Building traffic to your blog

In addition to continually writing on your blog to build up your content, you’ll want to begin building traffic to your blog as well.  Traffic will become the key ingredient in earning a side income from your blog.  The more traffic you get, the more visibility and click throughs your ads and affiliate offers will get.

I’ve already shared a number of traffic tips before here on Side Income Blogging and specifically some strategies you should be doing from the very start.  Given that, I won’t drive into the details again, but here’s a summary of things you should be doing in the early stages of your blogging daily:

1. Comment on articles from other blogs in your niche, making sure that when you do, you include a link back to your blog.
2. Be active on Social Media sites like – Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.  Social Media is becoming more and more critical in today’s blogging environment.  Use it to promote your articles but more importantly use it interact with others in your niche and your readers.
3. Link out to other blogs and blog articles from your articles.  Not only will this help your search engine rankings, but it will help get you noticed by other bloggers, who in turn just may starting linking back to you.  This builds links to your site (giving it more credibility with Google) but can also drive new readers and traffic to your blog.
4. Guest Post – Guest posting is when you write another article to be published on someone else’s blog.  Guest posting is a great way to get visibility and links to your site.  Absolutely something you should be trying to do.
5. Be active in online forums – Find a forum in your blogs niche, register and beginning being active.  Don’t include a link to your blog initially, but do so after you’ve contributed and have gotten to know the members.
6. Join or start a blog network – Blog networks are a grouping of like bloggers who partner together to promote their blogs and help each other out.  I’m a huge advocate, especially for new bloggers just starting out.  Blog networks are a great way to meet people, learn about blogging, and grow your blog.

Income and Traffic

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of traffic to blog revenue.  Click through rates on blog advertisements are relatively low and as a result in order to earn any reasonable amount of money, you generally have to have at least 100+ visitors a month.  Even then, your earnings will be low.

I recently worked with a client that wanted Adsense installed on their blog.  They were getting frustrated that their blog wasn’t earning them any money.  This particular client had a strong reader base, but their overall blog traffic is about 100 – 200 visitors per day.  A few weeks after adding Adsense, they asked that I remove it as it wasn’t earning anything.  I think they said that over a 4 week period, they had only earned about $4.00.  Now, in all fairness, the blog niche is not one easily monitized, so your specific income milage might vary some, but hopefully you get the idea: Low Traffic = Low Income.

Get started

If you aren’t actively doing things almost on a daily basis to grow traffic to your blog, get started today.  Trust me, I fully realize how constrained most people’s time is.  The trick is to block off a set amount of time to do nothing but build traffic.  This could be 15 minutes, 30 minutes or maybe even an hour.  While the time spent will equate to the amount of traffic received, even a small amount helps.  As you do this each day, you’ll slowly see your traffic build over time which I personally find very encouraging.  I’ve found that the more I see my traffic grow, the more encouraged I am to spend time traffic building.

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