Traffic from Search Engines … Meh

Posted May 4th, 2011 / By Christopher in Social

Building traffic to your blog can be one of the most difficult challenges you take on as a blogger, but before you start worrying how to beat out the well established blogs in your niche that hold position number one for your exact keywords — maybe even your domain name — across all search engine indexes, remember that not all traffic comes from search engines.

Search engines get a lot of attention from bloggers because in a sense they provide a gamble for content publishers — play your cards just right and you’ll win millions … in traffic. What most people overlook is that it will take years upon years to play your hand, and even then, it’s still just a gamble.

As a professional in the search engines optimization field, I can assure you that SEO does matter — it’s not just the practice of hacking code and manipulating keywords. Rather, it’s something content publishers have been doing forever … it’s the practice of increasing the chances of connecting with the reader.

That said, SEO doesn’t have to be for everyone … because there are other places from which to get traffic to your blog.

Overflow from Other Blogs

One of the places I’ve personally seen a lot of success in terms of building traffic from scratch is on other blogs — more specifically, the comments sections of other blogs.

Think about it: Established blogs have already attracted the community of people you hope to attract, so getting involved as much as possible and positioning yourself as someone others might be interested in following is one of the most efficient ways to build solid traffic. For example, I’ve heard of people within the comments section here at FUEL connect, follow each other and discover what they might have missed out on had they not been active. Just imagine attracting this awesome community over to your own blog!

You might find these 5 Ways to Attract Readers with Comments helpful.

Forums

While they might not be as popular as the were in the late 90s, they can still provide quite a load of traffic if you find the right one.

You don’t want to be overly self-promotional — rather, you want to focus on helping people. The more you help people in a selfless light, the more likely people are to follow your work, connect with you, and visit your blog.

Guest Posting

This one really depends on the community surrounding the blog — I’ve had experiences where a guest post had generated hundreds and hundreds in traffic as well as those that resulted in literally nothing.

Again, it depends on the community and more specifically, how familiar they are with your work already. This is why it’s crucial to get involved in the comments section of the blog, introduce yourself, provide your insight, ask questions, connect with people, and make friends in the comments sections of blogs before you submit a guest post … otherwise, you’re looked at as the blogger obviously just posting a guest post to get traffic.

Communities want to follow people that care about them … not people that treat them like just another number in their analytics.

Social Networks

Tap into the large networks, such as Facebook, as well as the lesser knowns specific to your niche. Where ever your readers might be hanging out online, you need to be there as well.

The benefit of social networks aren’t merely that you can connect with someone interested, but that they might share you with their circle of friends.

Social Bookmarking / Sharing

While this is still a bit of a gamble — okay, it’s definitely still a gamble, — it’s driven by people, not an algorithm. So if you create content that helps people, entertains people, or provides them with the latest news, you might just experience a community reaction and thus receive huge amounts of traffic.

This takes place on Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and any other website or service that enables people to share content.

Print

While this may seem like a step in a direction you don’t think you can pursue, you should ask yourself the simple question, “why not?”

Submitting an article to a magazine isn’t all that different from submitting a guest post to an online publication. The quality of content online might not be as strict as print, editorially speaking, but I know I’d be pretty worried as to how to keep up with blogs that consistently generate and publish quality content.

Never underestimate the power of that little byline … it can lead to a great increase in traffic.

So, overall, I think I’ve made it clear that while search engines get all the attention, they might be the least efficient way to build traffic. It’s simply a gamble that you may or may not win depending on the competition of the search phrases for which you’re trying to rank, the status of your blog and how search engines view you in light of what other blogs and websites tell them about you (aka how many links you have and what type).

Focus on cutting out the gamble and connecting with the community directly if you want to build traffic. You might not experience the thrill of receiving thousands of visitors from search engines when you break news … but that’s not to say you can’t enjoy that traffic with a little help from your friends (aka, the major influences in your niche).

What other sources do you use to build traffic other than search engines?

Christopher Rice is a publisher, entrepreneur, and abstract artist in Santa Monica. He’s a founder of Wearabl, editor of CreativeBlogger, and creator of Gumball. Friend him up at Twitter | Google+ | Facebook | Pinterest |