Confused and Frustrated - Need A LOT of HELP

Ok, you've got a blog. Awesome. How are you driving traffic to it?

Are you writing articles? How many? (HINT - 1 a day isn't going to cut it)
If you are writing articles, is that they only way you're driving traffic? You need to have multiple sources... You could also add a twitter account, a YouTube channel, build some backlinks (too many ways to do that to mention them all)....

We need a little more info, but I have a feeling that the general answer you're going to get is "Do MORE"

Write 5 articles a day (instead of 1)
Tweet 5 times a day (instead of 1)
you get the idea... MORE

Hope it helps,
James

In addition to what James said,

Are you sure that those articles you wrote are keyword-rich articles?

Submit the RSS Feed of those articles to RSS Feed directories such as FeedAgg.

Ping your blog each time you make a new post to your blog.

I highlighted the above point because it is very important.

Hi,
Check out our Free videos at SFM Video LCP there are 7 short videos going through everything you need.
Hope that helps
Val & Traci

-Do keyword research and put high traffic keywords with low competition in your articles.
-Take those blog posts and submit them to article directories.
-Submit your blog posts to social bookmarking sites.
-Add an autoresponder to your blog and begin gathering subscribers that you can send a newsletter to with the new posts outlined.
-Always keep researching and writing.

Your traffic will grow slowly. Once you have began building it up, monetize it with Adsense or Clickbank/Amazon affiliate links.

Joe,

What is your blog about? Also, you mention "good content". Are you paying for the content or is it self generated? Finally, which WordPress theme are you currently using?

Here is a great traffic strategy that is highly efficient concerning time.

Write one really high quality article. At least 700 words.

Submit article to blog and then to ezinearticles, and other article sites as well as make squidoo lenses, hubpages, etc.

Then, turn the article into a video. Read the article off and put pictures on the video to emphasis emotions, etc. You can hire someone from fiverr to do the voiceover if you aren't confident in your speaking ability. Upload to all the video sites.

Take the audio out of the video and upload to podcasting sites.

Take 10 articles and make it into an ebook. Upload to scribd or butterflyreports.com

Take ebook and turn it into a .exe file. Then upload it to software sites and submit the padfiles using padbot from incansoft.

Then start backlinking all the stuff with social bookmarks. Pull the rss feeds from all the places you can and submit those.

To go even further - take those articles and try get guest blogging positions. Take the video and get it on others blogs.

Syndicate syndicate syndicate!

Doing the above day in and out will quickly build you a lot of traffic pretty fast!

Rob

Hey Joe, I think you've got the wrong impression - 'most' people here do NOT make money.

It's actually very unusual for people to be consistently making money. Whatever impression you've got that makes you think you're the only one is just wrong.

Simplest way to drive traffic, other than what some of the people above have already stated, is immediately after you create a new post, go make 5-10 blog comments using the URL to the post as the link. After you do this for awhile, you'll start getting traffic.

Also get a twitter account, start following people, and install Twitter Tools. It will automatically post to twitter when you make a new post.

Use these and the other methods above to drive massive traffic to your site. It costs nothing but a little time.

Hardly. I lurked here for two years before I had the courage to post one question because I didn't want to sound stupid. It took me another year to make $100 in one month. I'm a slow learner...at least that's what my wife says

I built on that over time and now things are pretty good.

It takes time. Time to learn what works for you.

Never give up.


---Edit:

Go to Andy's blog, it's in his sig above this post, and read the Affiliate Marketing Insights articles #1-4. Awesome stuff!

Surveys I read say something like 90+% of online marketers make little or no money from their efforts. Online marketing is a long term project. One important point, in addition to all the marketing tips provided here, is to be sure to do correct on page optimization. Warrior member Daniel Tan has a good plugin SEOpresser. I used it and many pages moved up significantly in Google. After on page, it is a matter of link numbers and quality. Make sure your keywords are not too competitive, start with easy keywords first and then try the harder ones.

One thing you need to know is sites/blogs do not start getting tons of traffic in the twinkle of an eye. It needs to be nurtured and fed properly for it to grow.

Below are four steps to get your blog off the ground.

1. Pick five less competitive keywords that can generate a minimum of 20,000 unique visitors monthly if combined

2. Optimize your blog for your chosen keywords. I recommend wordpress selfhosted blog.

3. Start building back links to your blog

4. Add quality/unique content to your blog on a frequent basis


If you follow the four steps mentioned above you will soon land your blog on the first page of the search engine and you know what that means, lots of people to view your site.

You can't just concentrate on on-site stuff; you have to move off-site and promote yourself if you're ever going to get the results you want. You could have the greatest blog in the world, but if no one knows it's there, you're never going to get traffic.

So, how do you get traffic? You have a well-rounded marketing campaign. Like some of the above posters have said, write articles, find forums that are related to your niche, start Tweeting, start social bookmarking.

There's also another great way to market yourself that no one has mentioned - guest blogging. Look for blogs in your niche, contact the owners, and offer to do a guest post. The blog owner gets a little break from writing, and you get some great exposure. With a guest blog post, you get to put your link at the bottom (like a resource box in an article directory). With guest blogging, you're getting your name, your link, and your content out in front of targeted traffic (after all, if they're visiting the blog, they're already interested in your niche). All you have to do is create a great guest post that encourages people to visit your site - and, hopefully, become loyal readers of your blog!

Hello Joe -

I'm pretty sure that if you posted your website address and asked for ideas on how to improve it - you'd get plenty of answers just like you did for your traffic question!

If you don't feel comfortable asking here, may I suggest heading over to Lynn Terry's Clicknewz.com? She has a lot of great information and her own forum that is very helpful. You can post your site info there or try to get on one of her free webinars where she takes a look at your site live and offers suggestions on what you can do to improve it.

I saw a big difference in my traffic when I started using Twitter and Facebook. If you need to build up your followers, you can start by researching the leaders in your niche and then following everyone that is on their list. Most people will follow you back, so it's a great way to get started. You can then see if some of those people have a Facebook page or Fan page, and reach out to them there. FB won't allow you to friend too many people at a time, but if you start adding people weekly, you'll be set before you know it! Oh, you can also look for groups in your niche on Facebook and join those groups, then friend people from there.

Best of luck to you!

Glenna

This is all wonderful advice. I've written lots of articles and agree that you really have to stay with it and keep writing. It's hard I know to find the time, but it's worth it.

Have you ever thought of "buying" traffic?

If you're not selling anything that's going to
convert, then buying traffic is a money loser
but so is working for months on a loser.

Buy some traffic, see if the darn thing is going
to work .. and then worry about SEO traffic.

My best advice would be...

Don't give up, I'm not sure if I'm typical around here but I'm quite tech savvy and it's taken me over two years to build a reasonable passive income and it's still not quite enough for me to quit the day job.

Pick a product and work it till your fingers bleed. Learn everything there is know about your product learn every expression the buyers of the product use to search for it. Learn where your target customers go, learn where they live, what sites do they hang out on, how old they are, what gender they are etc. etc. This will help you to think, act and become an influence within your target market.

Once you know who your typical readers are, target your site and products you promote at them.

There is massive amounts of traffic in the long tails, often, the sum of the long tail traffic is greater than the traffic returned from a single keyword. So knowing this, create content. The more the merrier and the more combinations of keyword expressions you use in your content, the more searches your site will feature in.

Remember if you spend a week working flat out and the result of that work builds you a $3 a day passive income by the end of the year you'll be earning $150 a day. Do it for 3 years and you'll be earning $450 a day...

Read this forum and read it a lot as there is a vast amount of great information within but always remember activity and action are what will earn you money. Don't spend hours reading to the detriment of taking the action that will result in building you an income.

Find out what YOU need to learn, then when you learn it, give the information to others.

I got 100 hits from a single post in a single day when I blogged about Google Caffeine.

I get 5-10 hits a day from the free FBML template I made after I taught myself how to code FBML, which is for your Facebook page.

Same for the eBook templates I made using Word and Open Office.

Learn, then teach. And as for pinging with every post, you can check out my WP Master Ping List, which I use on my site.

AND do what everyone else above me says

Simply keep adding more blog posts and allow your visitors to tweet your content.

It's simply very difficult to get visitors, but what would help is if you can target a certain nice where you do not have too many competing blogs

I have a few blogs I have created and use for traffic sources.

So I write a blog post, post about it on my Facebook account, then I post a tweet about it on Twitter, Submit it to Stumble being careful to target my tags, After that I submit it to kingoftheblogs a link site. (there are many out there)

One submitted to kingoftheblogs I tweet about this new post page and stumble it as well.

Then do as said above and create new forms of the same content and submit those items too. As long as you create good content and then go tell the world about it you will start getting the traffic in.


Rinse and Repeat. This will get you up to 500 hits a day in just a week or so.


James

WOW - thanks everyone for the encouragement and help. I will read each response, but it will take me a little bit. Thanks

Here is my thoughts on make money with blogging.

When I just started blogging, doing keyword research using Market Samurai, writing articles and post onto my blog, I make some affiliate commissions off my banners but the income was not consistent.

Soon I found out what works for me is to implement a business model called the List building business model.

I am sure you heard lots of people keep talking about list building.

But what is it really?

5 Steps To Super List building At Warp Speed
============================
Step 1: Create a free report. (Buy PLR report and rebrand it)
Step 2: Create your download page.
Step 3: Create a squeeze page and thank you page. (Buy a PLR template which is tested and proven to have high conversions and tweaked it, it's easier and faster to get it up and running.)
Step 4: Drive traffic buying Solo Ads
Step 5: Drive more traffic doing Adswaps. (Warrior forum - Joint Ventures Section)

But of course if you are saving costs and wanted to do things your way, you always have the free agency to choose.

My recommendation is to start building your list, build relationship with your list and promote good affiliate offers to your list.

Winson

What everyone else said. Learning "cookie cutter" IM is not tough, you just need to keep going.

Hi there Joe,

I'm sorry to hear about that traffic problem. But don't worry just have patience you'll be able to know the secrets to more traffic once you've got into the right page. I was just like you 4 years ago now I am earning more and getting more traffic.Godbless

Driving traffic to your site is easy... just write a couple of articles and post it to ezinearticles.com.

If you write good quality articles, it will be published on other websites/blogs automatically which means lots of links back to your blog.

This process will take some time but it's the most naturally way of getting traffic without you doing anything extra.

Some great suggestions in this thread.. Here's one from my side

When your blog has few posts, submit it to blog directories. Here is a good list

TopRank Best List of RSS Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog and Feed - Online Marketing Blog

You will start getting traffic from these directories in few weeks.

Regards,
Anup

The things that I have noticed is give things away for free sounds crazy but make it easy to get and you will get traffic. If your content is good you people will be able to see it then. This is just one way keep in mind I am new myself so I wish you luck!

Find an on-topic forum.
Post it as a resource for people there. (once)
Links will come on their own.

Depending on your niche, you might also try submitting your post to blog carnivals.

When you're submitting articles to directories, don't ignore the other directories besides EZE. I'm talking about GoArticles, Buzzle, Article Alley, and ArticlesBase. Some of these do not give you "do follow" links, so you won't get much help with the search engines directly from them, but you will if the articles get syndicated by others, and you'll get traffic from people clicking on the links.

There are many specialty social bookmarking sites in addition to teh big ones like digg and delicous. For instance, in the finance, econ and banking niches, you can use tip'd (tipd.com). Those are great because you get people who are interested enough in your niche to use specialty social bookmarking sites.

Dear don't use free ways like me. You can get only everything by spending dollars.

You should also make sure your blog is listed in as many blog directories as possible. Some will make you have a history first, so wait until you do for those. Some directories you should look at include:
blogtopsites
blogcatalog
topofblogs
technorati
blogflux
blogorama

There are about 10 dozen of these. These are just a start.

do some backlinking for your blog