Traffic Generation: Using The Old And Boring Hooks Correctly

We all want traffic. That is the whole point of this traffic generation contest. Our blogging success is measured by our traffic. The money we earn, the popularity, the number of sales we make- all depend on one thing – TRAFFIC.

That is why people from successful blogs are conducting this contest by offering their time, effort, hard work, support and money – for us to learn the best traffic generation methods out there, put them to work and succeed with our blogs.

Every blogger is looking for new tips and techniques everyday to generate web traffic to their site. But in this process they either completely forget what they already know or they are not interested in doing the old stuff! That’s pathetic.

So what you already know about Traffic Generation methods?

1. Provide quality content – you have probably heard (or read about) that a million times at various places, but is still the King of all tips in this direction.

2. Do a social promotion of your blog posts – This again is the most commonly talked about and the most boring tip, but works.

3. Network with other bloggers – A potential tip, not only for traffic generation, but for your overall and long term success.

4. Do guest posting on big blogs – Again, a very potential tip to consider.

5. Comment on other blogs – Most of you will be already doing this. Good for traffic, networking and building backlinks.

Well, I would say that every blogger would know all of these (and even more) for traffic generation. But the point is, if you are one of those bloggers who knows these well-known tips for generating traffic, are you doing them with your blog? I am sure you will do some but not all of them. And, even if you are doing all of them, I am not sure if you are doing it correctly.

In the following I am going to tell you certain things that you either

(i) probably don’t know already (or)

(ii) already know them, but are not trying them out (or)

(iii) you are not doing them correctly.

For (ii) the reasons may be that you are busy or lazy, in other words, you may be afraid to try something out new, you may not have the expertise to do them and so on.

I can help you out with (i) and (iii) in the following. I am going to give you an inside scoop. Fine, now before telling you the hooks that work, I want to explain the correctness of certain things.

Comment on Other Blogs:

I know what you are thinking. You are doing it already. But are your doing it correctly?

So you have a list of interesting and potential blogs in your niche, which you read everyday and leave comments on them on a daily basis, very sincerely. But on what basis do you choose blogs to comment on?

You have to make your choice based on the following factors:

1. The blog is quite big or has a very big readership.

2. The blog has a very good PR; well, that is old and many are not happy with the little green thing on the toolbar. Neither am I. Even with the actual PR at the Google PR checker page. What you can look into is the Mozrank for a blog. A good mozrank = an authoritative blog, I can say that much.

3. The activity throughout the blog. Number of comments, tweets and other social shares.

4. The accessibility of the blogger. The blogger should be friendly and at least return 1 in 1000 of a favor leaving a comment at your blog or press the Tweet button once. You know that’s a lot of traffic when the blogger is having a big social background.

So commenting on such blogs should return you a lot of traffic. I just say “lot” because it depends on how frequently you comment and how regular you are at it. But I can guarantee that it will be a lot.

Deep Linking:

Deep linking your blog posts is very important for SEO. For traffic? Yes it is important for search engine traffic. The more you deeply do your internal linking the more pages get crawled by the bots, the more authority and more visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).

You can do deep linking in two ways:

1. It is a must that you should relate any blog post of yours to at least a couple of previous posts in your blog. This way you see that almost all the pages are linked and none of the pages are left abandoned in a rusted cupboard.

The plugins SEO Smart Links and Insights will be of great help.

Word of caution: Don’t overdo this! If you supply too much links within post pages, every page has a drain of the link juice (even if it is to another page of your site). And, it is not good in the eyes of Google! So a couple to a maximum of 4 links per post is fine.

2. Use CommmentLuv Plugin for deeplinking your own blog posts. When you leave a comment on your blog, don’t forget to choose from any of the recent 10 posts and leave the link. Do this for all your comments and you have a nice pitch. Again the word of caution applies here too! If you have the habit of replying to every comment on your post, you might be at risk.

Provide Quality Content:

Your content needs to be unique, cutting edge stuff. This will automatically attract a lot of traffic. And your posts will be easily promoted by word of mouth (or clicks). Make sure you are not writing theories always (although you can write some occasionally).

Give practical and usable tips (ya I have underlined “usable” to emphasize it). Help people to solve their issues, revisit a problem. More importantly, find your own writing voice. And this will brand you among the crowd.

Remember quality should go hand in hand with uniqueness; that will help you generate a lot of interested traffic and fans.

Provide Findable Content:

Provide findable content or concentrate on search engine optimization, in other words. If you don’t know about SEO, you gotta learn it. You cannot leave your blog posts without optimizing them for search engines. If you do so, you are not producing content that is findable.

If your content is not findable, how could you expect the traffic to come in? I am not going to tell you the basics or details of SEO; that is a separate topic. But that needs a mention here.

So what are the old but valid hooks when it comes to traffic generation?

Hook 1:

Quality Content

– the type of content as I have explained above. So the saying “Content is King” is still one of the vital aspects for traffic.

Hook 2:

SEO

– Ya you need to make it easier for people to find your content. Don’t lock your content down a pit and expect people to find it. You need to do interlinking, build backlinks and do all nifty things to optimize your posts for search engines. I think I don’t have to mention about keyword research!

Hook 3:

Social Promotion

– Ya the same boring stuff still works great when it comes to traffic. You may be sick of hearing it, but it works! So you gotta do it!

Apart from doing the promotion yourself, you have to make it easy for your readers to promote your stuff too. Make sure you embed Retweet, Facebook Share/Like and any other potential social sharing buttons. If you are into videos, create some and distribute them via the various video streaming sites available.

I auto tweet the post once immediately after it is published and do a manual tweet also. I also use the Tweet Old Posts plugin. OnlyWire is great if you want to do a mass promotion at one go.

Hook 4:

Networking

– Connect with as many as possible. Here is a list of 8 kinds of tribes you need to network with. Your networking capacity is your asset.

Hook 5:

Keep it clean and fast

– This could be something you never worry about. A clean and fast site is good in the eyes of search engines. If you could please the search engines, you could rank higher in the SERPs. This means more eyeballs will see your content!

Check you site’s loading time. Fix those issues that cause slow loading. Keep your site free from errors and broken links (I use the Broken Links Checker plugin). Opt for good quality themes; I personally use Thesis Theme at my blog – Clean coding and hassle free.

My traffic has almost doubled since I started using Thesis.

Hook 6:

Guest posting

– If you are not doing it already, you gotta consider it. If you are doing it, see that you are doing it effectively. Guest posting puts your face everywhere on the internet.

You easily become popular on other people’s (usually A-Listers’) platform. Your blog gains good exposure to a lot of people (which translates to a lot of traffic). And, you get very high quality backlinks, boosting your authority, SEO and findability.

In summary, I know that the most trivial and boring solutions still work when it comes to traffic generation. The key lies in identifying and implementing the right hooks in the right way to get a big catch of traffic.

If you want traffic, don’t wait. Don’t be lazy. Start to correctly implement the stuff you already know before going on a hunt to find new tips and techniques.

PS: I very much hope I have provided something of use to you here. I am sure that I have made you think and revisit the well-know traffic generation techniques.

Now, will ya promote me as crazy as you can? I am sure it is easy for you to promote this post with the social sharing buttons. You can also promote my post with OnlyWire at one go. All I need is your support; nothing else. You can promote everyday too; I will love it!

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