1) Buying traffic or

2) Growing traffic naturally (free), primarily through Search Engine Optimization and including the use of social media.

And if you have a blog, the opportunities are even greater in regards to developing traffic naturally.

Because there is a large community of bloggers in the world, there is a likelihood that there are others blogging about a similar subject that you are.

Some of those bloggers may be influential in their respective areas and may have a considerable following of people who read what they have to say.

If such a high-profile blogger were to cite something that you wrote about, and link to your website, then you stand to benefit from their traffic visiting your site.

And it all has to do with how easy it is for blogs to link to each other, which is an important component of the community of blogging. (Blogging is not about a one-way communication that is typical of static websites. Blogging is about 2-way communication and community).

For example, let’s say you are a beginning blogger writing about the subject of photography. If you search around to discover other bloggers who write about photography, or a related area, such as art or design, you can determine that some have quite a following, as evidenced by the large amount of comments they receive on their blog.

Here is a customary way to inspire such a high-profile blog to link to yours:

A) Write thoughtful comments on their blog

B) Link to their posts from within your own blog

Such bloggers will notice your comments and, over time, they’ll gain insight into your thinking, or humor, or viewpoint, or experience, and personality. Any one of these points could result in that person linking to you.

Many bloggers automatically track what others are saying about them on other blogs. So, when you write their name on your blog, or when you write their website address on your blog, they are automatically notified. Do that a number of times over a period of weeks or months and you may very well inspire a reciprocal mention, which is a useful component of the 3rd part of the SEO Triangle. (See training video Driving Traffic Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle).

Realize that such a link, itself, and all by itself, even if no traffic were to arrive, is valuable enough that search engines may push your site higher up in the search rankings. (See training video on the SEO Triangle).

But when receiving links from a high-profile blogs, this can be a very useful source of like-minded TRAFFIC.

If a high-profile blogger cites an insightful post of yours, you can benefit from a flood of traffic, and some of those visitors will subscribe to your RSS and others may subscribe to your email newsletter list to see what else you’ve got to say in the future, which would then put them in the process of potentially buying something from you, such as a product or service.

Of course, underpinning this whole thing is an understanding that you’ve got something of value to add to the community. Conversely, that does not suggest that every post you write should be worthy of a Nobel Prize. Sometimes all it takes is a concise statement of simplicity about a matter of community interest and/or a humorous presentation of something already tacitly understood.

It’s also useful to be aware that the highest profile bloggers have LOTS of other bloggers vying for their link love, hence, depending upon how much traffic they command, it may be some time before they link to you, particularly if your blog only has a few posts, which would be a reflection that you have more developing to do as a blogger to become recognized as a stable source of contribution.

But there is nothing wrong with poking around on the Internet today to start commenting on the websites of other bloggers to set the stage for some later opportunities!

And the best part is that in a number of cases, it’s quite EASY to get links from other bloggers who are NOT so high-profile, which is still very helpful to generating more traffic for you!

(See training video Driving Traffic Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle for a better understanding of this concept).

• 72% of bloggers are hobbyists and blog for fun.
• Of professional bloggers, only 10% blog 40 or more hours per week.
• 2/3 of professional bloggers are male, and 60% are between 18 – 44 years old.
• 74% of bloggers use Twitter, v. 14% of the general population. Their primary use of Twitter is to promote their blogs.

Here’s the link: 2009 State Of The Blogosphere: The Full BlogWorld Presentation.

Subdirectories

“Many of my company’s clients need to add content to the root of their domain to build up the authority necessary to compete for keywords. So, more often than not, we recommend that our clients add their blog to a subdirectory.”

Subdomains

Technical reasons (primarily involving compatibility issues) and even internal security reasons may warrant the placement of a blog on a separate subdomain.

Separate Domains

“Obviously, if you’re clever, you can create a blog that is seen as just liking one Web site so much that it links to it pretty often (and manage to use just the right mix of keywords in the anchor text to those links), as to help select pages of this other “non-related commercial Web site” rank well for keywords of choice. This can be an effective strategy, but keep in mind this blog will need all of the love and attention that any SEO project would get.”

Read the entire article by clicking on Blogging for Search Engine Optimization.

Twitter has become such a phenom in the tech world, and a darling in the media world, that it has eclipsed and dwarfed the other micro blogging platforms.

Michael Grey wrote a comparative analysis aptly titled, 5 Micro Blogging Sites That Aren’t Twitter (link below), that sheds light on some of the lesser known free services (compared to Twitter), and also includes notes about their search engine optimization usefulness.

Posterous: Micro Blogging platform that allows users to update Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, Picasa, WordPress, Facebook and a handful of others social media sites.

FriendFeed: This micro blogging aggregator is somewhat of a reverse Posterous, in that users can receive yours, and other, social media information into one stream, including tweets from Twitter, links from StumbleUpon, pictures from Flickr, Facebook updates, Blogger posts, and so on.  Although not mentioned in the article, the big news this week is that FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook, which will likely mean there will be more integration of FF technology directly into the mighty FB.

Tumblr: Like Posterous this micro blogging platform allows users to post text, pictures, video, audio, chat and links.

Dailybooth: Micro Blogging for pictures only.

12 Seconds: Micro Video Blogging (Make your videos 12 seconds or less).

Read the entire post for more information: 5 Microblogging Sites That Aren’t Twitter,

Literally “any” amount of traffic can be driven to your blog almost immediately – it just costs money. By using pay-per-click advertising, or online lead generation, or for that matter, any of the Ten Lead Generation Models, lots of traffic can be sent to your blog.

But a more important question is, “What’s it going to take to get those first-time readers back again?” Even with a large advertising budget, if you have to pay for each visitor to come only one time, then your costs may very well outpace your profits.

But what if you don’t have a large advertising budget?

Heck, for that matter, what if you only have a small budget?

Quality of Content

Regardless, even with “no” budget at all, an answer to what it takes to get visitors to become repeat readers can be summed up by analyzing your own interaction with all the blogs you come in contact with as compared to the ones you continue to keep reading. What drives “you” to return to some of those blogs and not others?

The details will vary from person to person, but the underlying answer is the same:  Quality of content.

Which begs the question, just how good is YOUR content?

If the content you are providing is “unique” and “valuable” enough, readers will return.  But before you assert that what you are writing is truly unique, you must really confront how valuable it is, from the perspective of your visitors.

Unless you are a celebrity, or known as an expert in a particular field, if you are simply writing about yourself and/or your views on a subject, that may not be “valuable” enough – especially if there are lots of others doing the same.

So, what if you are not a celebrity, or a well-known expert in an area, does that mean you shouldn’t blog?

In a word, “No.”

As noted in Content Creation and The Trust Factor:

“No one else has your viewpoint, your humor, and your personality, which includes the way you present things.”

Having said that, you still need something to present, that people want to know about.

So, if you can use your unique voice to convey things that potential readers want to know about, then you’re at least on the path to developing an expanding readership.

Successful Blog Fundamentals:

Here are a few additional fundamentals:

♦ Your blog needs to revolve around a defined subject that people want to know about.

♦ If you are also able to publish new and/or unique research about that subject, that’s one way to grab readers.

♦ Or, if you know your subject so well, so that you can provide an ongoing and updated industry perspective, that’s another way to keep interested readers.

♦ The preceding points are easier to identify and articulate.  But if you are able to exercise your knowledge, creativity, and experience to provide something else that is desired by those interested in the subject of your blog, that could be a powerful magnet for increased readers.  Although the following is by no means a complete list, such material could include:

• an online tool, or
• downloadable software, or
• a remarkable video, or
• compelling survey results, or
• ANYTHING at all that would be valuable to your readers and potential readers.

♦ For most successful blogs, there is also a quantitative factor, in addition to the qualitative ones. You will need enough content (read “lots”) to engage your readers on a repetitive basis, and to establish your blog as a resource for your readers. As a general rule of thumb, it could be stated that your blog hasn’t really gotten itself established until there have been 100 posts published. (NOTE: There are exceptions….) Additionally, the more content that your blog has, the more reasons search engines have to bring it traffic.

Here is some additional reading for increasing readership to your blog:

♠ 3 Real-World Blogging Tips for Success

♠ Generating Free Traffic with Blogs

♠ Writers as Publishers

♠ More About Keywords: How to Rank Fast!

Speaking of keywords, learning the basics of search engine optimization is a factor to help your content be readily understood by the search engines, which will result in more traffic and more readers.

What are the three most important things you’ve done to help you build your blog — to build subscriptions, inbound links, and recommendations from other bloggers?

a. Great content that is designed to spread.
b. An understanding of how social media works and changes.
c. Real relationships with those who can help get the word out.

How should bloggers balance the desire for a broad audience with the need to focus on a specific topic? Too specific, and your audience is limited; too broad, and you’ll have few original insights to offer.

It’s true that being too specific can hurt you, but only in the extreme. A strong focused niche audience will prove more valuable than a general unfocused audience of larger size. One shouldn’t water things down as far as subject matter or personality just to attract a larger audience.

Marketers are very concerned with the quality of the traffic on their site. What can you do as a business blogger to make sure you have quality traffic?

Stay on topic. Find a way to make your content sexy AND on point rather than going off track to attract traffic that is ultimately worthless.

Many bloggers deliberately post controversial opinions in order to gain attention. Is this a good strategy for a small business blogger?

I think positioning yourself so that some will love you and others will ignore you or even dislike you is smart. If you stand for something strongly, that will naturally happen. And if you do that, you don’t have to purposefully be controversial. Often bloggers attract the wrong kind of audience when they purposefully try to be controversial in an opportunistic way. Stand for what you believe in and don’t back down, and things will naturally happen without being ugly.

Business bloggers need to get value out of their blog. What’s the best way to get this value — and to measure it?

Sell something and count how much money you make. ;-)

(Click the following link to read the entire interview with Copyblogger Founder, Brian Clark)

Here are a few random notes from the 50-min video:

♦ Tim blogs not for income, but as a way to gain access to people and resources.

♦ Although he has a successful book (The 4 Hour Workweek), Tim says that the blog has helped his book, far more than the book has helped his blog.

♦ He found that by changing his “Categories” title to “Topics,” it increased traffic.

♦ Although he promotes his RSS with “7 Reasons to Subscribe,” he considers that promoting RSS pushes people away from the blog, which is particularly important for anyone who relies on advertisements on their blog.

♦ He controls the displays of dates on his blog by allowing them to appear on the home page (at the bottom) but not on the permalinks.

♦ He publishes “total read” time at the top of his posts. Although, for longer posts, he publishes “total bolded reading time,” which would be the time it takes to read the bolded portions of the post. (About 350 words a minute)

♦ Tim uses twitter for polling, quick research and feeding it back to his followers, but in general, minimizes the time he spends on Twitter.

♦ In terms of advertising, he considers Stumbleupon to be the least expensive source of good traffic.

♦ He posts “Comment Rules” and deletes all bad stuff from comments.

♦ Tim finds that about 10% of comments serve as the basis of future posts.

♦ Having a “voice,” and personality is more important than your writing skills.

♦ His general philosophy is to have fun, create a life you enjoy, and spend time with people you enjoy.

Regardless that searchers and visitors may, or may not, even recognize or care that their search results are made available via blogs, it’s important to the publisher of the blog to get his/her content made as widely available as possible.

Blogs are more and more likely to be the platform that delivers results to searchers, because blog content is typically newer (than a regular website), and search engines have a purpose to deliver the most relevant information to searchers, which can include how fresh the information is.

Blog Metrics

If you examine the metrics of most blogs, 65-95% are first-time visitors, which reflects that search engines are driving NEW visitors to your blog.

Additionally, by looking at blog analytics, which show (among many other things), which posts are the most visited, you will find that the search engines are driving more traffic to internal pages with content relative to what those searchers were looking for, as opposed to the home page.

Blog SEO Point #1

A simple way to increase the likelihood of those searchers finding your blog posts is via search engine optimization (SEO), which is really about making your blog posts more easy to understand for the search engines.

Although the subject of SEO is vastly more involved than the following point #1, just using relevant keywords in the titles and, to a lesser extent, in the headings of your posts are a simple way to clearly designate what the post is about.

Although this may seem intuitive, without an awareness of the importance of keywords one could have the idea that just making a title interesting or eye-catching (without taking into account keywords), or too succinct, may be a good practice.

For example, if you were to write an article about real estate, and title the article “Upcoming Trends,” that would not be a sufficient keyword friendly title and search engines would not be able to interpret that title effectively.  However, if your were to title the post “Upcoming Trends in Southern California Real Estate,” that would be much more informative to search engines AND to potential readers looking for such info.

Recency and Frequency of Blog Posting

In addition to the “recency” of blog content (the newness), as well as the use of keywords in titles, another factor that can make your content more relevant to search engines is how frequently your blog is updated.

A blog with daily updates, or at least weekly updates, is viewed more relevant than a website that updates once a year.

When you consider that a general rule of thumb for an average website conversion is between 1-2%, it becomes all the more obvious that generating as much traffic as possible, or making it as easy as possible for the search engines to deliver your content, becomes an important point.

Blogs as the Hub of Your Social Media Activities

Finally, another factor in driving traffic to your website, which is completely independent of search engines, is linking social media channels to your blog.  Stated another way, if you are participating in social media networks, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and any of the endless other social media channels, they are very likely already delivering traffic to your blog.

Your blog should be viewed as the hub of all your online social activities and the final measure of all your online activities leading up to lead generation and sales.

Writing a blog, you might think, would be an attractive option for writers of every persuasion. As evidenced by all the blogs in the world, and the many new ones that come online daily, that appears to be true:  But not every writer is a blogger.

Since blogging is more than writing and since the online world does not represent the traditional media that may have gained the attention of some writers for the majority of their lives, it has still not been embraced by some.

One way I represent blogging to such writers is to differentiate the activity of blogging from the purpose of writing. That might seem counter-intuitive, since blogging primarily IS writing.

But the differentiating feature can be emphasized by that little button that is clicked for every post which says “publish.”

One could argue that clicking a button does not truly warrant the distinction of being a “publisher” in the traditional sense of the word – and it’s not.

The American Heritage Dictionary describes a publisher as, “One that is engaged in publishing printed material.”

Of course the “printed” material, in the case of blogging, is completely bypassed to publish online, so a modern publisher is certainly differentiated from a traditional publisher of books, magazines and newspapers through the ease of that “publish” button.

Regardless, it would serve a writer better to consider him or herself as a publisher, instead of a writer.

Here are some additional responsibilities to consider when transitioning from writing to publishing:

• Deciding whether to display advertisements, or not
• Building readership
• Marketing one’s blog
• The presentation of one’s blog
• Developing other forms of monetization (or not)

By establishing greater responsibility for the process of getting one’s written work conveyed to others, one is more effectively completing the purpose of why a writer is setting ideas to words in the first place.

Regardless of any mental hurdles that might need to be overcome by some writers, to commit attention to learning a few simple technical things (blogging really is pretty simple), the advantage of thinking oneself as a “publisher” in addition to, or instead of a “writer,” represents a fundamental opportunity never before generally available to writers.

Blogs and social media are the greatest opportunity for writers that has ever existed, in terms of exerting control over one’s own connections to readers.

Although I have been continually amazed over the years at the development that goes into making WordPress easier to use, this 2.8 beta version had me laughing out loud in delight when I encountered the new ways that “Themes” and “Plugins” can be explored and installed – from “within” the WordPress admin area.   This just makes it all the easier to continually upgrade and refine a Wordress website.

Rand Fishkin, at SEOmoz, discusses how to gain more visitors and readers through the best positioning for your blog.

Not sure what a blog is? Click What Is A Blog for a simple overview and to learn a little about how they can help generate more traffic for you.

Although there are totally free blogging platforms, such as Blogger.com and WordPress.com, a professional blog with your own website name is the best way to present yourself to the world.

Blogger.com and WordPress.com are hosted on their own computers, which means you don’t need to download any software or buy your own website name. That’s the good news.  However, in these examples, the website name you would have would also include their website name, such as www.yourname.wordpress.com, which is not very professional.

The good news is that WordPress has an additional way to use their service – and it’s also free! Well, at least the software is free. The free software available at WordPress.org (note the “.org” to differentiate it from their “.com” service) is the best professional blogging platform available and you would use your own website name.

However, the downside is that there’s a separate blogging database to install, which is necessary for the WordPress software to operate. Installing the database and software is not terribly difficult, but if you’re not accustomed to this kind of stuff, it’s something else to learn. On the other hand, some website hosting services will walk you through the installation so it can be accomplished pretty easily.

Furthermore, although the WordPress software and database are free, you will need to spend some money for two additional things, which, all together, result in the least expensive promotional media available:

a) A website name costs less than $10.00/yr

b) A web hosting service cost less than $10/month (where the software and database exist on the Internet)

Also, some hosting services combine both of these items into one service.  In other words, you pay for monthly hosting and they give you a website name at no cost.

By the way, if you want to see how a blog fits into an online business, click Outline for Generating an Online Business and see point 3 for more info.

The Amazon Kindle is a wireless, portable reading device. It has an electronic-paper display that provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper and is designed for reading books, and now blogs. The first device was released in the United States on November 19, 2007

Kindle hardware devices can be used without a computer and its wireless connectivity enables users to shop the Kindle Store directly for ebooks and blogs that users would like to read.

In addition to expanding your readership through this service, you can even make a little extra money from Kindle readers of your blog (Amazon sets the price). Here is what is says over at the Amazon Kindle Help section:

“You will get paid 30% of the monthly blog subscription price for every subscriber to your blog.”

Click here to register your blog for Amazon Kindle.

Here is how Google describes their blog search:

“Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves.”

What’s the Best Price for a Blog to Rocket YOUR Marketing Performance?

How about FREE?

But which free blog do you want?

Enter your name and email below (in the yellow box) and click “SUBMIT” to read A STORY OF TWO BLOGS, AND HOW YOUR LIFE WAS CHANGED ON DECEMBER 11, 2008, to determine which one is right for you.

The story is rated “G” for general audiences, but it does include otherwise friendly people with sharp sticks, chocolate and beer, in addition to mean and nasty monsters.

Name:
Email:

That’s a good question.

And it’s a question that may apply to others. How about you?

• Part of the answer certainly includes knowing your subject well, but that may not be enough, since there are likely many others that know the same subject just as well, and perhaps know the subject even better.
• Publishing new research on the subject could provide an important contribution to one’s industry, if you’re in a position to provide that.
• Simply commenting on current trends and topics is a popular way to create content.

However, the most valuable thing you have to offer is the one thing that nobody else has: No one else has your viewpoint, your humor, and your personality, which includes the way you present things.

The way you communicate, the way you connect to people, the way you provide examples, or your analogies, or in whatever ways you can help others to understand things that they are looking to resolve: these things are uniquely you.

Just presenting information in a more easily understood form, or in a way that is more real to a reader, can make connections that establish trust.

A trust factor is established simply by helping people. If you happen to be the one that helped someone at the right time, with the right information, communicated in the right way, it doesn’t matter if you are the most knowledgeable or not. You established trust, and your voice matters.

So, rather than focus on all the stuff that is already out there, just focus on the value you can bring to the conversation.

How can you help others?

BuddyPress will allow the creation of a Social Network environment around a multi-user installation of WordPress, which will offer a great way to create small-scale networks around niche areas of interest.

Matt calls it “Facebook-in-a-box”.