Everybody knows there’s more than one way to get traffic to your blog. Some are easier than others, some are more effective than others and some are just … wrong. Let’s take a look at the good, the bad and the ugly ways of getting traffic to your blog.
Generating natural backlinks is the best way to boost your blog’s ranking, which in turn increases your traffic. But natural backlinks take time to develop because they only happen when other bloggers link to your content from their own blogs. If you think about it, what type of content do you typically link to? Only the best, right? You don’t mind sending your readers to quality content on other blogs but you don’t want to send them off on a wild goose chase. When another blogger links to you from one of his own blog posts that natural backlink carries more authority with the search engines.
Of course, you can also build your own “natural” backlinks by creating Squidoo lenses or Hubpages or Weebly blogs and your blog will still get that boost. However, now you’re going to have to create additional high-quality content so you have something to populate those other sites. You’re doing twice the work whereas, if you simply put the effort into creating quality content for your blog, other bloggers would take care of those links for you.
Blog commenting is another good way to get traffic to your blog. If your comment adds something to the conversation other commentors will start following your link. As a bonus, if you comment regularly on the same blogs, you’ll also start to develop relationships with those other bloggers. Soon, they’ll start reading and commenting on your blog, and linking to your content. And now we’re back to those wonderful natural backlinks again!
There are lots of ugly ways to get traffic and most of them will cost you money – lots of money in some cases – with very poor results. You can visit Fiverr and purchase one or two thousand Twitter followers for just five bucks. You can pay someone to post your links on his network of crappy blogs. You can pay a virtual assistant to leave comments on 30 or 40 blogs a day. You can buy programs that scrape email addresses and then pay someone else to send emails and you can pay people to visit your blog.
All of these ugly ways to get traffic have two things in common – they cost money and they don’t work. You know yourself how difficult it is to get 2,000 targeted Twitter followers and yet here’s someone who’s willing to send you 2,000 more today – and for just five bucks? How targeted do you think that traffic will be? Even if this guy sent you 10,000 followers you’d still have 10,000 people visiting your blog who couldn’t care less what you’re promoting. You’ve wasted money and you’ve wasted the time you had to spend dealing with this seller.
Like it or not, the best ways to generate traffic are free, they require nothing more than a bit of elbow grease on your part. Work hard to produce top-quality content that other bloggers will want to link to and you’ll generate the kind of links the search engines love. Try to take shortcuts, though, and you’ll seen learn the true definition of “ugly” when you see all of that un-targeted traffic traipsing through your blog.