This post is part of the Lessons Learned From My First Year of Blogging Series.
Traffic is one of the more popular topics, and one of the questions I get asked a lot is “how do I get traffic?”
Often it seems like people are looking for a quick-fix, because they say they’ve read my articles on how to increase website traffic and guest blogging.
However, they’re still asking me a question that has been answered thousands of times.
It all keeps coming back to the fundamentals: it’s about picking one strategy and getting good at it. In my case, it was guest posting.
The funny thing is that Wake Up Cloud gets nowhere near the traffic that some of my websites do.
One of my websites just hit 2,500 unique visitors per day, and it’s still growing, while Wake Up Cloud has averaged 300-400 daily visitors in 2010.
My Original Traffic Strategy
I started off commenting on a massive amount of blogs for the first few weeks.
I quickly realized that guest blogging packed more punch, so I went crazy with that instead, and the results were good.
But I couldn’t keep up the pace of 30-40 guest posts per month, so I started looking at which blogs were sending me the most traffic.
I eventually settled on just a few blogs, which still got me 80% of the traffic, but with around 5% of the effort.
If you want more, check out my post on how I went from 0 to 1,012 subscribers in 101 days.
One of My Secrets
I leveraged the traffic I got from my guest posts by sending people to a landing page on my blog which sold my email list.
What I mean by sold is that it made people want to subscribe and opt-in, because I was offering a free ebook if they hopped on the list and subscribed to updates.
Most bloggers link to their homepage and leave it at that.
That’s fine, but if you want to grow fast, you may want to do what I did.
What Should a Beginner Do?
Simplify.
The fewer things you can focus on the better.
Make sure you have a main keyword for your blog that you can target (such as I have earn money online for this blog).
This will require that you learn SEO and how to use keywords, but it will be worth it.
I use Market Samurai (free trial), they also have free videos in their dojo that are excellent for anyone that wants to learn keyword research better.
Your main keyword will give you focus, and it will help you come up with topics to write blog posts on.
Many bloggers shun keywords and SEO, but what keywords really are is the language that your market uses.
If your market is talking about natural food, why would you want to talk about organic food?
Small tweak, big results.
When you’ve got that down, start writing high-quality content for your blog, and begin guest posting.
What Would I Do Differently If I Started Today?
I would be stricter about keywords.
I started Wake Up Cloud for fun, so I wasn’t worried about SEO that much, but in hindsight it would’ve been a lot more fun now if I did it then 
.
I would do exactly what I wrote above:
- Find a main keyword
- Find related keywords
- Write great blog posts around those keywords
- Write guest posts
- Rinse and repeat
When you’re just starting out, you’re excited, and you can’t wait to get going, but if you take a few extra moments to plan and research, you won’t get frustrated after 2-3 months when the results are less than stellar.
Wrapping Up the Year
Before I created Wake Up Cloud, I was happily plugging along, building my websites, and making stuff happen.
2010 was a teaching year for me. I wanted to share what I knew.
From that came new realizations, new connections, and of course new challenges.
Working with and helping people has shown me some of the most common patterns and problems that we all face.
I’ll leave you with the answer to one of the biggest ones: there are no magic bullets, no magic strategies, and no shortcuts to success.
There are many ways you can earn money online. It all comes down to what you want to do. After that it’s up to you to stick with it until it works.
Get feedback.
Don’t give up.
{ 9 comments }
Great advice Henri!
I was fortunate enough to learn all about keyword research by starting with SBI. However, it’s more expensive and I don’t have all the handy WP Plug-ins.
But yeah building traffic is what everyone’s talking about. It just takes time, patience, and lots of consistent hard work knowing you won’t have instant results.
SBI is great. It’s not a requirement to have all the handy plugins that come with WP, and they can sometimes be a distraction.
Yes. Patience!
Thanks for stopping by, Sean!
I love how you break this stuff down and keep it simple, Henri.
Thanks for sharing what worked for you, but most of all thanks for emphasizing the idea to just pick one strategy and get good at it.
You mention guest posting here as well as blog commenting (which you indicate wasn’t so effective). What other traffic-building strategies did you consider but decide against? Did you decide on guest posting because it was the best strategy for you and your blog, or was it just the best strategy that aligned with what you liked to do (write articles)?
I’d say both. I’m good at writing, and it aligns well with what I do.
To be honest, I didn’t try many other traffic strategies, but then again, I already knew of several, such as SEO and article marketing, which I use on other websites.
Like I said in the article, in hindsight I regret not using more of what I already knew.
For guest posting though, I went with the strategy that people were getting results with. Guest posting came up way above any other strategy, so I thought it must work for me if it works for others.
Thanks for reading, Matt!
When I started my blog related to micro businesses, I decided to try a completely different strategy from what I used on my travel blog which became really successful in a very short period of time. The new starategy didn’t work as well as the previous, so I guess if I could go back and do something differently, I would focus on helping people one by one and communicating on twitter.
But one of the most most effective strategies still stay guest posting and article marketing, no doubt about that.
Two great concepts – simplify and stick to one system long enough to get good at it. Not doing those two things is what really causes a lot of people to stall out at first. Thanks for boiling it down to simple terms Henri.
Great tips. I like the idea of sending readers of your guest post to a landing page promoting your email list.
I find that I am writing about my passion, but my audience is perhaps limited. I wonder if I should target more with keywords that are quite unrelated or continue my writing?
It’s impossible for me to say. It could be that you need to build more links and it could be that you should go after more keywords.
The thing with traffic, especially from the search engines is that it takes time and patience.
Keep rocking!
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