Traffic Expansion
In the last post I stressed the importance of laying the foundation for traffic, and setting your blog up for growth. In this post I’m going to explain to you what I mean by that, and specifically what you can do.
Laying the foundation for your success means that you set it up so that a visitor comes to your blog, and they are not only able to do several things which bring you more traffic, but a very large percentage of them do. It not only means that the rate at which your visitors come back to the blog is high, but the rate at which NEW customers and viewers come to your page as a result of some action that your visitors took. Also, the visitors will perform some action a high percentage of the time that will bring you more viewers. SO not only do those actions they takee lead to a lot of viewers, but they take that action a large percentage of the time. In addition, they visit the blog frequently so they are able to perform those actions, and every vieewer views more pages so they are able to perform those actions on nmore posts.
One big example of how this is done is social bookmarking. Lets say you have a stumbleupon button and a digg button on every one of your posts. These are buttons that you will use to attract attention from these social bookmarking sites. Basically social bookmarking means that people can submit your content to be seen by others within that network. For example, if you saw a website that you liked, you would press the social bookmarking button, and it would be added to the database for other to view. The more adds it gets, the more times it’s added or marked to indicate people like it. Generally the more people that like it, the more traffic it gets.
Do not look at your visitors as potential dollar signs. Look at your visitors as potential future customers.
There’s an old saying, “word of mouth is the best form of advertisment… just don’t tell anyone”
But look at youtube a site where absolutely NO advertisement was done for it, nor did they do any advertisments. But they made it as simple as anything else for people to tell their friends about it. Much of youtube’s success has to do with the ability for people to post youtube videos in their myspace pages without really knowing programming. They have an “email to friend” button, they have a “link to friend button” they have buttons to favorite the videos, they have buttons to subscribe to users, they have a button to rate it so the community ccan tell others, they have “related videos” and “more videos by this user” to keep people on their site, they have a network community for others to interact… They have groups and chanels, they have their own search engine, and they really have it all down just great.
So on your blog, you’re going to want to encoorperate as much of this as possible. Model your blogs after the things that made sites like youtube and myspace so successful. Create tell a friend scripts, use related posts plugin for your viewers to see more pages, use social bookmarks as another way for them to “tell a friend”, have an autoresponder email, have RSS feeds, have all the right plugins, have different ways to generate more content based pages on your website without having to do a lot of work, try to generate a “network” of followers that will help you generate links, and make your posts easy to share, and make your posts easy to email to others.
I wanted to describe all of the steps in full detail in this post, But I have decided to break the posts up into several parts. Instead, I will be creating another post listing a step by step version on how you can set up your blog.
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Tags: , growth, traffic, traffic building, traffic expansion, traffic generation, website growth