Virtually every serious online marketer uses blogs as a key part of their online marketing strategy. Blogs are actually among the most powerful online marketing tools today.
Blogs can be used in their own right to promote products and services but are mostly used to point targeted traffic to sites and also for SEO (search engine optimization). Blogs have this ability to generate links and traffic rapidly and almost effortlessly. It all happens so fast that it is not unusual to see a blog building up from a cold start to hundreds of thousands of visitors within just a few short weeks. However the truth is that very few marketers really understand blogs or the most effective way of building up traffic quickly in any blog.
History of Blogs Reveals High Traffic SecretBlogs or web logs as they were referred to in the early days, have always been a medium where people linked to each other extensively and regularly. That is the real secret behind the phenomenal rise and growth of blogs from nowhere. However as blogs have become more numerous and widespread, somehow this strength and early secret seems to have been lost.The result is that vast majorities of bloggers are scrambling for traffic and do not quite understand how to get it. All sorts of traffic generating tools and sites specifically targeted at blogs have emerged and most of them are making some serious money off bloggers desperate for traffic. Yet there are blogs that have gained enormous traffic by simply linking to a single popular and relevant other blog. Others have done it by linking to half a dozen relevant blogs. |
Viral Linking EffectThe initial blog or couple of other blogs that your blog is linked to is usually just for starters. What normally happens is that dozens of other blogs will follow the lead and quickly join in and link to your blog. The result is that within a very short time, your blog starts to enjoy enormous volumes of traffic from both the links and also directly from search engines because the links will tend to cause the blog to immediately shoot up to the top of all major search engine rankings.There are of course a number of things that you will have to do to encourage other blogs to link to you. |
It Helps If Your Blog Complements OthersThe fine art of blogging seems to have quickly been lost to many who have hardly bothered to study the history of blogs or the habits of the initial bloggers. Most of the initial folks who kept web logs perfected the art of positioning their web logs, as they were known in the early days, in such a way that many other web logs will want to link to them. The easiest way of doing this is by complementing other blogs. Blogs are all about co-operating with others as well as exchanging views and opinions. The blogosphere took off largely because it is one huge conversation happening in real time.Many bloggers these days fail to capture that essence of blogs. The result is that they hardly generate any traffic worth mentioning, for their blogs and many of them quiote often start wondering what all the fuss over blogs is about. |
The Keywords Traffic GameOne of the traffic and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) skills that the early bloggers mastered was the use of high-traffic generating keywords. There are actually several techniques that use keywords, which can be applied, to any site to generate loads of free targeted traffic from search engines. One of the most popular is the use of less competitive keywords (usually in the form of phrases rather than a single word). Because the keyword phrase is less competitive it will take a blog right to the top of search engine rankings for the phrase which attracts a fair number of searches on a daily basis.Yet another keyword strategy is to take advantage of current affairs and to come up with popular keywords which other sites are yet to pay attention to and which will therefore not be competitive at all. You can even use current affairs and news that is of great interest to the public to predict the future popularity of certain keywords. |
These are the sort of skills that bloggers badly need to be able to reap maximum rewards and benefits from the power of blogs.