1000 visitors a day : 8 practical web traffic strategies

1000 visitors a day is a big milestone for many bloggers, but less than half successfully achieve this, most of us believe this as a great achievement mainly because this gives a rise to more revenue opportunities, as most networks accept blogs once they reach this level. This isn’t really tough and its possible for all blogs in all niches, but it requires some materials and planning which you can’t buy or outsource. I say this because if you own a blog, you’ll need the personal touch to build a community for yourself and this isn’t something which can be outsourced, maybe this is one of advantages faced by other internet businesses.

The methods I’ll be talking about here are all free, but very time consuming, as I said above you cannot outsource it or buy it, but you can make your work easier by using a few paid softwares and services. As I mentioned above there are a few things which are necessary for traffic, some are as follows -

1. Frequently updated, good quality content
2. Sticky blog posts and faster loading blog
3. Onsite social media optimization (Its necessary to you place bookmarking buttons and badges to give exposure to your profile).
4. Good looking design to get repeat visitors.

The above requirements are the key to the success of any blog, without these you won’t find it of any use to promote your blog, I believe in the saying that blog promotion is the mixture of both monarch and democracy, content is the king and promotion is the prime minister and it requires both to make a stable country.

Like other traffic generation posts, this isn’t something where I’ll write 100s of methods to drive traffic, I’m just going to mention a few techniques which are practical and have the potential to build long term and consistent traffic. Most of them have been used by me and a few are those which I’m still working on,

Blog commenting

I have written about this in all of my previous posts about generating traffic and I have got great response from my readers as well and I must say that all of them had a pretty good success with it. I usually comment on all of the latest posts on Techcrunch and Mashable and those two make my major source of traffic, I get a hell lot of negative replies for each comment, but the number of visitors I get is really unbelievable and a huge number of visitors turn out to be supporters after one visit.

Its still not very targeted, my audience is found on both those sites, but less than half of the visits would be interested in checking out my and 20% would make a repeat whereas only 1% of the total visits would become active and loyal readers of my blog, this isn’t really bad and my blogs growth was all due to this.

You can improve this by commenting on blogs which are in the exact same niche as the visitors will be solely interested in your content and if you can find relevant articles and send towards your articles, then your visitors are going to laser targeted, I kept doing this before, but I felt that it was really time consuming, but its really efficient if you’ve got time to spare.

Forum posting

Other than blog commenting I am very active on two of my favorite webmaster forums that is Digital Point and Warrior Forums, both these forums have proven to be really beneficial in the long run and I’m just as active even today. Digital Point doesn’t have much restrictions on self promotion, but I make sure I’m as secure as possible, because if I get banned I’m liable to loose all the hard earned reputation.

Almost all of the forums these days allow links in the signature and thats my major source of traffic, before I used to place links directly inside the threads, but I got banned for that. But even today I post summaries of articles as threads and give a link to the main article on my blog and their doesn’t seem to be any restrictions on that.

For finding forums related to your niche, I think Big-Boards will be the best option, find one which has great traffic and analyze its terms and conditions before creating an account as their are a few which don’t permit self promotion. After you’ve chosen a few forums, get active there everyday and try to build a reputation in the community. This way your sure to bring in a few loyal visitors and grow your network as many of them whom you have helped will try to connect with you.

Facebook

My third major source of traffic and my most efficient one till now has been Facebook, this results in very less new visits, but still its a great way to get recurring visits and to update your most loyal readers. When I first started off on Facebook I started to add my my school friends and then started adding a few bloggers I knew, so with this my network started to grow slowly.

At one point of time I began adding all the bloggers I knew to my network and this helped me grow further as Facebook as a good recommendation system. Once I made a few new friends, I used to write on their walls introducing myself and my blog and I was successful in making connections with a few big bloggers in my niche, I also had put a badge on my blog which got in a few of my readers to connect with me.

After I had built a big Facebook account, I wanted to have an influential presence there, so started to comment on all the posts of other bloggers and started to chat with them actively and when the time was right, I started to ask them for exchanging social media votes and commenting on each other’s latest posts and stuff. I started to get huge amounts of traffic from Facebook and I successfully started to send all my posts viral on different networks.

Twitter

Twitter is no big surprise as a good promotional method, maybe I was too skeptical about it, because I could have built  a huge following if I would have been active on it as soon as I had created an account. In the past few days, the number retweets on my posts have increased significantly, and this is mainly because I’ve started to gain quality and targeted followers.

Facebook does play a key role in my rising Twitter traffic, mainly because I use my contacts there to exchange retweets and I have syndicated my Twitter account on Facebook, so all my tweets can be seen by my Facebook friends and this way I’ll get a hell lot of comments on all my tweets.

Another technique I used to increase retweets was with the help of retweet.it, I site which allows you to exchange retweets with others with the help of credits earned for retweeting others submissions. Getting retweets isn’t really hard and anyone can generate tons of traffic from it today.

Linkedin

Linkedin happens to be one of the most powerful ways to drive traffic to any blog and in reality it happens to be much more powerful than Facebook. But since I have a habit of moving where the crowd moves, I neglected this as well, but now I’m trying my best to build a influential Linkedin profile. Its highly recommended that you have a well established Facebook account or in any other social network before this.

First thing to do after creating your account is to find your existing friends with the help of your email or Facebook and try to leverage a few friends on Facebook to Linkedin as well and put up a badge on your blog for your visitors to connect with you, so after you’ve made a few connections, you’ll start getting requests automatically as Linkedin spreads connections faster than Facebook.

After you get your first few connections start interacting in groups and answering questions, because this is sure to bring in much more of them. After you make a handful start having an influence in your network, by commenting on their statuses, mailing them and just letting them know you.

All of the above steps take atleast a month to be done properly if you work everyday and then you can start promoting yourself. First thing you have to do is to let all your connections know about your blog, then start doing status updates with links to your new posts whenever you post something. Create a group for your blog and invite everyone to join that, this is one of the mediums for you to actively promote your posts.

Other than this, other ways to drive targeted traffic with Linkedin is with the help of answers and other groups, all this helps generate huge amounts of exposure to your posts and unlike Facebook you will not be limited to the same readers, but you’ll also get a few new ones.

Keyword research

From the beginning I have never concentrated much on search engine optimization, but still I’ve got good traffic from Google, which I think is because of my uniquely titled posts, so what I mean here is that if I could have got traffic without any keyword research, just imagine how much traffic I would have got with it.

Keyword researching takes hard work and patience, and the results aren’t immediate, but once get the skill you’ll know the power of it. For those of you who haven’t done this before, let me tell you that keyword research is a process of searching for a keyword and analyzing its popularity and competition with the help of softwares, one of the most used is the Google Adwords Keyword tool.

So with a few minutes of search you’ll find a few keywords which are saturated and a few which are not, but you won’t stop with that, for any keyword you’ll have to figure out a long tail version of the same, for example the keyword ‘Make Money Online’ maybe saturated, but you can still try ‘How do I make money online’.

After you’ve got your keywords, then its time to make a post on that and this post must be based on the exact same keyword and must contain these words a number of times in the post and in the tags. The title must be exactly same or similar to the long tail keyword you choose. After a few hours or days your post will surely rank for this keyword, but the placement of you post depends on the competition, your page rank and search volume.

Videoblogging

Written posts are surely going to die out someday as most people these days prefer Vlogs, but this might be somewhere far in the future, but currently videos are one of the greatest ways to promote your blog or business online. In the past 2 months, I have made 2 long videos, which have both received average amount of views and the most surprising part is that both generate upto 60 visitors a week even today and if you haven’t seen them, let me inform you that they are of very low quality as I was screencasting for the very first time.

Videos are really easy to make, just a bit of practice can make you can expert, so I’m sure you’ll be able to make one video post every week. Its necessary that the videos are related to your niche and make sure you put your blog’s watermarks all around your videos. This is going to give more than just traffic, because this is going to generate a hell lot of brand exposure.

If its the traffic your concerned with, then don’t worry, because most video sharing sites allow you to give direct links in the description area, which of course can lead to huge amounts of traffic. Creating videos and optimizing them for site exposure can be really easy, but promoting the same is a total different story.

Almost all videos  receive a few average views if they are submitted to the major video sharing sites, which can be done via Tubemogul, but they are not enough to generate traffic to your site, so for this purpose, first thing is to post the video as a post on your site and then do a basic promotion for the video on all the sites with help of social media.

After you’ve got a few views, you can start commenting on other videos with a link to your own, this is sure to be effective and Youtube has a feature known as video responses which help generate thousands of views. All these steps can generate views which can make it go viral because most sites rank videos on the basis of views and ratings, so ultimately, its your video’s quality and content which matters.

Social bookmarking

I’m sure most of you would have expected this to be on the top of the list, but I really didn’t want to do so, because social bookmarking does give me traffic, but not as much as the above 7, this is mainly because social bookmarking sites these days are reserved only for the big blogs in the internet and almost all of them are currently saturated.

So its kind advice to all of you to forget Digg, Reddit and if possible even Delicious, because most of the submissions there don’t get more than one vote. Thats why I believe that you must increase the use of small social sites such as Dzone, Blogengage and Twittley, but I still believe that sites such as Stumbleupon still have lots of opportunities mainly because their design doesn’t let it get saturated.

As I mentioned above Facebook plays a key role in my blog’s promotion on other networks as well, most bloggers see my links posted there and they immediately head out to vote up my posts and comment here.

On to our readers

This is not our first post on this topic, but each time we have managed to update you with something better, this post took a hell lot of work and I hope you could gain something from this, If you have any suggestions or opinions or anything related to this topic please do feel free to use the comment form below and also don’t forget to follow me on twitter and subscribe to our feed.