How to get traffic to my blog

There is plenty of free material online about this subject, and that's good - because a quality blog that draws visitors is (in my opinion) the very best way to generate online sales and/or to build your email contact list (with TrafficWave, of course).

The first thing that you need to know about traffic to your blog is that it will start coming automatically once you begin adding content.  I'm serious.  After you have made even a few posts to your blog, you will begin to attract visitors via web searches.  The more content you add, the more page-depth and authority your site will have.  As long as you stay on topic and offer visitors quality, original content, the web traffic will eventually take care of itself.  However, to get a whole lot of traffic on a daily basis... you'll need to be more aggressive

For example, social bookmarking on sites like Digg or Delicious is very good, as is 'Tweeting' your posts.  This can be very labor intensive, however, especially if you have multiple blogs (as you should).  However, there are some software items out there that can automate a lot of this for you and create an integrated social marketing presence, driven by your blog (or blogs).  For example, there are ways to make every blog post show up in your Facebook profile.  At this point, I think it's important to tell you that I recommend keeping your personal and business Facebook accounts completely separate.  Do NOT mix Internet business contacts with your family and friends because you'll regret it if you do.

Of course, another excellent way to bring traffic to your blog is to leave comments on other people's blogs that relate to your subject matter.  Believe or not, people do read blog comments.  If you have something interesting to say on a popular blog, that author's readers will follow your link back to your blog in order to learn more.  Not only that, linking back to your site from someone else's creates something called a 'back-link'.  Google loves those.  The more relevant ones that you have, the more important the Google robots perceive your site to be.  But relevance is the key here.  If your blog is about email marketing, then only create back-links from other email marketing sites.  Understand?

The last thing to remember are 'keywords'.  Always tailor your blog posts titles (and the first sentence of your posts) to match what you imagine people might type into search engines.  The title of this post, 'How to get traffic to my blog' is a good example.  It works.

So, basically, what you want to do is add fresh, original content at least once a week (the more the better) and keep keywords and keyword phrases in mind.  Over time, this alone will get you plenty of traffic.  I also suggest that you have multiple blogs - again, the more the better.  But you want to create as many relevant links back to your site as possible.  Social bookmarking and commenting on other sites is the very best approach, in my opinion.

What has branding got to do with email marketing?

When building your email contact list with your TrafficWave autoresponder, you must also develop a quality relationship with your subscribers.  That relationship begins with whatever benefit you offered them in exchange for their name and email and continues through your AR series and occasional broadcasts.  In this case, 'branding' doesn't have anything to do with running a cattle ranch.  Rather, it's a means of creating a distinction between your messages and all of the others that your subscribers receive.  In business, we call this 'good will', and it's actually part of the price computation when trying to sell or buy an existing business.

You see, your optin mailing list is a genuine business asset... and it's worth money.  How much it's worth depends on a number of things, but one of them is the perception that your readers have of you - i.e. your 'brand', or public business image.  It's crucial that you create a good one, maintain it and promote it.  Give your business a personal touch (and a human face) and you will be FAR more successful than the vast majority of so-called marketers who prefer complete anonymity.

Email marketing via list-building is the classic Internet business model and that isn't going to change.  But your readers will never buy anything from you if they don't believe or trust you.  Remember that.

When growing your online business, remember one word: focus

Type  "make money online" into a search engine and you will quickly get excited about all the money you can make if you'll only download some programs, sign up for free e-books to read, watch some videos, or whatever.  In doing so, you can opt-in to a bunch of mailing lists and get tons of information from the guys who know Internet Marketing.  In other words, making money online is simply a matter of getting the information you need and pushing a few buttons, right?

Of course, it isn't.

If there was a secret 'magic bullet' to earning money fast online, everyone on earth would be rich.  So what's the truth and, more importantly, why is it so hard to discover?  The problem is information overload!  It's just as easy to find useless information as it is to find the truly useful stuff.  Earning money online basically boils down to three things:

1)  Building a website
2)  Building traffic to your website
3)  Building an email contact list

For example, I use blogger.com as my website.  I build incoming traffic by commenting on other (similar) blogs and linking back to this site.  And, naturally, I build my email contact list with TrafficWave.  My entire business is based on these three basic tasks... and I FOCUS on it.

You've only got so much time and so much energy, so expend both of them on the actions that will produce the best results over the long term.  Don't waste your precious time chasing one online 'opportunity' after another.  Your results will always be the same - i.e. poor.  If you are the type who is easily distracted, online business is probably not for you.  You must learn to focus on the basics and stay focused upon them if you wish to succeed.

Keep moving forward

I want to give you a basic principle that has helped me succeed in my online business. I wouldn't tell you to do something that I wasn't willing to do myself and, in many cases, I've already DONE what I'm telling you to do. But what I'm talking about is always moving forward - both in your business and in your life. What does that mean in practical terms? It simply means that you should always strive to improve everything that you're doing, whether it's running your business or managing your life and relationships. And you should always be looking for new things to explore. I'm not suggesting that you won't ever have to take a detour, or even have to stop for a while. Those things happen, and it's okay. And I'm not saying that you should lose focus and chase everything that comes along. I'm talking about a different kind of moving, where you're moving toward your goals and exploring the paths to get there. The more you move forward (even if it's just a very little bit at a time), the better off you'll be.

There are four big reasons why this true. First of all, you'll be learning. I have learned far more from moving than I have from sitting still. Even when I fail, I get something out of it simply because I choose to see it as an opportunity to learn. For example, when I first started online, I was trying to make a particular business model work for me. It was a complete flop. It just didn't work at all (it had to do with a sort of franchise opportunity with physical products). I had to give up on it when it became obvious that it wasn't going to work. But along the way, I learned all sorts of skills I still use today on different things. All because I kept moving forward.

And here's a more recent example...

You've probably noticed that lots of people are promoting junky products and using a ton of hype to do it. That has made it MUCH harder for legit affiliate marketers like me to get good results from promotions for truly excellent products (such as TrafficWave). Now, on the one hand, I'm bothered by the fact that some folks are sort of ruining it for everybody. On the other hand, I've had a great opportunity to educate myself on why hype ruins trust. And I've been able to come up with some pretty exciting plans for how to avoid it entirely in my business, which makes me feel jazzed about the future. Frustration is part of living, but if you turn that into a learning opportunity, it's a way to move yourself forward instead of wallowing in disappointment.

Second, you'll find more opportunities. Nothing helps you stay positive like finding new ways to succeed. And there's no better way to find those than moving! I can understand if you feel down in the dumps. We've all been there. But if you keep moving, always trying to improve and learn and do new things, I'll almost guarantee that you'll find new opportunities all over the place. This has happened in my own business more than once. I remember a time when I created my own product. It was a great viral ebook on a topic I'm sure everybody would be interested in...but very few people were. I didn't know why nobody wanted it (it was a free ebook, too), but that's how it went. I was pretty angry about it for awhile, but then I thought about what happened. My promotion didn't work, but I still had a great product that would give me more opportunities. Not too long after that, I ended up promoting somebody else's related product, and my ebook was a perfect fit as a bonus item. That's another opportunity I never would have found if I hadn't kept moving.

Third, you'll stay motivated (one of THE keys to online success). My TrafficWave Team Members send me email all the time to say that they're stuck. They feel like a failure. They're sick of struggling. I'm sure you've felt that way. I've felt that way myself, and I know it's awful. When you feel that way, it's very easy to stop moving, give up and quit. It's natural to pull inside your shell and stagnate when your excitement is gone. Here's the weird part... that's also the best time to move. It almost doesn't matter what you do when you start feeling that way:

* You can finish the project you put down a few weeks ago, just to do it
* You can reach out to some friends for advice
* You can try something brand new that you wanted to try, but were too busy to do it

It's those times when your motivation is extremely low that you're most likely to find new interests, new skills and new opportunities. At least that's always been true for me. It's also a chance to analyze what you're doing. I've definitely seen this in my own business. I remember a time last year when I was working so much that I felt almost sick. It was non-stop crazy, and it got to the point where I dreaded working every day. That's rare for me, because I usually love what I do. But it all just got to be too much. My motivation was completely shot. That's when I took a step back to really ponder why I felt terrible and hated what I used to love. In the end, I realized I had committed to helping so many people with their ads, autoresponder letters and such that all the fun had gone out of it for me! Here's the lesson I learned: I was so busy that I didn't have any room to move in ways that were helping me improve, either personally or professionally. Remember, that's what productive motion is about, not just flailing around (although sometimes, doing ANYTHING can help get you going, like I mentioned before). So I decide to change some things. I intentionally scaled my business back for a while, so I could breathe a bit. For one thing, I started taking breaks and 'stopped to smell the roses' once in a while. I admit, it wasn't easy because I'm the type that feels there's always something that I should be doing right now! But when I did it, I discovered that I started loving what I was doing again. Then the motivation came back, and my results have been great.

Fourth, you'll attract other movers. Honestly, this has been the most exciting part of my business - making new contacts. When I first started, I didn't interact with other marketers much. I was a little nervous about it, so I kept to myself. That was a huge mistake. I cut myself off from a ton of opportunities that way. Then a few years later, I met several people who knew a lot more than me about list-building and traffic generation (among other things). They didn't know much me, and I didn't know much about them, but we decided that we would start moving together on a few projects that involved TrafficWave. Not all of those projects succeeded, but a couple of them took off like rockets. In a way, we helped each other make our reputations... all because we decided to keep moving, even though we weren't "experts" on much of anything. Since then, we've all gone on to bigger and better things. We learn. We're creative. We're constantly exploring new things. There's no reason in the world that you can't start moving like that in your own business. It's a choice, really. One of the realities I hope you're learning about Internet business is that it IS a business. It takes some discipline to succeed. It's not an overnight thing. But moving can help get you there. Highly successful people move. They rarely stop, unless it's on purpose to analyze what they're doing. Most of the time, they're striving to improve, striving to learn and striving to experience new things. If you do that, your chances of success will go way, way up.

All the best in 2011 and beyond ~Juli Lopez