Blog traffic: Link out to generate and keep traffic


The web and social media will forget you if you're not visible frequently enough. Building a brand that lasts doesn't happen when you disappear or slack off for any period of time. It's also important to remember that if all other things are equal, Google will rank a site that is more consistently updated higher, than one that's not updated often.For the long-term, build your campaign around this: consistency and momentum build traffic and audience.

When the web was younger, one could put up a static website with information that went unchanged for years, and it would bring in plenty of traffic once it had a few decent inbound links and the popular search engine of the time indexed it. It didn't happen for everyone, but at the time the concept of building a site and letting it sit there attracting visitors without working too much on it was a reality.

The web has evolved to a point where the frequency of your output, and the prominence of your brand, are important factors in deciding how much traffic is piped through to your site from other sources. Because there's so much information going around the web now, much of it is outdated quickly, so the freshest sources of information are rewarded.

So be consistent. Set a frequency of posting and stick to it. Decide which social sites you'll use to build a following and stick to it until you've built a network that's easy to maintain before becoming active on even more sites. Find a writing style and approach that your readers like and stick to it.

Consistency will do more to build your brand than anything else. With consistency comes momentum. Keep up your posting frequency as one of the most common mistakes bloggers make, is to forget to post for a few weeks and think they can pick up where they left off once they get the time to push out another post.

Keep publishing content of the sort that your readers want to see. That doesn't mean more of the same – you need to become good at spotting trends in your readership. If you're consistent enough in the way you run your blog, momentum naturally follows.

Stop that momentum, and you'll have to start building your traffic and following all over again. That's simply how the world of blogging works. It's filled with short attention spans and too much information to fit in them. Having consistency and momentum doesn't mean you shouldn't innovate. It just means you shouldn't stop innovating halfway along the road to success.

Linking out can generate traffic for you. That may sound counter-intuitive, since linking to other sites may mean people click on a link and don't return. Truthfully, if a user clicks a link and doesn't return, they probably wouldn't have stuck around for long even if you hadn't linked out.

But if you recommend an excellent resource to them, they may come back and subscribe, because making good recommendations is one way to build credibility and respect. Specifically, it builds the reader's trust in you as a media gatekeeper: someone who filters the mass of information and presents only the useful material to their readership.

Traditionally, this role was that of newspaper editors and news program producers. Despite the hurrah about the web ending the control of gatekeepers over what we read, we still tend to gravitate towards them in an ad-hoc way. There's just too much information to deal with otherwise. Moreover, linking out can draw the attention of the person who wrote the piece that you're linking to, and can build goodwill with them. This helps you whether that person has a readership of one or one million.

One blogger I met said their blog had "made it" in terms of traffic after they linked to another prominent blogger. When the prominent blogger checked their recent backlinks, they were impressed with the post they were referenced in and linked back to them. The support of that popular blogger meant the new blogger got enough traffic and credibility to get a serious following going. Be generous with linking out. It doesn't hurt you to do it, and it makes people feel warm and fuzzy inside.

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This article was sent to us by: Lane Shorman at 02172011

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