Looking for traffic?
I don’t know about you guys, but I care a lot about my traffic.
Traffic means power and I love power.
In this little story I am going to tell you how I increased my traffic 10 times in 2 months time.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it is easy, but if done effectively you can see nice results quite fast. No, I didn’t worked 9 to 5 every day for 2 months, but I was on it every two days for a few hours.
All the work happened in December 2010 and January 2011 and it consisted in starting a well-planned link building campaign for one of my hair care blogs.
Traffic stats
I am going to start by showing you the results first.
Below you can find the screenshot taken from my Google Analytics account where you can see my traffic stats starting from December 2010 to May 2011.
As you can observe, before starting to implement this method I was getting on average 30 visitors a day and around 40 impressions or so.
You can pretty easily guess that I didn’t make much money off that SEO traffic, even though the niche I was in had a nice CPM.
Looking at the picture above you can see traffic increasing nicely during January and February 2011 just after I started my one way link building campaign. The daily traffic I get now averages 350 unique hits a day and close to 1000 page impressions still increasing slowly month by month.
Almost 90% of the traffic comes from Google searches, so the visitors reading the blog are really targeted; therefore the conversion rates are pretty good, generating a nice income considering that the traffic is still not that big after all.
The link building tips that I used to get my blog to rank so high in Google consists mostly of article submission and guest posting, but also some other activities like forum posting or Yahoo Answers replies.
These methods can be easily applied by anyone, however there are several tips and tricks I consider extremely important in achieving your goals in a shorter period of time.
Before we proceed I would like to mention that you should focus more on guest posting and article marketing, because two have been the most effective methods used.
Relevancy and authority
SEO is all about relevancy and authority.
You want to make sure that your guest posts will be published in a relevant place, on blogs or websites that are obviously in the same niche as yours, but more than that, on blogs that rank highly in Google for the keywords you are trying to rank for.
It is a good idea to have a keyword in mind when you are guest posting.
Take Problogger.net for example.
As you can see in the screenshot below, as I am writing this, Problogger.net ranks #1 in Google for the keyword “make money blogging”.
What does this mean?
It means that Google sees Problogger.net as the best resource on the internet on the “make money blogging” topic. Now, if you want to rank highlyt for the same keyword, who would you ask to give you reference?
It’s just like in the offline world.
Getting a link from Problogger.net and trying to rank for “make money blogging” is like applying for a job as a programmer and having a reference from Bill Gates.
See what my point is?
Anchor text
Having your guest post on relevant and established blogs is great, but having a good anchor text for your link is the ultimate goal you should have in mind.
This is very difficult as you cannot expect people to let you spam their blogs with SEO’d links. You usually get one or two links in the author box having the name of your blog as the anchor text.
However, you can get away with this if you own a nicely SEO’d domain name. Having keywords inside your domain name will give you an advantage.
One good example is dailyblogtips.com. Daniel could easily have his anchor text set to “Daily blog tips” because that is the name of his blog and, therefore, he will benefit from the advantage of having his keywords in the anchor text.
Don’t underestimate anchor text importance.
Quality
Make sure all the articles you are submitting to article directories or to other bloggers that accept guest authors are top quality, especially when you are posting for a high traffic blog.
Your article will be exposed to a very big audience so you want to make a good impression.
Don’t keep your best posts for yourself. Give them away.
Marketing Takeaway
What I wanted to tell you all with through this post is that you don’t have to be an internet guru to build your traffic.
All you need to do is have a strategy.
Make a plan.
Don’t just send out a whole bunch of guest posts randomly. Keep in mind four things: relevancy, authority, keywords and quality.
I would love to hear your experience with link building and other SEO best practices.
What is your strategy? How do you implement it? What were your results so far?
Feel free to leave your comments below.
Christian
Cristian is the owner and founder of Glorious Blogger. He gives free advices on various topics including blogging, SEO, monetizing and traffic building. You can also catching tweeting @gloriousblogger.
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