The key to a successful blog is TRAFFIC!!
Have you wondered how some ugly, badly designed and aesthetically displeasing websites are sometimes so much more successful than other much better designed ones?
Something which I do in my part time is to build websites for new small businesses. Frequently, these people have never had an online presence and they are completely focused on the visuals and want me to spend all my time to ensure that everything looks perfect. I tell them that so long as a website looks good and has all the information, that’s the key… the rest of the effort should be to market the website. Most of these customers are not interested in the marketing option, they just want the site to be ready and unleashed unto the world…. then they wait and expect that people will just find their site and that they will start getting calls from people.
What’s the point of having a fantastic website if people don’t visit it? People who know this know that the key to having a successful website is to get as many people visit the site as possible… this is how those ugly websites can do so much better than the better looking ones.. some people don’t waste too much energy ensuring the site looks good, they just put up all the information in a clean and easy to navigate way and then spend the rest of the time marketing. I realised this early on with this blog when I moved from the WordPress hosted blog solution to my own domain. Suddenly, my newly designed blog with nice graphics and customised widgets lost it’s audience… my blog certainly looked a lot better but I was only getting a couple of visitors a day. When I was on the WordPress hosted solution, after a couple of hours, already 20 people had visited my blog.
As I have mentioned in previous postings about this, I have set my blog to ‘ping’ blog directories everytime I submit a new article. I also have submitted my site to various search engines and manually posted to social networking sites such as Digg, Reddit, Technorati, Stumbleupon etc.
I am always on the lookout for ways to increase the audience. Increasing my audience means that there is a greater chance of people linking to my articles and posts.. each link is called a Backlink and the more you have of these, the more important Google ranks your website/blog to be and the higher Page Rank you get.
Getting a higher Page Rank means that you can negotiate higher level of sponsorships and generally make more money from your website.
Also, the more visitors you have, the more chance that they will click on your adverts which will generate revenue for you.
Anyway, I found a new site which has been generating extra traffic for me, this is called TrafficG.com and it is free to sign up. Since I started using this today, within a couple of hours I have started receiving traffic from them already. It works on a credit system, the more credits you have, the more visitors you get. You can get traffic by buying them (500 visitors will cost you $7) or by surfing their pages.
It’s worth having a look, I’m always interested in looking for ways to further my blog, especially if it’s not going to cost me!
Visit TrafficG.com
