I am going to put together a longer than usual post today. I want to share with you a break through I have recently achieved in my understanding of how to maximize natural traffic to my website. I really like to make money blogging, and I like to help people succeed. You can succeed at both of these at the same time if you do things correctly. I am going to cover 10 concepts I feel are critical to getting a lot of natural traffic to your blog. When people ask me how to make money blogging, I tell them to build a nice blog and work on getting natural traffic to it. Here are 10 solid tips that will really help you get an ever growing amount of natural traffic to your website or blog. These are tested by me and they work. Here they are:
1. Top Shelf Content On Your Posts — This is an absolute must. You are not going to find yourself making money blogging if you do not provide great content on your site. When people come to your site, if they don’t see something that is going to “flip their switch” and compel them to read your post, they are gone… very quickly. If you think you are going to make a lot of money on your blog from Adsense of Amazon or ClickBank with junk content, you are just wrong.
You want to only put well thought out, top shelf, highly relevant content on your site. If you need to do some research or take your time writing out some excellent posts, by all means do this. Your content is your backbone. If you can not get anything interesting and exciting on your blog, you are going to suffer the consequences with very low earnings. It is in your best interest to do the work and put up great content on your blog. It is a good sound business decision to treat your blog content as the super important asset that it is for you.
2. Keyword Richness Is Vital — You do not want to “keyword stuff”, which means you do not want to use your keyword 10 times in a 400 word post. There are a lot of people that believe this is the right way to get your pages to rank, but it is not true at all. If your post does not flow and make good sense to your readers, the search engines are not going to rate it well.
You want to use a few different “related” keywords and phrases as you build out your blog posts. The variety will be nice for your readers, and you will find that you will eventually rank well for several keyword phrases rather than just your one primary phrase. This will cause a huge boost to your overall traffic over time.
3. Correct Use Of A Good Variety Of Anchor Text Phrases — Yes that is a mouthful. It is a complex concept that has taken me a good while to fully understand and embrace. Your anchor text is one of the major ways you have to communicate with the search engines on what your site is about and what is important in your eyes.
If you only optimize for one keyword phrase in your anchor text, you are limiting the “reach” that your site has. If you are building a lot of posts (and you should be), the use of the same phrase over and over is not good for your readers. It is also not good for your site in the eyes of the search engines. You want to use your main keywords and some closely related terms in your anchor text.
You are going to have to map out a plan to make this happen effectively and efficiently. You want your post to read naturally and it must make sense, but you can write your posts with your anchor text in mind. When you manage a good diversity in your anchor text, you are building a blog that has a much broader appeal to the search engines.
4. Primary And Related Keywords Cast A Net — One of the key things I have learned over the last few months is the major affect that keyword grouping have on your rankings and traffic in general. I have always had a pretty singular approach to keywords. I would do a lot of work to rank for a particular key word phrase and then move on to the next one. I spent pretty much no time at all on “related keywords” that are the primary keyword with some additions or modifiers or keywords that have a similar meaning.
These keywords are very close in Google’s eyes to your primary keywords. When you weave these keywords into your existing posts, there is a strong additive or even multiplicative effect to the traffic generated by that given post. If you can simply focus on integrating some “related keywords” into a post, you can get a lot of bang for your writing. You will not have to write so many posts or articles to rank well for a keyword.
When I finally got this all straight in my head, I was able to slightly modify my writing style to be more inclusive of the “family of keywords” related to my main “money” keyword. This has allowed me to see a significant and almost immediate increase in my traffic over less than 10 additional posts. This is a breakthrough for me and I wanted to make sure I shared it with you.
5. Post Weekly Or More Frequently — You are not going to have an active blog that keeps your readers engaged if you post sporadically. You need to develop a posting cadence that is predictable to your readers. You really want to get repeat readers to your blog. There are a lot of people that just fight every day to get new people to their blog. This is crazy in my opinion. Why do I say it is crazy? I say this because I used to think this way and I finally figured out how “nuts” that kind of thinking is.
Your base readership are the people you will really connect with. They are the people that you will hear from. They are the ones that will give you feedback… the good…. the bad…. and the ugly sometimes. These are the people that will allow you to build some predictable income from your blog with. You will not be taking money from these people’s pockets. You will be helping them and they will be happy to come back to your blog and occasionally purchase products and services that you recommend.
You want to make sure you have some fresh information for these loyal readers when they decide to come back to your blog. I have found that if I don’t post every week, pretty soon a few weeks go by. This is not a healthy thing for you, your blog or your readers. I just put some “post to blog today” time on my schedule and make it happen at least weekly. I highly recommend that you do the same.
Now moving on to links….
6. Must Link Externally — You are not going to get much traffic by posting on your blog and doing the occasional submission to Ezine Articles. The traffic you will generate this way is a tiny fraction of what you need to get a strong blog established. You will probably be thinking, “I have heard that is all I need to do for my blog traffic”. Well the fact is, that may have been true three or five years ago. It simply is not true today.
You need links to your posts to survive into today’s Internet. Yes, I said links to your posts. This is another one of those lessons it has taken me a long time to process and internalize. Each of your blog’s pages is ranked by Google on it’s own merit.
If you do not make a post or page on your site seem important to the search engines, it will just become lost out in the “cyber desert” with all the other millions of single pages and posts that aren’t deemed to be important. You need to learn to get links back to your important posts and pages. Do you need to do it for every post and page. It depends on how many you have, how much time you have to link and how important the content on that post is.
If you want your best work to be found and given respect on the search engines, you are going to have to do some external linking to it. Once I finally got this in my head, I started making a lot more progress in getting good results in the search engines for the keywords and phrases that are critical to my success.
7. Should Link Internally — I like to think of internal linking like having your home services hooked up correctly. You can have shelter in a dwelling without electricity and water. You can survive this way for a while. When you have your wiring and plumbing hooked up correctly, you will live a lot more comfortably. The same goes for your internal links within your site.
You want to link to your most popular and desirable posts from other posts on your blog. This will pass the “internal authority” of your site towards your key posts. You always want to let Google know which posts are most important to you. If you are linking a lot of your posts to a central “authority post”, this will help that page rank better.
It will also highlight this post to Google and will help pull this particular post higher up for your “money keyword phrase”. All you need to do is find your “money keyword” in your regular posts and link it with anchor text to your “authority post”. You can use your money keyword for each one of these posts, as it is all done inside your site. This internal linking will make your site much stronger, and will give you some control over what posts you want to highlight to Google and the world.
8. Get A Variety Of Single Links From Many Pages — If you are building a new blog and want it to really shine in the eyes of the search engines, you have some work to do. There is no way of sugar coating this. It is reality. You just have to roll up your sleeves and come up with a linking plan that you can accomplish. You need to get links to your main URL and your key posts from outside sites. It is best that these links come to your site one way. You can accomplish this with article submissions, guest posting, blog commenting, forum commenting and quite a few other ways.
The links that have improved my site’s rankings the fastest are guest posting links. I will submit a blog post to another persons blog and get a link or two back to my site. This can be a tedious process, but really makes your site much stronger. When you are linking to you site, think in terms of being willing to do things that others will not (or can not) do. These types of activities are what makes your blog look real and relevant to Google.
I do not recommend doing a large amount of social bookmarking or article directory blasting. These activities may make you feel like you are getting a lot of links to your site. What you are really doing is showing the search engines you are lazy and are willing to cut corners. If you want long term income from your blog, you should avoid this type of thinking and behavior. Google’s tracking and analysis tools are second to none. If you think you can “game” the system, you are wrong. You are putting your blog and all your work in jeopardy. Take the high road and get great one way back links to your site. It is the best path to take and will serve you well in the long run.
9. Do Not Rely On Low Quality Links — If you have no quality one way back links to your site, it is not going to rank well. Google has a process called filtering where they basically just discount a lot of the poor quality links you generate. You want to compare your site to any authority site in your niche. A good authority site will have a few great links, some average links and a lot of poor links. That is the profile of a great site. You want your link profile to mirror these numbers as much as is possible. You want to start out getting as many quality one way links back to your site as possible. This will give your site a favorable early impression in Google’s eyes.
This is very important for your site. You only have one chance to make a first impression. This saying is just as valid for showing your site off to Google as it is when meeting someone face to face. You want your site to look great behind the scenes to the search engines. The quality and source of your links is basically how you are dressed and groomed when you meet Google.
If you have a bunch of spammy links coming back to your site, it is not going to make your site look good to Google. This “bad first impression” will set you back months in your rankings and may even get your site “de-indexed” or sent to “the sandbox” for 180 days. You just do not want this headache. As much as it can be a real pain to hear this, you are going to have to build out your blog slow and methodical and get some great links back to your home and post pages. It is the “new reality” for ranking well with Google, so you might as well embrace it. Trying to work around or outside this reality is just not a good idea.
10. Spend A 3:1 Ratio On Links To Posts — This concept really blew my mind when I finally “got it”. I had been trained and indoctrinated to believe that posting great “stuff” on my blog and doing a few articles in Ezine Articles would jump start my traffic on a blog and it would grow from there. That actually used to work pretty well, even a year or two ago. Things have changed and there is just a “new reality” that I mentioned above.
Google is getting better and better at sorting out blogs that are real with real content and all others. This sorting and sifting mechanism they have is solid and getting better all the time. If you are going to rank well and stay ranked for any type of competitive keywords, you are going to have to have a strong linking strategy.
You are going to have to spend well above 50% of your content effort at getting solid back links to your posts. This seemed so “backwards” and “counter intuitive” to me that I just rejected it for a long time and kept doing what had worked for me for a long time in the past. I finally got tired of beating my head against my monitor and spend a good deal of time and effort learning what is really going on with the search engines versus following old doctrine that was not serving me well.
I now spend most of my time getting quality back links to my home page and my key post pages. I am heavily involved with guest posting and getting as many one way links back to my site from as many different URLs as possible. This change in thinking has made a dramatic positive affect on my traffic and income. I can’t make you think the way I do. I know this. All I can do is share with you what is working for me and hope that you will take a look at your traffic and content generation.
In closing, I have come to realize that high quality, unique content is indeed king on the Internet now. I have also learned the hard way that linking is just super critical to my online success today.
I realized if I want to make money blogging, I was going to have to embrace the “new reality” instead of fighting it. It has taken me multiple years and many dozens of hours of training, mentoring and coaching to get where I am at today. I hope you enjoyed this somewhat lengthy post and would welcome any comments you have. You can Skype me at patmac11 if you would like to chat. This is my preferred method of communication. Have a great day and enjoy your blogging!
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I agree with your Make Money Blogging — It’s All About Posts and Links| Blog Earning Secrets Articles, excellent post.
I agree with your Make Money Blogging — It’s All About Posts and Links| Blog Earning Secrets Articles, good post.
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