3 Easy Free Ways You Should Be Getting Traffic (From People With Money) To Your Blog

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Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

In the next few minutes you’ll discover:

• 3 easy ways to start attracting the right kind of visitors to your blog
• How to start growing your email list immediately
• The secret ingredient (that skyrockets sales) you must deliver in all your content

First some bad news: in today’s web marketplace just having a blog won’t get you any real traffic at all.  In fact, the market is savagely competitive and crowded, so if you aren’t super-focused you probably won’t get far in marketing your site.

The good news: people are super busy these days and what they need and want when they look for information online is clarity.  When you create focused information that is easy for people to understand and explore, you win.

Some of the best, most friendly traffic is free.  Friendly traffic is the kind of visitors who want information and come searching for it.  I call this traffic friendly because they are asking questions and want solutions to their problems.  They aren’t really expecting to be sold anything, so their guard tends to be down.  The “friendly factor” is part of what makes blog traffic so high quality.

Of course some of your traffic will usually come from phrases people type into search engines.  You’ll get this sort of traffic naturally over time,  but getting lots of it is a technical process I won’t try to teach in a short article.

The cornerstone of the best free traffic is human engagement. That means giving information as from one person to another.  Imagine a person asked you a question and you knew the answer.  You would probably share the answer, right?

Sharing answers to questions is the easy way to get free traffic.  Of course sharing answers means putting words together.  There are many opportunities online to share answers to questions, but the easiest to learn to use are:

• forums
• article sites
• press releases

Online forums are easy to figure out.  You’ll want to explore whether the forum allows you to put a signature link at the bottom of your posts.  If it doesn’t allow links, it’s probably not a good forum for getting traffic.  There are hundreds of great forums where people ask questions.  One easy way to find forums is using Google Alerts, which is a service that emails you whenever somebody uses keywords, anywhere on the internet.  For example, if you had a blog about alternative energy, you could have Google Alerts email you whenever new content turned up with phases like “home solar power” turned up.

It can take awhile to build up forum traffic, because with most forums the more you post, the more people on the forum will trust you because they can see your “post count”.  People naturally assume the more you’ve posted, the better your advice.  Thus, a good strategy is to stake out a half-dozen or so forums and promote your expertise on them consistently.  This strategy takes awhile to generate a lot of traffic, but in time the traffic can get to be quite substantial.

Article sites  are another good way to get traffic. The most important thing is to learn how to title your articles so people will be curious to read them.  Arguably your title is more important than the content of the article in getting people to read the article.  Article marketing can be frustrating if you aren’t writing about subjects lots of people are desperate to learn more about.  A smart approach is to test different approaches until you figure out what kind of article topics and titles get you the most traffic, then write more of that type of article.

Press releases are like articles but you can get away with a lot of self-promotion in them.  Articles tend to do well when they are informative on their own.  Try to make your releases more newsy and tease the reader to go to your site to get the really hot information.  Not many marketers use press releases effectively, but the traffic is often substantial.

How to start growing your email list immediately (plus a secret)

All anybody online searching for information thinks about is “what’s in it for me?  What do I get and how do I get it?”. Web searchers are about as self-centered as 2-year olds.  The best way to build your email list is offer instant gratification in terms of bait.  Free reports or training videos are common subscriber baits because they work.  The secret missing ingredient you must offer in the bait, if you want a lot if subscribers, is the implication that if the person gets your free goodie, all their problems will go away effortlessly.  I cannot emphasize this enough – you have to write to the “Chimpanzee brain”, the 2-year old who wants only easy, instant gratification.  A nice box shot or graphical presentation of the free prize your subscriber will get can skyrocket your email list to.  That’s because people want what’s new.  Make your free prize “goodie” appear as new and exciting and effortless as possible and you’ll get much better results in building your list.