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
The easiest method is simply to tell your friends and family and have them tell their friends too. After that plainly getting listed in search engines and trying to develop a few back links helps. One way to develop some back links is to submit articles to a blog carnival or an article submission site that allows back links. Submitting articles to social networking sites can also help but frankly, not much unless you have a bunch of friends online that will vote for your article.

Frankly though, you just have to patient and consistent and post quality material.

Specific Site Strategies
I have several websites and blogs. Each has a target audience and so different methods work for each. Here are some of those methods for two very different sites.

The Energy Hedge Fund Center has a highly defined target audience of investors, hedge funds and energy/commodity people. For that reason, we have used the following strategies successfully to build traffic;
1. Press announcements – there are a number of publications and other websites that will routinely pick up our press announcements;
2. Interviews with the media – Reuters and Bloomberg and other media outlets often reach out to us for interviews and we comply so long as they mention the website;
3. Trade shows and conferences – we execute media partnerships with trade shows and conferences in the space in which our logo and url is displayed on all promotional materials in return for free advertising on our site.

These strategies have all worked but they work because the site is highly targeted and we know our target audience.

Rant Here is a comic site with the occasional rant thrown in for good measure. Its audience is far broader and more difficult to characterize but by using surveys on the site it seems it’s largely male and middle aged or younger. So how to attract traffic?

1. Social networking sites like Digg, Blogengage and others have delivered some traffic. Though not by submitting articles. While I have submitted articles, because I don’t have networks of friends on these sites, the article gets a few digs and then falls off the radar. The better strategy has been to look at highly dug stories and then add comments where appropriate. Those comments complete with a url back to a similar article on my website consistently bring traffic and keep on delivering;
2. Article submission directories have also paid dividends for this site. By submitting an article and the link it gives you a back link worth having and also some traffic;
3. Sing meta tags in each post and a specific url with keywords has also helped to slowly grow search engine traffic to the site.

What’s interesting about Rant Here is that traffic no longer comes in for the last article posted. I get traffic for old articles on the site as much as for new articles and I can only believe that it is those Digg comments still working for me. However, it’s also a sign that the site is maturing and goes to show that consistent and quality posting can bring in traffic.

So there you have it. Two different websites, two different target audiences and dramatically different techniques for developing traffic.

Remember – target audience is key to building traffic.