Generating Traffic
Quality Content
First and foremost, provide quality content. Quality content might not be sufficient – I’m frequently stumbling across great blogs and wondering, why doesn’t everybody know about this great site? But it is necessary. It’s going to make everything easier if you in fact have great stuff that people want to read.
Link Aggregators
Of course, before you can keep ‘em coming back, you need to get them in the door.
One way is to get other sites and blogs to link to yours, in order to attract visitors. There are a couple of ways to do this. One is to use aggregator/social-bookmark sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Del.ic.ous for particular – and particularly-good – posts.
But then the quality content comes in. There’s a well-documented “Digg effect,” where links from high-profile aggregators result in a traffic spike that quickly dies off.
Links from Other Bloggers
Another frequent strategy is to solicit links from prominent bloggers in a given field. Most blogs consist of links to, and commentary on, outside content – and the “outside content” is frequently other blog posts. So, the thinking goes, why not have a post from your blog be the one that’s linked to?
Which is fine, as far as it goes. But don’t do this unless you have a post that would legitimately be of interest to another blog’s readership. And don’t be a pest. A common “post genre” on high-profile blogs is one where the big-name blogger complains about people pestering him or her for links.
Also, it’s important to realize this strategy’s limitations. As with the “Digg effect,” so with the big-time link: you’re likely to see a brief spike in traffic, and then it’s likely to die back down. Of course, high quality content can help you keep some of the eyeballs that have followed the link, and the sudden exposure probably won’t hurt long-term traffic. But keep the importance of these links in perspective.
Comment Sections
Another is to participate in open-access group blogs, and blog comment sections. For example, I once discovered a smallish blog that I now read regularly when I read a comment by the author on a highly-trafficked blog. Of course, you’ll need to provide a link back to your blog if readers are going to follow you.
Search Engine Optimization
Another reason to build links is to improve your performance on search engines, which often rank sites according to incoming links to the site. Here, though, it is important to be careful.
Many of the “opportunities” to optimize your search engine performance by building links are illusory. Many user-generated links add nothing to your search engine performance – because sites that allow user-generated links often set them up to ensure that search engines don’t “count” the links. This is to ensure that user-generated links don’t constitute spam designed simply to increase the destination page’s search engine performance.
Such “link spam” is at the heart of the “black arts” of search engine optimization, or “SEO.” Ever since search engines came on to the scene, web proprietors have attempted to game the engines by crafting sites and situating them within a web of links that play to the engine’s algorithms. The search engines, in turn, have tried to stay a step ahead of these efforts by constantly tweaking their search algorithms to render the methods ineffective. Still, though, the internet is filled with SEO resources of various dubiousness designed to rocket a site to the top of the search engine results page.