You’ve got a blog and you’re putting a good amount of effort into it. You’re writing away, posting articles and doing what you can to get some readership.

The problem is that nobody is reading your blog. It seems no matter what you do you’re not gaining any traffic. And you know you’re writing good stuff.

What do you do?

Follow the five stupidly easy steps below and watch the traffic roll in.

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Any method of making money online requires traffic. You need to have traffic. The more traffic that you have to your website, the larger will be your ability to make money online.

So, the question is: how do you get traffic?

And that is the age-old question. Several of the past days in this series have touched on various ways to do it. People are devising new, creative ways to attract new audience every day. There is no single right way to generate traffic to your site. It is as much an art as it is a science.

So, given that there is no magic pill for traffic, I will simply list out some ideas which we can then expand upon in the future.

1. Set up a blog and start posting regularly. Blogs work well with search engines, and the “pinging” helps promote your site when you post things with links to other sites.
2. Use Google Adwords. This will cost you some money, but you have full control over how much you spend. Adwords is essentially guaranteed traffic. It WILL send you new visitors. It is then up to you to create a site which converts a visitor into a potential sale.
3. Participate in social media. If you play an active role in social media when it comes to your niche, people who are interested will take note. Use your profiles to create links to your site. And, where appropriate, you can mention your site.
4. Post meaningful comments on relevant blogs, providing the URL to your website when asked.
5. Create videos and post them to sites like Youtube. Use TubeMogul to post your video to several video sites at once to gain maximum exposure. Do something buzz worthy and provide a link to your video along with the video as well as IN the video.
6. Write articles for your target market and post them on article hubs where they could be picked up for republishing by other sites. Sites like Isnare and are good places to post your article. Articehubs.com has more information on this.
7. Write a free report and use that as a way to attract people to your site. You might even offer to allow other sites in your market to also give away your report as a value-added benefit to their visitors.
8. Participate in relevant forums and use the forum signature to place a link to your website.
9. Approach bloggers in your market and make contact with them. Offer them material for a blog post - something that would be interesting to their audience. And perhaps you can get a link to your site along with it.
10. Offer to guest post on other websites.

Obviously, we’re only scratching the surface here.

Obviously, you can always sell products on the Internet. But, what about selling a service?

A lot of people maintain websites in order to be a public face to services which they offer, whether offline or online. This is always great because the web can put your offering in front of the eyes of many people easily. More and more, people are turning to the Internet even to find local, offline business services. The yellow pages are so yesterday!

When you offer a service via your website, the most important advice I could provide would be to NOT have your website be little but a digital brochure. I see so many business websites out there that do nothing but say what they do and have a link to contact them. Boring! And it is even worse when they use some of the classic mistakes of marketing, like calling themselves #1 or using “they” when they are only a one-man show.

As I said earlier in this series, the era of doing business with big corporations is nearing an end. People do business with PEOPLE. They want real people.

Not only that, but you need to give people a reason to come to your website. Why would anybody come to it? The classic mistake of brochure style business sites is that people would only happen upon the site if they were looking specifically for that business. But, nobody is searching for your business name on Google!

So, some general advice (since this series is all about just hitting highpoints) for offering a service through your site is:

1. Provide real VALUE on your business website. Start a blog and offer freely available content having to do with the area of your business. Offer free value to your potential clientele. Much of your clientele is going to discover you because they’re searching for an answer. So, give them the answer and then say “Oh, by the way, you can hire me for more personalized service.”. This is a much better way to market your service online then a brochure-style website.
2. Don’t hesitate to hire somebody who knows what they’re doing to create your website for you if you don’t have the expertise. An amateur-looking website can have the exact opposite effect that you are looking for. If you look amateur, people will write you off as such. Remember, you have only a few seconds online to make a first impression once somebody arrives at your site.
3. Use local search. A very high percentage of people who search locally for something are actively looking to hire somebody! For example, if I search for “tampa bay mechanics”, am I just looking for general info about my car? No, very likely I am looking for a mechanic to fix my car! So, make sure your site is geographically centric if your business is. Use the name of your city in your website and in your site’s title. And if you do any internet advertising, make sure  you geo-target visitors specifically in your city.

Bonus Tip: Even if your business can cater to many cities, you can take advantage of local search. Create multiple landing pages to your site, all targeting different cities. Then let the search engines index these. Anybody searching for your product in those cities can then find you, even if you’re based elsewhere.

You have an idea for a website or a product. You invest time and maybe money into creating it. You get it all ready. It looks gorgeous! It is time for launch. You upload it to your web server. You pull it up in your web browser. Wow! There it is. You’re in business.

But, nobody is coming.

What the HELL is going on?!

Well, what the hell is going on is that nobody knows about you! You’ve built a website but there are no roads to it. It’d be like building a house out in the middle or the forest and having no roads to get to it. Well, that house is going to be hidden, right?

So, the whole adage of “if you build it, they will come” is most certainly not true when it comes to the Internet. Setting up a website and a product is only stage one of setting up an online business. Stage two is promotion and marketing to make people aware of you. Smart people will be working on stage two while stage one is under way.

Getting People to Come

There are a multitude of ways to get people to come to your website, and each could probably be an entire body of information on it’s own. But, here is a basic list to get your feet wet:

1. Running a blog on your site.
2. Posting in relevant forums (with a link to your site in your signature)
3. Posting on relevant blogs
4. Google Adsense (probably the single best way to start getting traffic from scratch)
5. An Email List
6. Joint Venture Deals
7. Guest Blogging
8. Article Marketing
9. Social Media (be careful when using this as a marketing medium. It can backfire if done incorrectly).

Outflow Equals Inflow

If you want an inflow of traffic, be prepared to outflow. Your efforts will be almost directly proportional. To the degree you are active in getting your name out there on other sites in as many places as you can, you will see an inflow of traffic. If you ever want to get more traffic, outflow more.

Period.

There is an old saying: “If you build it, they will come”. Well, that is just plain NOT TRUE when it comes to a website. It takes work to get people to your website. The good news is that a blog is an ideal platform for promoting and, just by having a blog, you’re already on your way. In this video, I’ll give you 10 tips to start driving readers to your blog.

Video Length: 17:28

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