Digital Marketing Consultant

Traffic is what keeps your blog alive and well.  Without traffic a blog can be considered to be dead online.  A blog with no traffic has no life and no value. So if getting traffic to your blog is of great importance, how can you accomplish it?

The first thing that can help your blog get traffic is good quality content.   Your content needs to provide valuable information from which your visitors can learn something or have a take away.   Good content is important, but it is not the only thing that is needed to obtain traffic.

Keywords

Keywords play an important part in getting traffic to your blog, just as they do to your website.   Consider keywords when you are writing your blog posts.  Use keyword tools to find the best keywords to use for your blog topic.  Keep the keyword density about 4% for your blog posts.  This will enable the contents to rank well with the search engine results.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites allows you to bookmark specific pages of your blog to obtain traffic.   Use of social networking sites is also another way to obtain traffic for your blog.   A good strategy is to join all social networking sites and place on your profile advertisement for your blog.  Add as many friends to your social networking sites as you can.   This can provide greater visibility for your blog.

Other ways to increase traffic

• Promote your blog on your email signature for greater exposure. 
• Feedburner use can also successfully increase traffic to your blog.

Consistancy

Having said all of the above, none of them has any importance if you do not publish regularly...preferably every day.  After about 100 posts, you will begin to notice increased traffic.

The key to keeping your blog alive and well is traffic.  With that being said, you will want to use several different strategies to continually increase the traffic to your blog to keep it alive.  Bury you blog with traffic so it does not become a dead blog on the web.

And finally, if you would simply like to read some excellent material on the subject, go to http://bit.ly/WSIwisdomBook starting at page 93.

You have probably spent a lot of time, money, and effort to establish your online presence.  Now it is time to direct your attention to marketing strategies.   The first secret to an online business is traffic, of course.

You will want to develop a strategy for lead generation that will generate traffic to your site.  Notice we referred to strategies, not strategy.  You will need multiple types of marketing campaigns to produce the growth in traffic for a successful business.

[I need to point out right here that traffic is only the beginning.  To complete the picture, it must be the right kind of traffic (that wants your product or service), your site must be built correctly to convert the traffic to business (with a correctly structured landing page), and you must know if all of this is happening (through analytics).  But back to basic traffic....]

Growth in the areas of marketing, as it relates to social media and internet advertisement, has been and continues to be at astronomical paces.  More dollars are expected to be spent on email marketing strategies including various social media platforms as other more traditional types of marketing are in decline.  Some of the more traditional types of advertising, including TV and radio ads, are not being utilized at all by some businesses.

Some of the most valuable marketing tools to facilitate growth in traffic to your website for 2010 include

• Search engine marketing
• Public relations
• Email marketing
• Social media

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a popular type of search engine marketing.  This is a very powerful tool used to provide traffic growth.  PPC makes your company’s products and services at the fingertips of your potential customer immediately when they are searching for those products and services...if you do it right.  It can be an expensive lesson is wasted money if you do it wrong.

The most effective method to reach your customers is by way of search engine marketing (SEM).  To accomplish the growth you would like to see in traffic to your website, use of several tools and methods is the best option including:

• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Blogging
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• PPC
• Marketing campaigns with a mobile focus
• Social media
• Email campaigns

Each of these methods is a story of its own.  Correct use of these techniques can successfully drive traffic growth to your site.  Converting that traffic to sales is a study you can find more information about at our Wisdom Book.

There are lots of different ways to analyze data about visitors to your website, but it is a known fact that the ratio of hits-to-visitor is important to your website profitability.

Looking at the number of hits per visitor on your website for a specified period of time is valuable.   The formula to obtain this ratio is relatively simple, number of hits within a given period of time divided by the total visitors for the same period of time.   You can use whatever period of time you would like such as:
•    Day
•    Week
•    Month
•    Quarter
•    Year

Looking at a period of time less than one day will result in an inaccurate view of traffic to your site.

This ratio shows you the number of pages a visitor on average looks at while on your site.   A low number is not good.  You want this number to be higher.  The more pages a visitor looks at the more likely they will make a purchase, sign up for your newsletter, or take action in other good ways.

There are some basic reasons the ratio is sometimes low and there are some ways to improve things and improve the length of time a visitor stays on your site and looks at several pages.

What are some of the most common causes for a low ratio of hits to visitor?
•    Slow loading time
•    Artificial clicks on PPC
•    Nonspecific advertising

The most common cause is slow loading time for each page on your website.  Your visitors will not wait around for a slow loading page.  It is important to remember a lot of internet users are still relying on dial up methods of accessing the web which will only result in longer load times.  You should have your pages designed to minimize load time.

I will give you a good example of a bad example on my own website: The Wisdom Book.  Because of the heavy graphics of this book, the whole site loads more slowly than I would like and especially this section.  I keep it there because the information is quite beneficial for serious visitors.  If I depended on the site for selling a product, I would move the book to another site just for the book.

Pay-Per-Click campaigns should be monitored for click fraud.  This will distort your number of hits and not reflect an accurate ratio of hits to visitor.

Your keywords need to be specific to your site and products offered.  Using keywords that are too general will send visitors to your site and, when they see your site does not offer what they thought they would be getting, they leave rather quickly.  Your advertising campaigns and keywords should accurately describe your web site and products or services.

As long as we are talking about basic information for website, you really need to read Google Webmaster Guidelines for websites: Google Guidelines.