Periodically I search the Internet for traffic building ideas and find the same old arguments and ideas trotted out over and over again. And they don't work. Here are some of the things I have tried for traffic and how they have performed;

Submitting to Digg, Stumbleupon and others
I submit articles regularly to these types of sites. I don't apparently have a big enough network on Digg to ever get published but I do get a few hits this way. Nothing much but a few. Posting comments on other folks published articles can get many more hits but at the risk of being labeled a spammer and having your account frozen. Stumbleupon has been useless - no hits at all except in a few cases where some popular Stumbleupon user has submitted one of my articles and then I have had thousands of hits.

Moral of the story - you need to invest time and energy into building a network on these sites to get any real traffic.

Article submissions
Submitting articles to various sites including using Blog Carnivals is also hard work and time consuming. Again, t brings a few visitors but the biggest benefit is climbing up the Technorati rankings.

Traffic Generators

I quite often do searches on how to build traffic to my blogs and so on. Pages and pages of blog articles come up and I go through them one by one to find them all - well - totally useless. They all say the same things. It's as if bloggers everywhere cut and pasted each others stuff.

So after lots of research I simply decided there is only one way to truly build traffic and that is to blog, blog and blog, day in day out using meta tags on the posts and then submitting to sites like Digg. Eventually, traffic starts coming - not a huge tidal wave - but bit by bit. Of course, if anyone out there truly has a magic technique please do let us know.

This blog for example is growing in traffic - slowly - but it is growing. 45 unique visits per day the first month, 65 the next and 80 last month. So far this month its around 95. Not great numbers but slowly growing.

So, my conclusion is... keep blogging and posting good material and doing the right things and traffic will slowly come.

Building traffic is actually very difficult in my opinion. You can find all sorts of articles around the Internet with advice on traffic building and frankly, most of them are simply useless. I have found a few things that do seem to work however but, like many things regarding blogs and websites, traffic building strategies really depend on the site, its niche and it’s content – who are you targeting and how do you reach them?

General Traffic Building

Yes - it is all about traffic. If you want to make money hell, even if you just want someone to read what it is you are saying, you have to have traffic.

If you do an Internet search on blog traffic you will find all types of articles at all kinds of sites. They all pretty much say the same things though. I will synthesize what they say in my list of five ways to build traffic and add a few thoughts of my own below...

What is a brand?

A brand comprises of two essential components. People usually get one right and forget about the other.

First, a brand is a statement of what the product or service actually is. This is called the brand promise. A brand promise isn't a tag line or a statement written in words. It's the overall encapsulation of what your product or service stands for. This means that it is the tag line, design, written description and how someone feels interacting with that product or service.