish one of your own with helpful information and of course a link to your blog
Create SlideShares of Your Content
If you’ve already tried out LinkedIn then you also have an account with SlideShare that you can use since they’re both under the same parent company now. Slideshare.net is the proper URL, (not a .com website so use .net).
This can be an entire article all on it’s own so I’m going to leave it up to Google and YouTube to teach you how this is done. It’s fairly straightforward, though it can take some work to make slideshows which will stand a solid chance of gaining any traction on the site. On top of that, slideshare is a very high authority site so if you pick your keywords well enough and follow one of the many tutorials you can find online for slideshare then you’ll probably wind up in the top search results under your slideshare presentations. This could be useful for getting traffic back to your blogs.
Add Sharing Buttons
This one is very straightforward. There are a number of plugins you can use for your wordpress blogs which will put little ‘share buttons’ on your web pages. A number of premium themes even include this feature built-in already.
These are those little buttons you often see on pages which feature icons for various social media sites and typically they have the number of “shares” collected for a particular page displayed on screen.
Contact People Mentioned in Your Content
If you’ve mentioned any popular or otherwise influential person or website or brand (or whatever) in one of your articles then you may want to send them a quick email explaining that you mentioned them in an article you posted. State that you thought they might find it entertaining to read so you just wanted to send it to them to let them know how much you appreciate their work or whatever the case may be. If your article is favorable enough they might share it with their following which can oftentimes lead to a flood of traffic for a short period of time.
Comment on Relevant Blogs Related To Your Niche
The trick to this method is not outright promoting yourself but to find blogs which are closely related to your own, leave a useful comment, something of value to the readership of that blog and then let your name serve as the link to your own site. If you go around posting links of your own within the comments you’re going to find that way more of your comments get “ghosted” or otherwise rejected.
This one is very hit or miss and relies on playing the “numbers game” to get as many of your profile links up as possible. For anyone confused by this… anytime you comment on a blog (if it’s a wordpress blog which most are these days) you’ll typically be able to create a poster’s account which gives you an opportunity to make your profile name a link back to your blog.
If you are posting up helpful comments people will often times click on your name-link and wind up on your blog as a result. This works, it just takes time and lots of patience… and if I’m honest, quite a bit of work searching for blogs and of course posting comments to them. Do it gradually over time for best results.
Create an eBook and List it On Amazon For ‘Cheap’
This one can have big potential, especially if you put at least one new book out per month. If you happen to write your blog in such a way that you can pull a collection of articles to make a short book from them then you don’t have much extra work to do here.
You’ll need to sign up for a free publisher account with amazon… if you already have a ‘normal’ Amazon account then you can (and should) use that account. Head over to this page and sign up for your account:
We won’t cover the details of how this process works, it would drag on for far too long. However, if you wish to learn the process of publishing a book to the KDP (kindle direct program) then a quick search on YouTube or Google will do the trick. It’s very easy and straightforward so you have nothing to worry about.
The idea here is to put a quick ‘blurb’ within the first 2 pages of your book and at the bottom of that blurb leave a link back to your blog suggesting people check out your blog if they wish to get more information or something along those lines. Not only can you publish to Amazon Kindle, but you can also publish to other platforms if you wish though you will honestly get the mass-majority of traffic from Amazon so don’t feel like you have to do this extra step if you don’t want to.
Wrapping It Up In Conclusion
I know there is quite a bit of information in this 2nd part of our three-part-series. I also recognize that a lot of the information is not in super fine detail but that’s on purpose and here’s why.
These types of methods constantly change and are being updated. Think of this article you’re reading right now as a guide and not a step by step lesson plan. It’s meant to only give you the ideas so you can then go do the detailed research on your own. You’ll want to find up to eate methods and the best way to do that is search for things on the spot and learn from various sources around the Internet.
All of these methods of generating traffic work and if you dedicate just one or even a few hours for five days a week you will start to see a steady stream of traffic back to your blog in a short period of time. Not only that, the traffic will flow on a regular basis, we aren’t just talking about hitting your pages with a spike of traffic here and there, but a regular stream of traffic which can grow larger over time until you’re ready to start using paid traffic sources.
We specialize in paid traffic generation so if you’d like to learn how that’s done by an industry veteran then feel free to check out our updated affiliate marketing training course. We used to have a handful of courses split off into different packages but now everything is included in one BIG lesson plan for one low price. There are no up-sells, none of that, just what you want to get off on the right foot in your own affiliate marketing plans.
You can find part 3 of this 3-part series right here: Click This Link
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