Early Stage Strategy: Getting Traffic

If there’s one thing new blogs are lacking it’s traffic. Getting visitors to your blog is one of the first priorities, especially if you’re interested in monetizing it like I want to do with Scraping Pennies.

Traffic comes from various sources:

• Referral Traffic
• Search Engines
• Social Media
• Direct Traffic
• Ad Traffic

I’ll cover each of these sources in this article.

Referral Traffic

Refferal traffic are visitors that found your site, because another site linked to you and they used that link to visit you. One of the best links to get is when someone else talks about you and recommends you. That way they are actively promoting you. But there are various ways of getting links to you on other sites. And as they are important for search engines and advertisement networks too, I will cover them in another article in the Early Stage Strategy series.

Search Engines

Search Engines sent targetted traffic. Someone entered keywords in that little search engine box, and they suggested your site. So the people who come to you in this way are more likely to like what you offer, because it fits what they were looking for in the first place.

Search Engines can be a major source of traffic! So much so, that an entire industry evolved around them. It’s called SEO, Search Engine Optimization. The subject is way too elaborate to fully cover here, but it involves both technical aspects (being friendly to the search engine spiders) as the content aspects (making sure the right keywords score).

The biggest factor in a high ranking in the Search Engines are incoming links, and it’s hard to get those in the early stages. But as I said before, I will talk about those in another article in this series. Two good places to investigate the subject further are the SEO Book by Aaron Wall and SEOMoz.

Social Media

There are a lot of Social Media sites around. Social Media in short are people sharing content with other people (read more about it at wikipedia). Some of these sites can really cause a large influx of visitors when an article gets popular.

The better known sites are StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Digg. But there are a lot of other sites out there as well.

Having a strong profile on any of these sites is not necessarily to be used to stumble, digg or vote for your own articles on these sites. But, as they are all about making friends, it’s about building a community (or a pack) to rely on to submit them for you. Although every once in a while it’s not a problem to do it yourself.

Actions you can take right now:

• Make an account on StumbleUpon and start stumbling. There are many strategies to build your account, read more about this on DoshDosh.
• Make an account on Digg and start digging. Read here how you can become a power digger.
• Make an account on Twitter and start building a network. Add me as a friend and send me an @ message so we can talk. Read more about how to build a twitter presence.

This is a strategy I’ll be using for Scraping Pennies as well. I do have a headstart, because I’ve build profiles already on some sites. They’re not nearly as strong as they can be, when you use the tips in the articles I linked to, but it will help.

Direct Traffic

Direct Traffic are visitors who key in your address into the address bar of their internet browser. They knew your address beforehand, either because they’ve been to your site before or because they heard about it somewhere on- or offline.

These people are best helped by having an address that’s easy to remember. For Scraping Pennies I have already set this up. It’s easy to remember, because it’s an existing expression, only two words, regular spelling, no dashes and on a .com domain. If you don’t have a domain yet, and need some help figuring domains out (it can be very frustrating), you might be interested in Daniel Scocco’s e-book Killer Domains. I haven’t read it myself, but I hear it’s helpful.

To increase your direct traffic you need to get your address out there. People need to know about it. This may not be your biggest source of traffic, or the one you can grow the fastest, but it in the beginning of a blog or website getting any traffic is welcome. And you are definitely reaching different audiences, than the other methods will.

Actions you can take right now:

• Set a signature under your email messages with the address for your blog.
• Tell your friends and family about your new blog.
• Print (free) business cards with the address and pass them along.
• Print (free) stickers with the address and put them up around the city.
• Place (free) ads in a local (door-to-door) newspaper.

Ad Traffic

You can buy advertisement space on other blogs, websites or even search engines. When used effectively this can be a good source of targeted traffic as well. There are various forms you can choose to advertise, varying from Adwords at Google to banner buttons at similar blogs.

At this point I’m undecided whether to go ahead with buying advertisements. After all the budget is tight, but on the other hand traffic is necessary for monetizing Scraping Pennies.

One thing you can factor in is the benefits of choosing a host that offers credit for advertisements when you sign up. I host Scraping Pennies at GoDaddy and they offer a $25 value of credits for Google Adwords. I’m going to use those soon and report back here, on how to set them up and on the results.

Next article in the series will be about getting links to your blog.

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