0 to 100K visitors : 10 steps from my blogs marketing plan

OK now you don’t have to be surprised as my blog still isn’t close to 100,000 visitors, what I’m disclosing here is my blogging plan which I feel is the main reasons behind my blogs growth, till now whatever I have done was according to the plan and its been pretty good. When you read this many of you will realize that it may have been what your following, yes this is true, what I have done here is formed into a theory.

This is not going to deal with the practical part of generating traffic and I will not speak about various traffic generation methods either as I kind of feel that such posts are flooding the internet. This post contains the philosophy behind driving traffic on the internet and the methods techniques and uses are upto you to make.

Build solid relationships and connections

The whole reason behind web 2.0 is connecting with people and building hard to break relations, and this is something which can be the biggest weapon for any internet marketer, but most of the marketers never utilize this as they are busy spamming with the connections they build. This will include friends, family members, bloggers, webmasters and others in your niche, so after you start a blog in a particular niche its recommended that you inform and build connections with others in your niche.

After you build these connections and earn each of their trust, you can use them efficiently to trigger a viral chain in small networks and in the past few months I’ve utilized my friends and other bloggers to successfully trigger many such viral chains. I actually do this is in the manner of exchanged favors and till now its worked really well.

Other than chatting with them and helping them promote their articles I also comment on their blogs and interact with them publicly on Facebook and Twitter, by doing this they feel that I’m giving personal importance to their posts and usually they visit my site and comment here too.

Initial onsite traffic

Whatever big network you build, it gets a better value and gets a bit targeted if you get some onsite exposure. Almost 40% of the friends and connections I’ve built came from my my blog itself and this 40% is the most active and most useful because they are the ones who are really interested in my content and they have also experienced my site very well. Thats why I recommend in all of my posts to follow me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook.

My techniques to retain visitors have worked very well, I’ll be writing about that soon, but now how did get more than the initial two visitors which happened to be me and my mom. Thats something which is usually the toughest part in a new blogger’s career, even I had to struggle for this and after a lot of troubles I successfully established a base for my blog.

For my blog I used only two methods actively and efficiently and as you all can guess its blog commenting and forum posting I’m talking about. Even today I leave about 60 comments each day on some of the biggest blogs in my niche and I’m one of the most active members on Digital point and Warrior forums. Immediately after I started to implement these methods I started to get a steady flow of traffic and I did all I could to build a community around it.

Tap into small networks

If you have done the above two steps efficiently I’m sure you’ll have a small audience with a few friends who have agreed to promote each others blogs with you and now I feel that its time to put it to use. The most common mistakes people make while doing this is they directly tend to tap into big networks such as Digg, delicious etc., but they never realize that while having such a small network your just wasting your effort as well as the return favor you were supposed to get.

I realized this at an early stage, so I actively started to promote my blog on small channels such as Blogengage, Twittley and Sphinn, instead of the big ones and since then almost all of my articles have gone popular in these networks, even though the traffic one gets after going popular is low, its much better than Digg. I preferred this and I still do so because after I ask all my friends to rate it, I may get a upto 20 positive ratings which is just enough to go popular.

Your initial audience and connections can also be useful to tap into a few big networks as well, a few which I use are Facebook, Stumbleupon and Twitter, this is because these sites aren’t very saturated and with just a few ratings you can go really viral. This has a much bigger potential than the other sites above, so what I mean is if you trigger a chain in of of these networks, your blog will easily be pushed to the other, I’ll talk about this in the next topic.

Tap into big networks

After you feel that you’ve grown your blog to a certain level and after you have good stance on the small networks with more connections to get favors from, its time to you give a try to the big ones. For this you’ll need to even optimize your content first and then build a powerful account. After that you can try your best get audience from there, as popularity from these sites are huge but comes very rarely.

First thing to do here is to optimize your site by placing social buttons and make sure its easy for users to rate your post in any way possible, because the main thing here is onsite exposure. Later on write social media friendly posts to give enough value for your social media optimized site. Then continue to go ahead with all the steps above while asking your connections to rate your articles in bigger networks as well, so one or the other day you’ll make it popular due to a viral chain triggered in another network.

Once you start getting your submissions popular you’ll see your profile getting instant popularity and after a few popular submissions, you’ll see your submissions going popular faster and much more frequently, so after that if you feel that you can manage with the big ones alone leave the small networks.

Tap into mainstream media

After you get a bit popular in the big networks, your sure to get in a flood of visitors and with that a hell lot of revenue, so when this happens you’ll get a lot of mainstream media entities looking to feature you and your blog. This can be the best moments in your career, but you can’t always wait for the offers to come in, as soon start your career try to make friends with people in the media, I already have some friends in this industry, although I cannot dare to ask them directly at this stage. maybe when my blog gets a bit popular they’ll ask themselves.

Build your online brand

Mainstream media includes building your brand, but for a blog online brand is what matters most. If you know many bloggers on the blogosphere, you’ll notice that their are many bloggers who earn more than Darren Rowse and generate more traffic than him, but he isn’t famous, I mean many people do know him, but he cannot be called as famous as rarely anyone speaks about him. Thats something I find funny in today’s media.

If you have successfully accomplished all the steps above I’m sure your quality and content cannot be doubted, so now you need a way to get people to talk about you. Firstly I’d say that start connecting with the biggies in your niche, they are the ones who’ll mean lots to you, if you be friendly with them I’m sure they’ll mention your and your blogs name in their future posts, this simple mention can bring in a lot of discussions about you. Another well known way is guest posting, most people these days use guests posts as a method of driving traffic, but this drives very few amount of visitors, but gives you a lot of fame for sure.

If you can successfully get a discussion to take place then very soon you’ll find plenty of people mentioning about your site, this will definitely make you more famous and if you see the bottom line, it will lead to interviews and you’ll soon be part of success stories.

Go ahead with paid advertising

I guess most of you will be wondering why I have put paid advertising in the end, well I myself don’t know that , although I already have launched a few paid advertising campaigns I haven’t launched in full fudge. So if you have successfully achieved everything above I’m sure money wont be of a problem to your guys, so you can definitely start a huge campaign.

An advertising campaign must definitely go beyond the traditional adwords one and its recommended that you take it to different levels. this is not the age for leveraging visitors who click on ads directly to your home page, you need to have a welcome page or its better if advertise a free ebook or something.

The best advertising campaign is one which is aimed at leading towards organic traffic and viral communication and that starts from social advertising, I’ve heard many cases in which one Stumbleupon campaign has made an article go popular on Digg, this is something which we can call as an effective campaign.

Premium promotional methods

After all of the above methods you have used to promote your blog, and after you have a strong and supportive audience its time you use methods which are self promotional meaning it should make the news and send traffic to your site on its own. These methods take a lot of innovation and creativity, but results 10 times more success rates than the initial ones.

The methods I’m talking here are giveaways and contests, which are getting really popular these days. It can result in huge amounts of popularity if done well, but takes a hell lot of planning and work.

You can easily build a big list through this method and at times you can almost double your traffic using some tweet to win type of contests. Whatever you do it depends how you launch and promote it, I guess you can spend money on advertising for such things which really give out value.

Outsource marketing

I have never spoken a single word about SEO in this post, but most of the methods on this post have huge SEO benefits, so I’m pretty much sure that all of you will be getting good search traffic by now. After you’ve reached this level its time you concentrate fully on your blogs content and on the big promotional channels.

You’ll find a lot of internet marketing companies these days, one thing I can say is never go for the cost efficient ones because if it is the cost efficient ones then your sure to waste your money.

Generate traffic passively

I have written in many articles that my ultimate goal is to generate passive income and the income will be consistent only if  I manage to generate traffic consistently without working. So for this I need my posts to be promoted socially on its know by my audience, moreover I need unstoppable search traffic and constant links from other blogs.

Outsourcing was one step closer to this level, but social media is something which I need to keep active with, but hopefully I’ll get enough onsite exposure to take my posts popular.

On to our readers

Well this is my marketing plan, I mean an overview of my marketing plan, as I said above this is just the theory, the practical is up to you as it differs from niche to niche. Moreover I haven’t describe the time length for each task as it would be upto you and you must decide when your ready to move on to the next one. Remember this isn’t what I can call as a race so take your time and be patient. Their are many things in this post which requires further explanations which I’m sure to do in future posts, so to keep up please do follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my RSS feed.

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