Extra bump in traffic

I have been experimenting with different ways of getting traffic to my site. I have yet to be ranked by Google, so I am not too worried about search engine traffic as of yet. Many of you are wondering when the traffic will start pouring in for your own site. You have’t seen much from search engines, and you are not wanting to spend money out of pocket for advertsing on popular sites in your niche. This leaves your site a ghost town. No comments, no traffic, no clicks. But what can you do to get traffic without paying for it, and no search engine respect yet?

You have probably heard the saying, time is money, but what does that mean to you? To me it is putting an hour or two into working on your site’s traffic per day. Make sure your site is presentable (ex. your theme isn’t broken by testing in IE and Firefox). Write a new post that you feel people want to read and comment on. By doing the methods I am about to tell you, you want to make sure your site is presentable or your time will be wasted!

Social Networks: I open all the ones I use in seperate tabs, and login to each one. The networks I use are: Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Propeller, and Technorati. Using the “Share This” script at the bottom of my new post, I submit my new post to each one of them. Within about 12 hours, I see a decent amount of traffic through these alone! I don’t recommend using all of them, I just use the more common ones. You could use all of them, but that just requires a lot more time. I feel that is just overkill and not really worth it.

Site Hoppin: Right after you submitted your new post to a few popular Social Networks, we are on to the next step. I recently have been using Site Hoppin to get a bunch of visitors quickly. Every 10 sites you view through their program, you get 1 visitor. You earn more credits by commenting/tagging/rating a site. Usually I manually hop the first 5 sites, commenting on each one of them for a quick start on hops back to my site. Then I set the timer to 8 seconds and hit play to start the slideshow. That will run in the background for about an hour, if not longer while I do other things. If you haven’t heard of Site Hoppin before, then read my Site Hoppin Review.

Entrecard: I have a ton of Entrecard credits, so I usually look for some related sites to advertise on. I try not to waste all my credits in one place. It increases your odds by spreading them out among a few different sites. Usually I do some reasearch on the site by checking the pagerank, alexa rank, and so on. If it looks promising, then I advertise there. The downfall is that most campaigns are 5-8 days you, but If you do this often, you will not get behind. You can read my post on entrecard and learn how to get 300 Entrecard drops in 20 minutes.

MyBlogLog: Next stop is My Blog Log. About once a week I look for new communities to add to get my name/icon spread further through the network. I choose once a week because I kept looking over the same communites just to find a few new ones. If you do this once a week then you will find more for your money (time = money). By being signed in to My Blog log, it prepares us for the next step.

Commenting on many popular blogs in your niche. I have a folder of bookmarks that I try to comment on daily, or at least right after I make a new post. I currently have about 20 sites in this folder for the “Make Money Online” niche. 5 of these are sites that get an ungodly amount of traffic. I suggest commenting on 2 or 3 of their recent posts for each site. Make sure your comments are worth reading. Don’t just say “cool”, this makes you look like every one of the readers. Say for instance they post about SEO, you could throw in some tips they left out. I talked about how to SEO Your Site, it is something every blog owner should read!

Be A Top Commentator: A little case study that Not John Chow and I did was to pick a few popular sites and get on the “Top Commentator” list. This list provides a direct link to your site, and really does bring you more hits! We both came to the same conclusion, it really does work! I noticed about 30-50 extra hits per day for each site that I was “Top Commentator” on. For 5 sites, that could be an extra 250 hits per day!

What happens when you slack off? Well unfortunately so do your hits. I haven’t posted in 2 days, so I also haven’t commented, site hopped, or anything. This weekend I have been with my fiance and family taking care of things for our wedding. I just recently got on and checked my stats. All that extra traffic I earned was lost. For someone that doesn’t get any attention from search engines, or doesn’t pay or advertising, these methods are your only source of traffic!

Conclusion: If you are serious about your site, then take what I said above into consideration. You will see little to no traffic if you don’t do anything. If you write a post, make sure you have about 2 hours to dedicate afterwards to get your content seen. If you don’t, then you might as well not have even posted it!