How To Get More Traffic For Your Blog – The Ultimate Guide [UPDATED]

So, you want to know How To Get More Traffic For Your Blog? right?. Let's face it! just who exactly would say no to that!. 

But, 

Do you know what the absolute most important thing about getting traffic for your blog is?.

Clue: It is not Social Media, nor is it google or any other search engine!. It is something far more important than that!. It is something that very few so called "Internet Marketing Guru's"out there are teaching you!. 

Keep reading If you want to find out what this VIP thing is...and stay safe and unaffected from algorithm updates forever!. 

But first, while I reveal that well kept secret let's discuss some awesome traffic generation and growth hacking secrets!. 

How To Boost Blog Traffic By Using Social Media

The Rise Of Social Media

The advent of social media and the various social sites is nothing new, neither is their use to drive traffic to blogs and websites by means of cost free methods. 

The growth of social media networks and platforms and their use by online businesses has been the biggest game changer and challenge to search engines as a method for the general public to find websites in recent years. 

It is the growth of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and the Video Sharing Platform YouTube have brought about whole new streams of traffic to bring visitors to your site.

They have also, in my own belief, brought about a whole new way of doing business and added in, rather developed a third business model away from the regular and traditional Business To Business and Business To Commerce models. 

And this newly and naturally developed third business model is Person To Person. 

Society and people today are far more comfortable doing business on a P2P basis. This is also thanks in kind to the rise in blogging and the added element of social media and social media influencers. 

In its very simplistic form Person To Person business online is simply when some one buys a product, be it your own, that of a third party, based on your recommendation. 

People have tendency to trust people much more than cold faced corporations. And those Big businesses have been catching on to this quickly!.

This is the very reason as to why they jump on the bandwagon and hire social media influencers. They, the big businesses,  most certainly recognise that aligning their brand and/or products with influential people will help them to pull in more sales. 

Sports companies have been doing it for decades now by latching on to Superstars like David Beckham, Michael Schumaker, Leo Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo's and Michael Jordan's of the world. 

This is exactly why your very first efforts and your focus should always be on your brand and establishing your brand. 

Because as a blogger this is exactly what you are.

An Influencer!.

And  a self employed one at that!. Because us blogger are the original influencers, long before social media was invented, way way way before Mark Zukerberg had his big idea, us bloggers were blogging away to targeted audiences, aligning ourselves with certain brands, recommending products and getting paid lovely commissions for it too!. 

Because You Know There Is More Money To Be Made Blogging!. The Question Is Will You Take The Money!?!​​​​​

 Thus the very first step in maximising your traffic potential with Social Media, the general public and search engines is to establish your brand. 

And trust me on this, brand awareness goes a long, long long way to pulling in the very best possible traffic! 

Direct "typed in to the address bar" traffic!. 

Your visitors have been aware of your brand, your website address, remembered it and entered it directly into the address bar and arrived at your site. And that was all down to your hard work in establishing your brand. 

How To Build And Establish Your Brand

Building and establishing your brand is the accumulation of, at times, years and years of consistently working hard building your site, promoting it, and maintaining a consistently high quality of work and marketing efforts. 

All that starts, or should start from the very first day that you launch your site. If you have not already, now is the best day!.

With your brand strategy you will need to consider a whole variety of aspects which will then need to be fully congruent, aligned and in harmony with the branding strategy for your blog

Things To Consider:

• Your logo, brand name and identity
• The positioning of your brand. 
• You Message, your slogan. 
• Forms and methods of marketing. 
• Your website and its design. 
• The content of your site. 
• Your social media presence. 
• The humanisation of your brand.
• The Quality of Your Products, Quality Of The products That You Recommend (i.e aligning yourself with well known quality products and brands)

​Your logo should be well designed, clean and in my opinion simplistic as these have a tendency of standing out much better and being better remembered. 

Your brand name should be one that is easy to remember, like BloggersHQ! The Head Quarters For Bloggers!. It is short, sweet and easy to remember. Similar is to be said for your slogan. 

That, yes is one of my slogans, another is what I sign off on all Posts with "To your success and Blogging best". 

Now the positioning of your brand, is wholly dependent on what you want to achieve and who your audience is and who you are targeting.

If you are targeting high end clients you most certainly want to position yourself as, a, or the market leader in your sector and be classy and of top quality. 

Targeting lower end clients and market sector like the supermarket chain "costco" does does not require any fancy marketing, advertising or positioning of your brand. 

Positioning your brand is simply getting yourself out there in front of and appealing to your ideal target audience. 

The Humanisation of your brand is something that is very easy and very natural to do for bloggers of any and all niches. 

Instead of appearing as a cold face corporation, add in human elements that are sprinkled over your site, in your content add in and share stories that are relevant to your own experiences, funny stories.

The use of YouTube, a great source of high quality traffic is an excellent medium for humanising your brand. Appearing in your videos is better and creates more warmth, trust and connection with your audience. 

Podcasting is pretty good for humanising your brand also, and very much is something that I absolutely recommend that you do. Putting yourself out there and getting your face seen and voice heard goes a long way in creating that human touch to your site and business. 

Which brings us to Social media. 

Keep your branding strong and consistent across all social media channels that you use, your link, logo, slogan and images used being the same this all great for brand recognition and your audience getting used to to seeing your brand and becoming familiar with it. 

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One of the main reason for establishing a brand is the fact that Google does have its way of being able to tell is a website is a regular website or if it is a brand. 

And they set brands and regular websites apart for better ranking purposes. 

Now let's crack on with How To Get More Traffic For Your Blog by using social media. 

How To Get More Traffic for Your Blog With Twitter

Twitter might not be as dashing and fashionable as it once was and it is most certainly a site that you should NOT ignore. 

Hell no way! 

Twitter is very much for "Live" traffic, instant hits which very quickly lets you know if what you are doing is working or neesd tweaking or optimising straight away. Other social sites and traffic generation methods take weeks, or months of collation of data. 

But with a reasonable sized account with thousands of followers that is. 

Twitter, lets get this straight, because it does not have billions of monthly users it does not mean that it is unpopular..approximately 350 million months users of which 70 million are from the United State makes it still a popular social site. 

Why do I like twitter?

• Traffic is instant! 
• Very easy to grow your twitter account. 
• Traffic is Targeted towards you audience when you build it right
• You can get long term traffic if you do it right. 
• Twitter users tend to have money to spend. On my twitter account the average salary is $75,000 a year according to Twitter Analytics. 
• It is fun!.
• Twitter users are, in my experience very active and retweet a lot, signal that helps with SEO and thus more organic traffic also.  
• Twitter users tend to follow famous and well known and popular people in their area of interest, thus a big account will become a massive account very quickly!. 

• Growth Hacking Your Twitter Account For More Traffic

Growing your following on the micro blogging platform twitter is something that is very easy to do, and even when you are starting from a fresh account with no followers at all!. 

However,

having just any follower is a huge massive big, screaming out loud "Nooooooo!" 

In order to get a targeted audience, and targeted traffic you need a targeted following. And doing this on twitter is pretty easy!.

It is really as simple as typing in relevant niche related search terms in your twitter account (as shown below) and finding popular accounts that have thousands or tens of thousands of followers. 

In the example above all I typed was the name of a niche (yoga) where indicated and then selected people. 

The highlighted account, has 1.5 million followers!

And since these followers are following an account dedicated to Yoga we can take an educated guess that they are interested in Yoga. 

Side Note: Note how very well branded those twitter accounts are. Beautiful! professional looking. You just know that you are going to get top quality info from those accounts right? See how exactly here how important branding is and how it can get you more followers and thus is importance and direct effect on traffic!. 

That is exactly why I give strong emphasis on branding. 

• Growing Your Followers On Twitter

Now that you have identified some targeted popular accounts on this social media site your next step is to follow them. 

The twittersphere and the twitter ecosphere functions very much as a "follow for a follow back".

Now that you are following users that have followed a popular niche related account and thus expressed an interest in the topic we know that we are building a following of twitter users that are targeted towards our niche. 

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Thus we are building a targeted audience on this platform and will get targeted and interested traffic Vs just anybody and everybody. 

There is a lot of good direct and indirect reasons for building an audience that is interested in your niche, most of which is related to getting quality traffic. 

Earning $3000 a month from say 30,000 visitors is much better than earning the same amount from 100,000 monthly visitors. 

Also, there are knock on benefits related to your SEO efforts. Better quality following will have a tendency to result in more social interactions when you tweet something related to your site or indeed from your site. 

Furthermore, you will get visitors that stay on site longer and click through to read more pages. and more return visitors. These are all good SEO signals that relate to a good user experience and an "uh.." signal to google and a bump up in the search engine rankings. 

Following those followers you can do this manually - definitely not advised! as it is far too time consuming. 

Much better is using known software. Personally I highly recommend the use of ​Tweepi.

It is a cloud based app that allows you to follow and unfollow hundreds of users en mass in about 2 minutes flat! 

(Seriously)

This app you can quite comfortably use the free version if you are bootstrapping your business and in all honesty you will be completely fine and good to go when it comes to growth hacking your twitter account. 

Obviously, the free version comes with its limitations and the premium version will help you to grow your account much faster in maybe half the time.

Going premium is definitely something to consider at some point, be it now or later. 

A few general rules that I have regarding who I follow or not follow!.

• Account must be in the English language
• Must be active within past 7 days.
• Must have at least 100 followers.
• Must havea  profile photo.
• Related to my niche

Accounts meeting those metrics tend to be more active and more a more targeted. The language aspect is obvious. I want that they understand my tweets and content.

Sure, someone can be multi-lingual like I am, but I like the assurance that their followers are more likely to speak English. Which brings me to the number of followers.

I like that the accounts that I follow have a healthy number of followers as it shows 1) they are likely to be active long term, 2) my tweet will be seen by many more people when they retweet it!.

The last two are simple quality related. An account with no photo, know as an egg, and is active with followers is more likely to be fake and a spam account thus low quality content in my twitter feed and unlikely to perform any social action other than tweeting their own stuff.

Also,

Likely to have fake or spammy followers. Accounts related to my niche, I have covered that already...quality targeted traffic!.

Because You Know You Can Build A Brilliant Blog And Drive Wild Traffic To It!. The Question Is: Will You Do it Or Will You Just Dream About It?

Growing You Twitter Account With Viral Content Bee

There are many methods to growing your twitter account and getting more traffic for your blog than just following users of popular related accounts.

Viral Content Bee is a free tool that I have used for years not just to grow my account but to find and post out curated content that keeps my followers happy and not inundated or bored with me just harping on about my stuff and posting my links. 

This, just to mention it, is my own strategy for getting social traffic and yes getting known in the industry. I share more of other folks content than my own. I only post about 20% of the time my own stuff. 

The remainder, is curated content that I have found on Viral Content Bee or a Similar app. This helps to keep up my exposure, retweet rate and have my audience pre-conditioned, psychologically speaking, to receiving high quality content. 

There are no competitors in your industry, only relationships to build in which you can leverage later when you need it.  The internet pie is big enough for us all to share and enjoy your slice of. 

Besides, if you are being greedy, and acting in a manner of scarcity and not sharing other peoples content how do you expect others in your industry or related industries to share yours? 

As the saying goes, you only get what you give!. So give a lot!.

And when you do give a lot and share a lot using Viral Content Bee, I tend to get a lot of retweets, and likes, and that, thanks to MY sharing of OTHER peoples content gets me new TARGETED followers. 

Those are followers I would have not other wise gotten had I not shared content from my fellow peers. 

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• Getting More Traffic Using Viral Content Bee

As the very name suggests, this app is for much more than growing your twitter following, this is a nice "extra" a good side effect if you wish. 

Plus it does save you hours of searching for content to share. What this app is for is getting your own content shared by other human users. No bots, no fake accounts, just genuine and authentic members of the site sharing each others content. 

It is rather limited though, limited in the fact that it works only for Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr and Linked In These are currently the only popular ones being used.

It works on a credit points basis. 

You build up credits by first sharing other member's content. How much credit you get depends on the size of your account and following. 

Approximately for every 5000 twitter followers you will get 1 credit point for each tweet that you share and about 500 pinterest followers will earn you 1 point for each repin that you make using their dashboard.

Thus a Twitter account with 20,000 followers will earn you 4 credits for each retweet that you make on Viral Content Bee, and 2,000 Pinterest Followers will earn you 4 credits for each repin that you do.

When you order retweet and repins using this App you can only use a maximum of 30 credits at a time, which is enough to get around 7 retweets or repins from reasonable sized accounts.

Or of course, that could end up being 30 tweets or 30 repins from much smaller accounts. This something that neither you or they have control over.

It is the natural flow of human traffic and those using the community and the size of the accounts of those sharing your content.

Viral Content Bee is most certainly something to have and use as a weapon in your social traffic generation arsenal. Simply because it is free, almost effortless and gets authentic human social actions on your content. 

Which, as discussed, are good indicators for a bump in the search engines. Also, it its functional for a number of social sites.

Personally, my advice, if you are starting out or your site is new, get on this app straight away and spend a few minutes, half an hour retweeting and repinning and setting them up to go out automatically and scheduled using the buffer function.

The buffer I send is set out to repost something every 15 mins, thus every 15 minutes I earn some credits for use later for when I need them. 

In fact, when I first started, I went wild for one hour a day for 4 months setting up retweets and repins to go out as scheduled every 15 minutes earning me way more than enough credits to keep me going for the rest of the year and the scheduled posts a few months in advance so I can chill out and forget about it altogether and work on something else for that hour!.

Because You know driving traffic to your site is the easy part. The question is: Do you really know how to make money from it?

There is software and apps out there that allow you to automatically send out or tweet out and automated welcome tweet which can be prewritten to contain whatever you like. 

They tend to look a little like this, and perhaps you have seen them before many times. 

"Hi @Usename, Thank you kindly for following me, I see you are interested in XYZ Niche do check out my site here +link"

Although on the face of it this might look really cool and like a brilliant idea. The problem is the quality of the traffic and the spammy aspect of such messages. I am very much a strong proponent of good strong branding. 

Spamming in this way is detracting from your brand image. If, and when you what excellently branded social accounts people who follow you will likely click the link in your bio to check out your site on their own, or perhaps already have done so. 

Other examples of automatically generated welcome tweets include something like:

"Hey @Username, Thank you folllowing me on Twitter, we are also present on other social sites check out our interactive Facebook Group here where we discuss a variety of topics.."

On the face of it, this is actually a great tweet to set to go out frequently. There is nothing wrong with cross promoting the awareness of your site on various platforms and building your social presence and audience this way. 

But, 

As a welcome tweet, or a welcome message it is far too early and a bit pushy, besides you want to have a balance of social activity across all platforms and not be dependent on one particular social media site. 

Beside, some folks, like me might just not like facebook all that much and prefer twitter and to immdiately push your facebook group in to their faces is a bit strong. 

If they see a tweet, that you send out frequently, they can choose to ignore it if they wish or they can join you on the other platform that you mentioned. 

It is all about being prestigious in your marketing efforts and putting your best foot forward as a quality brand and using quality marketing techniques. 

A very good and unknown technique for gaining more followers is to check your twitter analytics and see what content of yours (and others) is getting more retweets and well, send a similar tweet. 

This might not seem like building your audience but, it is getting your content out there in front of your audiences eyes and the eyes of your audience's audience thanks to the retweets, and thus could bring in a few more organic and natural followers. 

Also, a lovely ninja trick is to see who your most followed follower is and go geek out on the account!. Examine it...do a post mortem of their account! what do they tweet..and when?...what do they like?

Go a step further and go google and facebook them see if you can find them, get more info about them and...specifically create tweets @mention in them with a specific aim of getting their attention and, hopefully a retweet!...to their massive audience! 

• The Use Of Images On Twitter

Use images in your tweets, brand them and make them beautiful well designed graphics if possibe. You can use canva, the free version is cool enough.

There is no need to be all Picasso and fancy pants, just eye catching and attractive, and with your logo in places where it can be seen!. 

You can use Video also. The particular reason for using Images and video in your tweets is the very fact that they take up so much space in the twitter feed and really help to get your content out there, to get you seen!.

They really do help to get your stuff out there in front of twitter users eyes and gain up to 3x more clicks than tweets without images or video. 

• How Many Hash Tags Should You Use On Twitter?

The number of hash tags that you use has a direct effect on the engagement of your tweets. Naturally speaking, you, like myself, might be inclined to think "the more the merrier". 

You know, 

The more hash tags the better!. 

Wrong!. 

Nothing could be further from the truth! Seriously. Less is more! Studies have been conducted on hundreds of thousands of tweets to show that the optimal number of tweets is....

*Drum roll*

Just one or two!. In fact, further analysis indicated the optimal number of characters in hash tags that got the most engagement was 18 characters long or less. 

Using any old hash tag or, just putting the # symbol in front of a word and hopping for the best is not going to get you the ideal or optimal engagement. At best this approach is guess work, hitting and hoping for the best. 

When it comes to getting more traffic for your blog in regards to your marketing efforts you have to also get the right tags. 

And for that you should hop on over and check out the appropriately named Rite Tag website.

Rite tag shows the tag data on an hourly basis for the number of tweet, retweets and how many see the tag in their twitter feed. 

Picking the best hash tag is not always the one with the most views or the most tweets or retweets...

Although this is a good indication, a high number of tweets and retweets can reduce the exposure for your tweet as it quickly gets pushed down on the twitter feed. I tend to look for double figure tweets and retweets as maximum and as many views as possible. 

For the list of hash tags above, #Workout and #Meditation are good options. Note these are hash tags to use to get your tweet seen now!. 

Because You Know You Can Make It As World Class Niche Site Marketer. The Question Is: Will You Work Hard And Take The Money?!?

The App rite tag also shows us some excellent hash tags that will help your tweeting efforts to be seen over a longer period of time. 

Thus you will want to take advantage of those tweets and send out a few tweet targeting short term hash tags and few tweets targeting long term ones in order to get the very best out of what traffic you can get both short and long term on twitter. 

In the example above, If I was running a Yoga site, I'd be selcting any two from the three above as they are more targeted than the others due to containing the word Yoga and they get sufficient number of views per hour to justify their use. 

Best part there is no need nor requirement for you to get premium on Rite Tag, the free version will give you all the information that I have show above!

Getting Traffic With Pinterest

Pinterest, like Twitter might not be hip and fashionable or cool and trendy. But ignore Pinterest at your own pearl!. 

With 250 million active users it is smaller than Twitter and significantly smaller than Facebook. 

But, 

Pinterest users earn an average $125,000 per year and are 2x more likely to make a buying decision when compared to Facebook users. 

And that is the very reason, or one of the very reasons as to  why you should not ignore Pinterest.

Another such reason is the quality of traffic, and I am not just talking buyer related traffic here, I am talking about the good user experience generated by Pinterest users which has additional positive benefits for your SEO efforts. 

Also, Pinterest is a search engine that functions using Jquery. You pins, if well optimised with "Pinterest SEO" will hang there on your boards, and on other folks boards if they repin them, pulling you in traffic for month and even years!. 

And that is pretty awesome. A continued stream of traffic for something you did just one time. 

• Optimising Your Pinterest Profile For Traffic. 

Obviously, you, like myself want to get the very best out of your Pinterest account and squeeze the absolute most possible traffic from it with the least amount of effort.

Right?

That involves setting you account up the right way. Straight out, you want to have a Business account. The reason for this is that currently, a business account allows you have what is called "rich pins" and a personal account doesn't. 

Rich pins are a special feature that contain a little extra amount of information on the pins that are related to the article and your site. They also save you a bit of time also. 

I very much recommend that you select Brand as your business type. The principle reason being is that you are aiming to establish yourself long term as a brand and of course to get search engines like google to recognise you as one. 

When it comes to choosing your Business name in Pinterest I'd go for something related to the name of your blog and with the main industry search term related to what your blog is about. 

This is for recognition of your site name and for getting in a keyword after the hard stop (vertical line) as I have shown below "BloggerHQ | Blogging Tips"

The "BloggersHQ", name of my site and recognisable for regular visitors and the "Blogging Tips" is very much what my site is about and is a search term that helps Pinterest and Pinterest users to find my profile when searching for "Blogging Tips".

The URL name, keep that as close as possible to my website address, again for brand and website recognition. 

In the About you section add in your Blog Name, again for reasons of getting your brand and blog address out there and then after the hard stop use the main search terms that your blog and boards are going to be about. 

Again, this is to help Pinterest and Pinterest users to find your blog. 

Your next step is to claim your website. This is an absolute must do and is pretty simple. Just copy and paste the given code into the header of your blog. Very much in the same way in which you have perhaps, already done for your google webmaster tools (AKA Search Console) and Google Analytics. 

In about 24hrs Pinterest will have confirmed your website and you will have your blog address in your profile! 

• Enabling Rich Pins

Rich pins are certainly something that you should get enabled as the add in some extra information about your website and direct users of the social media site to your blog. 

When someone repins your pin with a regular pin they can alter and change the information and even where the pin directs traffic to. With Rich Pins enabled, this cannot happen as they "pull" the information from the originating website. 

And thus, with rich pins enabled you can gain more traffic for your efforts as you know that the description and meta data and information will always remain the same and will link back to your site.  

There are plenty of and absolutely no shortage of website and videos showing you how to enable rich pins while using Yoaste SEO plugin for WordPress powered blogs. 

Unfortunately, I, like many others just don't like or use that plugin. I have a preference for the All In One SEO Plugin. 

The very first step is to head on over to your WordPress dashboard. look for the all in one SEO plugin on the right hand side, near the top flick feature manager and activate the Social Meta, like I have already done (see Below)

Then you will be able to see your social meta activated beneath the feature manager, give that a click and the scroll down until You see "Social profile links".

In that box enter your Pinterest URL into the box as show below. 

Note: Never change your Pinterest URL, if you do, you will have to change it in your All In One SEO also.

Below, where it says person or organisation. Select what is most appropriate for you. I have selected person as it is the best option for now and has no baring on my ability to establish my brand or not. 

The Associated name, here is an opportunity for branding. I associate here the name of my site, for branding recognition and Blogging Tips as it is what I want the site to be known for and it is a keyword that will help Pinterest and Pinterest users to find my Pins. 

This is what will be displayed for my Pins when using Rich Pins. 

Now, all that is left for you do to is to click save and then validate your rich pins. Thankfully this is as simple as heading over to the rich pins validator on Pinterest and entering in a URL from your and clicking the validate button. 

If you have followed my instructions you should see something like this (see below). And your rich pins will be enabled right away. 

Because you need no validation to become the king pin in your niche: The question is Are You Building your Blog the right way for Sustainable success?!?

I hope you followed that easily enough as enabling rich pins and getting your profile set up right and properly optimised will set you way ahead of 90% of Pinterest users that are not doing this. 

Seriously, don't wait or hesitate when it comes to rich pins. Get on it for your very first pin like I have!. 

• Optimising Your Pinterest Boards.

Optimising your profile and your boards as well as your pins is what is going to set you apart from other sites and accounts and help you to get much more pinterest traffic. 

And, 

I mentioned previously, these users make more buyer related decisions that any other social media. . 

You Pinterest Boards are something that you should optimise and set up very much like you would categories on your blog. 

For example a blog about Blogging Tips could have boards about "SEO" "Traffic generation" "Niches" "Keyword Research". In short where you have categories on your blog you would make a board on Pinterest. 

And on those boards, where you post all things related to that category. You can, in theory (and practice) have one board for an entire niche and cover different niches this way. 

I have a preference to divide boards by topics related to my main niche. 

Your boards, you should name them using Keywords, you can use keywords generated by Pinterest or your own. This is entirely up to you. I suggest that you use ones generated by Pinterest. 

For example have a look at what Pinterest brings up for a search of "Blogging Tips".

On your boards you certainly should use 2 or 3 keywords in the description and hash tags that are related to the main keyword for the board.

This is simply to give the Pinterest Search Engine a helping hand to find your boards and to determine what they are about. Don't go out there keyword stuffing! Pinterest has it's way of telling if you are stuffing in Keywords!. 

It also help users of the social site to find your boards. 

• Featured Boards

Naturally speaking you should take advantage of the featured boards facility.

Personally, I am of the school of thought that here you should wait a little bit and see what your more popular boards are and then add those as featured boards to drive even more traffic to your site. 

• Taking Advantage Of Group Boards To Get More Traffic! 

Creating group boards and participating in them is a fabulous way to growth hack your way to a crazy amount of Pinterest Followers, dramatically increase the number of repins that you get and quite literally put your pinterest efforts on autopilot!. 

They have have the beautiful effect of increasing your engagement level and if done well a whole bunch of new fans (followers) and brand ambassadors!. 

That all spells out "Winner!" so make good use of Group Boards!. 

• Naming Your Pins

When it comes to naming your pins you ought to, where possible, name them with Keywords that best describe what the pin and Article is about. With Rich Pins this is something that Is Auto Generated from your Meta Tags. 

The same can be said of the pins description. Use Keywords where possible and put in that little bit for effort in helping people to find your pins and thus your site. Again, with rich pins, this is autogenerated. 

Time saver!.

If you can, still add in some hash tags that describe the image, what your article is about and a keyword or two. 

If you put in the effort and set up your Pinterest profile and account as well as your boards and pins, enable rich pins you are most definitely going to be head and shoulders above the masses and have your Pins and boards primed to get more traffic. 

Because you know you can make more money with your blog. The question is: Will You make the effort to grow your site?!?

• Growing Your Pinterest Account

Once you have properly optimised your account your next step to Getting more traffic to your blog from Pinterest is to grow your following. 

Growing your following on Pinterest is very much the same as Twitter. Find popular pinners in your niche and follow their followers. 

This is best done with the downloadable software Ninja Pinner. Approximately speaking, starting from zero you can expect to grow by an average of 2,500 targeted followers per month using this method alone. 

Combining the above methods of fully optimising your account and pinning in group boards and inviting active influencers to pin in your own group boards only aids your growth exponentially. 

Don't forget though to unfollow those that are not following you back after about a week. 

Ninja Pinner is something I use to run in the background while I am working away, like I am right now, or have it running automatically following, pinning, repinning, commenting or unfollowing while I am fast asleep!. 

Obviously, the more people interested in your niche area following you the more will see your pins and more traffic generated. 

• Creating Content Specifically For Pinterest

Just as we use keyword research techniques for finding great content to rank for on search engines like Google, we should not ignore other search engines like Pinterest. 

And this is one of the big secret things that very few, if any, Internet marketing guru's are teaching you!. 

And that is becoming independent of google!. I, personally, lost a business or two because of being far too dependent on their traffic. They updated their algorithm and Boom! quite literally over night I lost a massive chunk of my income!. 

Boo- freaking-hoo! 

(you wont hear me crying about it!. Lesson learned..own your own traffic, we will get to that later!). 

So be warned, and forewarned is forearmed as they say!. Have a balanced source of traffic in the region of 40-30-30 percentage wise. 

• 40% Owned (Direct, Referral, email, Push notifications)
• 30% Social Media
• 30 % Search Engines

Getting that right, without completely ignoring search engines is hard work and takes time. One way is creating content specifically for Pinterest. 

Thankfully it is much easier than it sounds. 

Simply Head on over to Pinterest Perform a simple search of your niche as shown below for the Yoga niche.

Yoga, a popular niche, brings about plenty of suggested topics and ideas for what to create content for your site around with the aim of getting plenty Pinterest Traffic from. 

Lets dig deeper. Simply, in the following image I clicked the 4th from the left "For Back Pain" to make my Search "Yoga For Back Pain".

Lets see what results we get..

Now this is where the magic happens...

All you have to do is go through the pins one by one and take note of which ones get thousands of pins and repins! This is indicative of plenty Pinterest traffic. 

Just for the record, there is currently 7 thousand repins alone for the top two results. Given that most people don't or won't repin...that is a heck of a lot of traffic to one single article. 

That is how you do simple keyword or topic research using Pinterest. 

And when you perform a board search (above was a pin search) by just switching your selection of your search results to that of boards you will find a few related boards for you to pin in and get traffic from. 

The top board, "Yoga For Back Pain" currently has almost 4,000 followers!. Nice. 

• Getting More Clicks From Pinterest

Keep in mind that repins, although helpful and handy is not the end goal of your Pinterest efforts it is clicks through to your site and getting readers for your articles and yep..some other action such as leaving a comment, buying something or getting that email sign up!. 

Two of the principle ways of winning those clicks is by creating beautiful, relevant and attractive pins. Ones that do get a lot of traction are "How To's" lists and infographics. 

When you are making your pins leave that element of curiosity.

If you are writing about the "top 5 ways to do XYZ" don't show or mention those on the pin..maybe one or two and leave that element of curiosity so that the reader clicks on over to read your article. 

Curiosity didn't only kill the cat..it got the click!. 

That is one of the reasons I am not too much of a fan of infographics that reveal all or too much of the information as pins on Pinterest - there is no curiosity and no click to see the whole thing or to read the article. 

When all the info is revealed up front on a Pin, folks will repin it and save it for later but they won't really click through to your site and you won't get that traffic. 

Keep that in mind!. 

Get More Traffic By Growing Your Facebook Group

Let's face it!. It really was only a matter of time before I was going to mention the elephant in the room as far as getting more traffic from social media is concerned. 

Unfortunately, growing your facebook group is not as straight forward as doing the same for your facebook page.

I'll be honest with you here, facebook page is not something I am too concerned about. Sure, I have one, for branding purposes and letting google know that I am in fact a brand!. 

The main difference between the two is the communication method, a page is very much one way where as your group is two way deal!. The main benefit for us marketers of all niches is that facebook groups help us to grow our community. 

Having that brand loyal community by your side when an algorithm update from search engines goes against you will see you in good stead. 

Some Simple And Easy Ways To Grow Your Facebook Group. 

• Mention your Facebook group in your opening email or two inviting new subscribers to join you there. 

• Mention it on your About Us, Contact Page and thank you pages

• Pin A Tweet and update it regularly so it looks freshly pinned. 

• Create a Pin and use it as a featured pin on your Pinterest Account. 

• Have an attractive graphic on the side bar of your website linking to your Facebook Group

• Cross promote your FB group on social media

• Pin an attractive catchy pin about and to your Facebook group in Pinterest group boards that you own. 

• Post in other Facebook Groups about your group. Read the rules first!

• Make a few facebook live videos for your fan page, mention your facebook group in it and link to your group in the description and promote the video post to those who like similar pages.

Facebook live videos tend to hang in peoples news feed for about a week. Keep your videos interesting, catchy and relevant. An investment that definitely pays off! 

Because You know you deserve to make more money with your blog!. The Question is: Do you feel deserving of that extra money?!?

• Promote a simple post sharing your group on your fan page. When growing your community this is something that definitely pays off.

• Keep posting engaging content that interacts with your audience like questions, debates (Product A Vs Product B) and questions. 

• Create what is known as gateway content. Such example a downloadable freebie in which to get they must join your group to get

• Create YouTube Videos, or on your YT marketing efforts, do mention your group and have an annotation/card and link in the description about your group. 

• Add your group URL to your Instagram Bio. Traffic from instagram is not really the "sit and read content" or buy something. Rather than take bouncy or low on site time traffic to your site, take them to your Facebook group.

Facebook Groups have on average 15x more reach than a facebook fan page. Plus the content is crowd sourced - generated by the group members. Thus, when you get to a certain point, the tipping point it will grow on auto pilot!. 

Do keep a strong eye and iron fist on spam. Delete any and all spam. Do deal with spammers by private message and don't ban them right away. Give them a chance. 3 strikes and out!. 

A good tip here is to ask 3 questions that they person seeking to join has to answer. This will filter out some spammers and many bots that run on facebook groups these days. 

Once your group grows it can be come overwhelming and you might need to employ or better still, give someone the honoury prestigious title of group moderator. 

Facebook groups are a tremendous place and source for people to be talking about your brand, engaging and discussing relevant topic about your niche. It can and will enhance not only your traffic but your authority an a given niche and brand awareness. 

Growth hacking your facebook group with targeted interested followers is an absolute must!. 

Facebook may under go a few scandals here and there, and even some major ones such as the Cambridge Analytica debacle that ended with Mark Zukerberg appearing before congress!.

The sheer amount of users topped 2 billion and will in all probability top 3 and 4 billion in the coming years. 

Even if it doesn't. The massive amount of active users is a very difficult number to ignore!.

Facebook is still the king of social media! and Facebook groups is where you get people interacting and discussing your niche related topic and aware of your brand and site. 

Making it a pretty awesome source of traffic, and one that is impossible to ignore!.

Building and growing your traffic using the main 3 or 4 social media platforms is an absolutely great way of really exploding your traffic. 

Of course there are many more social sites than Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook Groups. In this section on social media I have chosen to show you these 3 platforms because I believe that they are the most effective both short and long term. 

Twitter, you can grow rather quickly and get pretty instant results for your efforts and it is ideal for bloggers to exploit!. 

Pinterest, despite it's use and reputation as an excellent social site, the actual functionality and use of J query really makes it more of a search engine and one that can really drive you a lot of purchase ready traffic!. Ignore that if you dare!

And Facebook Groups, adds the fabulous element of really building your audience and sending your brand awareness and customer loyalty into overdrive!. 

Now lets look at other ways of Getting more traffic for your blog!. 

Because you know that you can build and profit from building an amazing blog the right way!. The only question is: Are you going to take advantage of this opportunity or let it pass you by?

Thus, during your video, and in your description area, and in captions where possible and permitable, encourage viewers to interact with your video by sharing it, leaving a comment, telling you their opinion on a particular subject matter.

Even encouraging them to like or dislike your video is good. It is still interaction even if it is a dislike!. And do respond to every single comment made on your content and remove spam!. 

It is also good practice, and being very social if and when you comment on other videos and channels related to your niche. 

(it is also good outreach and relationship building, which you can leverage later!).

• Repurpose Existing Content!

The is absolutely no need for you to be scratching your head and struggling for what to create videos about at all!. You can simply repurpose your existing articles and make them into videos. 

If you have a small site, great! in zero time you can turn the majority of your articles into video content easily and quickly. If you have larger site, and also a very good starting point for all bloggers, is to start with your most popular posts traffic wise by having a look at your google analytics. 

And start ticking them off one by one!. 

A good starting point could also be to check off your most popular categories and go through the articles one by one creating content in a new video format!.

Other starting point include going through your most helpful "How To" "Top", "best" and review articles. 

• Get Into The Habit Of Making A Video For Every Article You Publish. 

Do get into this, once you publish an article, make it a habit, a must do thing that you absolutely can't miss out on to turn the article into a video. 

This is obviously going to aid you rather strongly in your content promotion and driving traffic to that particular article. 

This is actually what I do for every single site that I start. From the very beginning all my articles are turned into videos. There is a reason as why I get a lot of quick early sales!. 

• Brand Your Channel!

There I go again with the "B" word!. Branding your channel and looking professional will set you apart, look much more professional and win you more subscribers and views. 

These of course are subscribers that you can market to!. As I mentioned earlier in this article keep your branding consistent across all your social channels and on your website. 

This of course helps you to become instantly recognisable. Also, when the moment comes personalise your channel URL with your brand name (i.e YouTube .com/channel/YourBrand). 

Don't forget to add your social media details at the appropriate area for your Channel and anything else related to your branding such as your logo or slogan.

• Humanise Your Channel

This is actually following on from branding your channel. Do show up on your videos from time to time well dressed and looking awesome, as they say putting your best foot forward. 

You are after all representing your brand!. 

humanising your brand by appearing on video, which is not necessary for every single video if you are shy, it is great for bringing forward that human touch, appearing like a real life warm and trusting person. 

Which will help your crowd to connect to you, to associate to and with you on a deeper level. It is this that will win you more recognition, sales and repeat buyers thanks to the trust and emotional connection created. 

• Post And Promote Your Videos On Social Media

This really should be a huge massive obvious MUST DO once you are ready to publish your videos.

Getting your videos out there on Twitter, pinterest and to your Facebook Group is a great way of giving your followers and members content of a different, and refreshing format. 

Also, 

you will get more views, more social interaction which will aid in your ability to rank well on YouTube. Also, you might find that mentioning your site or facebook group (or other social channels) on your video will get more growth or visitors than cross promoting in a textual or graphical way. 

You will also expose your videos to a new audience and win more subscribers. 

Let's not forget, you can also embed your video on your blog inside an article!. 

• Use Custom Thumbnails

This one is a biggie, and darn easy to do. Use beautiful, catchy and relevant thumb nails that tell exactly what the video is about. If and where you can, brand it with your site name and logo!. 

The thumbnails are seen all over YouTube, related videos down the side on the left of the video that you are currently watching, at the end of the video you have just seen and in search results, both on YouTube and in Google. 

Check out the example below, Brian Dean, SEO expert, and how he has taken advantage of custom thumbnail and made it a great "advert" for his brand and what the video is about. 

• Optimise Your Video Description

This where you can add in your video keyword naturally and elegantly. Simply say what the video is about and add in a curiosity value to get that click!. 

A big no-no here is to punch in you website address, which is of no value ranking wise and does look spammy and low quality, besides if you are using good and weel designed stand out thumbnails you can get your branding and website address in there in a classy brand aware fashion!. 

Because Video Killed The Radio Star And You Are Ready To Make A Killing Online With Your Blog!. The Question Is: Are You Going To Take The Money?!? 

Let's discuss now some less obvious traffic sources, ones that you would not have otherwise thought about. 

One's which will help you to become independent of both Social Media and search engines. This is the big secret that nobody is talking about and few are teaching - getting independent from those main sources and owning your traffic. 

When you can do this, you will be unaffected by major changes and algorithm updates. Social media and having a diverse following across all platforms is just one source of a diversified traffic source. 

Guest Posting - With A Different Attitude!

Guest posting, a strategy normally associated with Search Engine Optimisation and link building. 

Listen up!

Guest posting, despite currently being great for SEO purposes, is not the reason as why I seek out great sites to post on. 

The link is irrelevant to me, I am not in the slightest bit bothered if or when a guest post backlinks gets given zero value by google or highly devalued. 

When you have the privilege and honour of writing on and for some seriously high traffic websites that have huge lists and social media followings you not only get yourself and your site out there, you get pretty good targeted brand awareness from an audience that is interested in your niche. 

 Plus the potential to leverage that audience, gain traffic and a whole bunch of new followers and a steady stream of traffic from that guest post to your site. 

And when, this, a source of traffic and new audience is your main objective I suggest you follow my method and attitude in regards to guest posting. 

That is to treat it as if you are posting an article on your own site and no short 500 word, or 1000 word or even 1,500 word article. 

Write the very best piece of content that there is on the internet in regards to the topic and get deep and detailed (like this article for example!) and cover the article in depth!. 

I'm taking skyscraper, blockbuster 10,000 word long (at least!) highly detailed article. One that you will be absolutely wishing that you had darn well posted on your own site - a dam proud to have as well!. 

When you do this, many things happen!. Not only do you provide the site owner with an outstanding piece of content. You give their audience tremendous value and have that "wow!" factor, as in "Wow this guy/gal really know his/her stuff - I am defo checking out his/her site!". 

And you end up with a new follower or regular visitor. 

Also, you will have just created immense value for your brand. Do it often enough, and on high traffic sites and you will have very much reverse engineered your outreach efforts!.

Why? How?

Simple!. 

Other site owners in your industry will have seen your block buster content, and maybe on a number of sites too...and who, just who, would not be chomping at the bit to get a piece of the action and an incredibly well written highly detailed article of their own written by you on their site?.

You will find after a short while you will be contacted by site owners telling you they seen your GP and asking if you would like to guest post on their site. 

While you guest post on another site there are a few do's, simply out of courtesy, respect and traffic reasons.

Do Keep The Following In Mind When Guest Posting

• Do makes sure you get at least 2 do follow links for your effort, one to your home page and one to your capture page. 

• Do offer a freebie, a download ebook or guide to the readers of the blog you are writing on. Win for the audience, (ebook) Win for site - high quality article, win for you - traffic/email address! win-win-win. 

• Don't ever write and forget about the article. Not set and forget thing. Update it after a year, add content, and again 6 months after that. It is your article and a traffic stream for your site - take care of it!.

• Do keep an eye on comments on the article and tell the site owner that you will respond to all comments.

Do this in a timely manner. It looks much better when comment replies come from the author rather than the site owner. It also keeps your face out there and more awareness for you!.  

•  Do fully promote the guest post to your social media and email list. Go a step further and do some white hat link building (if site owner permits). 

• Do make a video or series of videos about the guest post, mention it in the video and link to it in the annotation and description below the video. Promote it like it is your own piece of content on your own site. 

• Get the site owner if you can to participate in a written interview, which you can use to promote the guest post. 

Because you know that a blog +massive traffic = Success!. The question is: Will you you put your best foot forwards and make a success of your life?!?

The attitude of creating and posting on other sites in this manner is taking guest posting to a new level and a new way of thinking. 

It is for the referral traffic and leverage of a new audience than that of getting a backlink. 

Do enough guest posts of this nature and you will end up with a steady stream of traffic. Think of it as many mountain streams all coming together to make one big river. 

Given that you are aiming to post on DA 40+-50+ (or DA 30+ that are capable of growing to a DA of 40+ to 50+) authority sites in your niche with 10,000 email subscribers and a strong social media following.

You can expect a steady stream of traffic given that those sites are already well established and your article is long and highly detailed and will in all likely hood rank for a number or related keywords, quite possibly hundreds!. 

Using the pareto analysis, which serves well in the online marketing world. 1000 visitors and you should yield 20% or 200 visitors per month or close on 2,500 visitors per guest post. 

One block buster of a guest post per month for a whole year could very well end up with you getting a whopping 30,000 visitors per month or 1000 visitors daily to your blog thanks to your outreach efforts and writing earth shattering blog posts. 

Sure, the massive benefit of traffic goes to the site owners, but you get a steady stream of traffic that is fully independent of google algorithm updates and changes to social media also. 

It is also traffic that you own, now, using the above example of guest posting 1x month for a whole year every other month for 2 years you can pretty much end up with not only 1,000 visitors daily but an average of 25 new fresh email subscribers on a daily basis too - given an achievable average of 2.5% email sign up rate. 

That is a very ample and nice 750 fresh email subscribers on a monthly basis or 9,000 on a yearly basis!. That is freaking awesome!, especially when you consider that this figure is from guest post referral traffic only!

But, only if you put in the effort!. 

Certainly not a traffic source to ignore at a whim!. In fact, it is one of my current favourites!. 

All talk of guest posting does bring me to another favourite traffic generation technique of mine, reverse guest posting. 

Reverse Guest Posting

What is reverse guest posting? 

Apart from being a great way of drawing traffic to your blog it is a fab way of getting great content for free. Pretty simple, you invite influential blog owners in your niche to participate in interviews. 

Most site owners, if you have good enough a relationship with them will happily accept your pitch to do an interview with you - especially if you have appealed to their ego.

Besides, 

The site owners will know that they will get do follow link from you and potentially a rankings boost, brand recognition and traffic from your site to theirs. 

You also, if done well, ought to get a surge in traffic also. Linking out to quality related site is a signal that google look for and your interviewee is likely to be darn proud to do an interview and blast it out to his followers and subscribers. 

Do keep the questions relevant, on topic and light hearted, above all seeking not to give the interviewee a good grilling or to draw him or her across the hot coals but the get them to be informative, helpful and to share a technique or two with your audience showing and proving their status and knowledge in the industry. 

You are building a relationship here and you could very well appear on their site with one of your stunning guest posts or indeed on a podcast or vodcast!. 

Do remember this is very much effortless, upon your behalf, obviously a bit of out reach and building your relationships and network is required but other than that it is pretty effort less. 

Also, just to mention it, be sure to mention the fact to your list and social media followers that you interviewed XYZ person from ABC site!. In all probability you following and subscribers have heard of this person and are interested to hear (Ok read!) what they have to say!. 

In every niche there is always something polemic to be discussed, and they are topic that your audience will be openly thinking about either on related forums, social media or amongst themselves. 

This next traffic method draws upon the previous Reverse Guest Post, or interview technique. 

Host A Debate

This will most certainly draw in traffic, recognition and very much links like crazy, of which will generate referral traffic, get a whole bunch of social shares.

All of this is actually pretty awesome for SEO signals for the search engines. 

Simply pick a topic and fully research who is for and who is against it. There are several techniques, while some encourage and advise being polemic in order to generate traffic, I personally disagree with being controversial

I have a very strong preference of coming across as educated, intelligent and balanced, state my opinion on the matter up front, of which it s very likely that my following will already know my own views on the matter.

Then present the debate allowing members, participants of both "For" and "against" to clearly and concisely state their opinion on the matter and then just provide a balanced conclusion allowing readers to further participate in the debate in the comments sections. 

Generally, my views is not to sway or change a readers mind, but to have them fully educated and informed about both the "pros" and the "cons" regarding the topic of the debate. 

Ideally, looking for 3-5 participants on each side of the debate, that is 6 to 10 in total. If they each manage to put across their point in 500 words you are looking at a core article of 3,000 to 5,000 words plus your introduction and conclusion. 

Great crowd sourced content that will get traffic from those participating in it as they will likely share and blast out an email to their audience. Also, other bloggers in the sphere are likely to link to the article to aid their own audience. 

Your followers on social media are likely to chip in with their own opinion or share it, maybe even leave a comment on the article or social post somewhere. Such an interesting article is very likely to get a high on site time. 

These are all absolutely brilliant signals that can and will boost your search engine rankings. 

Because there is no debating it!. You know you can make money with a blog!. The question is: Are you going to build it the right way and make ton of money?!?

Expert Round Up

This is something that does take an effort in putting together and does require some some outreach skills and leveraging what contacts and relationships that you do have. 

I do stress outreach and building relationships in your industry is something that you most certainly must work on and build from day darn 1!. 

While everyone loves a lone wolf, and the romanticism associated with a person that toughed it out gone it alone and still succeeded, connecting with those in your niche, from the outset, is absolutely going to set you on the road to success much quicker. 

Also, getting those contacts sets you on a path to getting a fair amount of "independent traffic". Traffic outwith from the likes of google and social media. And this is something that I can't, absolutely can't drill home strong enough. 

Owning your traffic is absolutely essential and an expert round up certainly achieves that. Plus who comments or gives their expert opinion on the topic is someone that you have built or building a relationship with. 

That is an individual that you could tap up for guest posting on their site, have them appear as an interviewee on your site or participate in a debate.

Not to mention that you, at some point could appear on their site in similar fashion as your stock rises in your industry. 

See how this works? 

You scratch my back, I'll scratch your, You leverage my audience and I'll leverage yours and we both end up with fresh new followers and audience... 

Win Win all round. 

Now, an expert round up is pretty easy. Get 30-50 or more experts in your niche to make a comment or share a tip or two or their opinion regarding something that is relevant to your niche. 

Example, 

"38 top marketers share their opinion on the direction of SEO for the coming year"

"54 Successful bloggers share their opinion about the future of affiliate marketing and website monetisation" 

"27 online entrepreneurs talk about the importance of branding your blog" 

Content Round Up

Content round ups are great ways of getting content for your site, establishing yourself all while you are working hard to build your site and establish your reputation in the niche of your choice. 

A content round up article is as simple as it sounds, it is a round up of the top posts and articles related to a particular topic. It could very well be something like, "Top 10 ways to drive traffic to your blog". 

Where, in the article you are sharing and linking to some absolute top traffic generation techniques and methods that are written by other bloggers. 

You can simple give a quick but short recap of the technique and link out the the original source, and fully credit it, mentioning the author and site owner. 

Like the expert round up post this is a bit ego bating and site owners are very much delighted to link back to your article, aiding and helping to strengthen your backlink profile, more importantly, a nice trickle of referral traffic.

Also, ego bating site owners they are likely to give a big shout out to your article on social media or indeed to share your post to their audience and thus exposing your site to their audience. 

Which does has it's effect on helping you to win some new followers, new regular blog readers!

Also, a little sneaky here, you can of course later replace those outbound links to the articles in the content round up by expanding on your own article with your own content regarding the technique or method that you had originally linked to and still get the benefit of the incoming link(s). 

A little cheeky, and a little sneaky. It is entirely up to you if you wish to do that or leave your article as it is. 

Because you now know absolute fabulous ways to drive traffic to your blog!. The question is: Do you know how to set it up and build it the right way?

Just your name and your photo on your gravatar is enough. Anything pertaining to a website name or logo as an image will make you commenting efforts look like the only reason you left it was to gain traffic for your site and brand recognition and had no real interest in leaving a comment - regardless how awesome your comment is!.

The comment, length wise should be of no maximum length but hey, your not writing the next edition of war and peace... about 150 to 200 words is fine. You can be critical of an article but to a point here as long as you are still adding value to the article. 

You might disagree with something that has been written, say it is an article about PBN's and you disagree with their use..say so and say why in an intelligent and educated way that gets the author to reiterate, prove and defend their point.  

Your main job in essence is to enhance the value of the article, keep things in a positive tone and offer some kind of potential for an on going dialogue, like a question or something and do write 150-200 words. 

Where warranted, if I see I can help a fellow commenter, I will chip in. 

Obviously, you want to be writing on blogs that are related to your niche, and find some that you really do like and well, you might just stand out as a regular commenter for the followers and owner of those sites which will stand you in good stead for both traffic, guest post and other outreach opportunities. 

Yes, in case you are wondering, you do get traffic from blog commenting and yes it does take time and effort. 3 comments a day is 1,000 comments in a year. 

That is 1,000 comments in niche related blogs and sites, many of whom readers will recognise your name and will subconsciously know of your site and perhaps visit it later either directly or by clicking your gravatar. 

Forum Marketing

Seriously, this is very much an under used and underrated method of traffic generation. Before many used to use it and a lot. 

But, 

with the advent of social media the attention to forums by marketers kind of weaned and dropped off. 

Which means....

It is most certainly something that you ought to be doing!. Since there are few doing it these days you have little competition in these. 

The great thing is that forums are absolutely packed with people interested in your niche. In short, your target audience is hanging out there!.

And this is very much at the core of traffic generation, finding where your audience is hanging out and drawing them to your blog. 

Don't go spamming away your link though, there is no sure fired way of devaluing your brand and getting banned quickly than spamming away at a forum. Instead, enjoy, participate and offer information that is of high value. 

In short, participate just like a regular member and have your link in your profile or signature - only where and when permitted. 

When possible do place your link, but not excessively so. Be respectful, the last thing that you want is to be banned and miss out on a rich source of traffic. 

If possible, do offer to sponsor popular forums. Your targeted audience hangs out there. Nice one!. 

Because You Know You Can Absolutely Drive Wild Traffic To Your Blog! The Only Question is: Do You Have The Right Training And Support To Take It to The Next Level?!?

Getting Traffic From Q & A Sites

Very similar to blog commenting and forum marketing, Q & A, question and answer sites take an effort to drive traffic, but it is a persistent effort that pays off long term with quality targeted referral traffic. 

Question and Answer sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora are exactly where your audience are hanging out and asking their questions related to their pain points in your niche. 

Go! Read that paragraph again!. Tell me exactly what that means to you!. 

Well done, 

You got it right!. Spot On!. 

If and when you do answer your audiences problem areas in a significant and detailed manner it enhances your authority in that niche and positions you very much as an expert, and with time maybe even THE expert!. 

There is also a whole bunch of other stuff going on, on a deeper level like building trust as you are helping your potential audience with their problems. Also a fair bit of enhancing your brands value is going on by putting out high quality detailed answers to their questions. 

And, 

when you do so, 

You tend very much to win traffic from those sites to your site. 

Also, these kind of sites are huge sources of what to write about on your site. Sure answer questions, 2-3 a day and you can be answering 1,000 question in the matter of a year.

You can give out a detailed answer in a 500 maybe 600 word reply and then later a full 2,000 word detailed blog post dedicated to answering the question. 

Do, absolutely make sure your blog article is 100% original and not duplicated from your answer to the question on the Q & A site. 

This is absolutely one of my top content techniques... 

Create content around questions that your audience is asking. This, from the very outset positions you as the expert and keep going, keep doing it consistently and you will have strong enough of a following to establish yourself as exactly that in your niche area. 

Do, however use both techniques and don't ignore sites like Quora for commenting on and answering questions. 

Finding the questions that your audience is asking is super easy. There is, in fact a fabulous and quite brilliant keyword research tool that will just spit out the very questions that your audience are typing into google, yahoo and bing. 

It is called "Answer The Public", which is exactly what you are going and aiming to do, to answer your public. 

And on the subject of creating content, although it is very much a traffic method that is dependent largely on search engine rankings and thus google, yahoo and bing. 

Despite the need to "own your traffic" you still can't ignore it as an excellent source of targeted traffic. 

The need for independence is simply due to fluctuations in search engine rankings and of course algorithm changes, which are fantastic when they go in your favour but just business destroying when they don't. 

Other than creating targeted content around your audiences pertaining problems and pain points there are other particularly effective article and content types that generate a lot of traffic which are as follows. 

Get More Traffic For Your Blog By Creating How To Posts

How To Posts, actually a type that I really enjoy writing, help to raise your stock in your sector due the inherent nature of such posts to show your in depth knowledge of your niche be helping your audience all at the same time. 

One of the particular plus points is that "How To" posts generate a lot of social shares and links as well as being placed high up in the sales funnel. 

You might not get a lot of direct sales from a "How To" post when compared to a direct more lower down in the sales process type of keywords like those that are product +review. 

Again, to find the "How To" use Answer The Public Keyword research tool. 

Write List Posts

List posts have that tendency to be very popular and get a lot of shares, links to them and a ton of traffic. 

Much more than any other kind of post. You definitely and utterly and completely must do some list posts, be they "Top X" (where X = a number) or "Best +Product Type" or "Best ways to", "top ways to" kind of posts.

One of the absolutely best things regarding this kind of post is the fact that they can be very high in the sales funnel and process. 

People who are looking for information about the best of a particular product type are certainly likely to click on the product or products mentioned and make a buyer related decision. 

After all they did search for "best + product type" or "Top +product type" or "Top 10 +Product type" for a reason, there is a lot of buyer intent in those search terms. 

Because You Know The Easy Part Is Getting Traffic!. The Questions Is: Do You Know How To Make Money With That Traffic?!?​

Building Your Email List

Absolutely the most important thing in any and all forms of internet marketing is owning a large and highly active email list of interested subscribers. 

It is absolutely traffic that is in your back pocket. Every email you blast out or have in your automated follow up series that points to one of your articles or reviews is guaranteed clicks and traffic, not to mention sales. 

Hence, the importance of owning a good sized quality subscriber list. As a note you should not send out emails too often and have too many of them commercial related. A nice ratio is 2 informative and helpful articles to 1 with commercial intent. 

Also, your email list should be double opt in. Simply to increase the quality of your subscribers and be less spammy. 

Building your email list is pretty simple, use an opt in form and a call to action on all your posts or have a pop up or screen splash.

Don't be shy when it comes to asking for an email address and do give away a high quality product as a magnet to get the email address. 

Ebooks tend to be history, although still effective as a lead magnet with mini 5,6,7 day E courses sent by email being more effective.

There are a number of techniques available for you to optimise your email list which include the very effective technique and idea of placing opt in form on your most frequently visited pages which includes your about me, contact and home pages. 

And why not take advantage of all that traffic? 

You'd be foolish not to!. 

Other techniques include offering content upgrades, offering the option not to opt in (two choices), use social proof (testimonials) and adding in a stand out card on your YouTube Videos. 

Also, as I mentioned, in your guest posts that you write on other sites, those huge detailed highly informative ones, do offer a give away to those readers and offer them a ebook or course and direct them to your email capture page. 

Push Notifications

Push notifications are a great way of owning your traffic and most certainly something that you ought to be using as a means of owning your traffic. 

Notifcations go out immediately or depending on the software and your settings to your subscribers and get your traffic. 

They have been used very effectively by Marketing experts like Neil Patel and many others. The very effective version by Subcribers.com offers the brilliant option of adding in your logo of branding effects. 

You can adjust and split test messages, headings and Call To Actions to find out which ones are more or most effective. And make sure they are active on all, if not, your most effective and highest traffic pages for maximum effect. 

Due to the very nature you are limited as to what you can do in terms of getting more push notification subscribers, but don't ignore this option of owning your traffic. 

How To Get More Traffic For Your Blog Conclusion

Wow, there you have, an absolute ton and variety of methods of getting more traffic to and for your blog. So stop asking How can I get drive more traffic to my website!

You have the answer right here, and you know the absolute top secret thing and tip that just about nobody is telling you to do! - get out there, get independent of google and own your own traffic!. 

Have balanced sources from Social Media, to Email List, To Push Notifications To Referral traffic and yes, google too!. 

The key, is not creating a dependency on any single traffic source or too high a percentage of visitors to your site from a single traffic source or type. 40% - 30% - 30% is a perfect balance between owned, Social Media and Search Engines. 

Now it is up to you to take the next step and knuckle down and...

Take Action!

It is important that you take action and build your site the correct way and have it set up for success, sustainable success so that the traffic come flooding in and not in dribs and drabs. 

With proper training you will learn that and go very quickly from Zero site and visitors to well over 50k a month in a relatively short period of time. 

Just pop your email in the Box below to get my free guide and 7 day blogging training course to find out how to build a blog that brings you a sustainable income for many years to come. 

I hope that you enjoyed this article about How To Get More Traffic For Your Blog, if you have any questions, leave a comment below and I will get right back to you as quickly as I can. 

To Your Success And Your Blogging Best. 

Derek.