For instance, blog comment spamming, forum spamming software is bad. Will give you a bad reputation, not to mention a lot of enemies.

Using AutoSurf programs, commonly known as Traffic Exchanges, appear to be against Google’s Terms of Service. The reason for this is that they inflate your page impressions, and Google allows customers to advertise on your site based on Page Impressions.

That means using traffic exchange systems like BlogExplosion are a no-no for Adsense blogs.

Hope that helps,
George

One last thing to keep in mind with traffic that I didn’t mention but Jill did in her write up is point number 3:

3. A great way to make money on a blog is to pick a topic that a huge number of people are interested in. Even if you only get a tiny percentage of a million visitors searching on a topic, you can still make decent money off of that

I know it goes a little bit against the grain of keeping it ultra-niche, but it’s something that is working for us. I am not sure how much world cup soccer is searched, but my guess is that it would be decent, especially during the peak of the season.

All the best…

cheers

The ones that we got the most traffic from were Technorati and Globeofblogs (more traffic from the latter).So if you do nothing else, I do recommend that you submit to those two. I am fairly sure that all of them added a little bit of help as far as the Search Engines. Maybe not a lot, but a least a little bit.

I hope that helps,
George

Just out of interest, did you buy the extra package for $5.55 on the following site?

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

If so was it worth doing?

Also, one thing I forgot to mention in the area of traffic is that when we started planning the blog we knew we had a very short time frame to draw visitors. We really wanted to make people want to come back on a regular basis. So we came up with a bunch of ideas of things we could do to make visitors want to come back to our blog. Some of the things just weren’t doable given our timeframe.

One of the things we did to get readers to come back to our blog on a regular basis was for Jill to post 3-5 times a day leading up to the Olympics.

We also added a poll that we regularly changed. This was easy to do and kept people coming back. During the Olympics we tried to come up with a new poll on a daily basis to keep visitors involved and to give them another reason to come back to our blog (to see the poll results and participate in the next poll). This is also something we are having good success with on our American Idol blog.

Another thing we did was leading up to the Olympics I created a weekly Winter Olympics trivia quiz. It gave people yet another reason to come back and visit our blog and it gave us more content.

Lastly, throughout the Olympics Jill asked people questions at the end of some of her posts to get the readers involved (This is something we learned from one of Darren’s posts).

I think that when you get your readers involved, through polls, comments, quizes, etc. they are more likely to come back and visit on a regular basis.

Hope that helps,
George

thanks for the great article & marketing plan! you’ve given both inspiration & action plan.

again, thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing.

The most important piece of advice I can give on getting traffic is to work on getting traffic from as many sources as possible. In other words, don’t throw all your eggs in one basket.

Here is what we did with the Olympics blog. As soon as we got the blog set up, we sent out emails to our friends and family about it. One of them sent it out to a sports list she is on. Almost instantly we had some decent traffic to our blog. Which proved to us how powerful word of mouth traffic is.

Then I wrote about our Olympics blog briefly on one of my blogs to let some of my current readers know about it.

The next thing we did was both for Search Engine Optimization purposes and for extra traffic. We placed a link to the new blog on all of our other blogs. This is something that blog networks do and it greatly increases the number of links to your blog. The first time I saw this done was several years ago when Weblogs Inc was first starting out. I was doing search research for my wife’s Baby site and Blogging Baby kept showing up in the Search Results. I noticed they had about 15-20 blogs all linking to each other. It surprised me a bit that the Search Engines allowed this, but have since realized that it makes sense for the Search Engines to allow it.. So if you have other blogs, linking them all together really helps with your search enginge traffic. We have a heading called “Our Blogs” and under that we link to all of our blogs. It is great for cross promoting the blogs and also great for Search ranking. Note: Be sure to use your primary keywords as the anchor text (the text you use to link to your site) when you do this.

I setup wordpress to ping the services on Jeremy Wright’s list:
http://www.ensight.org/archives/2004/11/21/services-to-ping

Next, I submitted the blog to all the places here:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Next, Jill wrote great posts which people naturally linked.

Jill posted often (3-5 times a day), which gave the blog a lot of content and kept people coming back to see the fresh content.

I searched for sports related sites that you could submit your RSS and blog to. Then submitted the blog to those sites.

I did link research. I used the Yahoo linkdomain: command and the MSN link command to find places that linked to some of the top ranked non-official 2006 winter olympics sites to see if there were any additional places we could get links to our blog.

We submitted our site to coolsiteoftheday, which brought in about 2000 visitors the day it was featured (the day before the Olympics).

I posted occasional comments on other peoples blogs and interacted some with other visitors of those blogs.However, I did this very sparingly.

Eventually we got a lot of traffic. Here is a very brief overview of our traffic sources:

Traffic coming from bookmarks (42.7 %), Search Engines (48.7 %), the rest from links (8.4%). MSN and Google gave us almost all of our Search Engine Traffic. For some reason Yahoo didn’t really start giving us much traffic at all until the Olympics were over. In the Month of February we got 72171 hits from Google, 53669 hits from MSN and only 2699 from Yahoo. Our highest number of visitors on one day was 13209 visitors (note: this is not pageviews or hits, this is visitors, pageviews and hits were much higher).

The URL really helped. We were fortunate to get it. Apparently, a domain squatter had it and a bunch of other 2006 Olympics sites but was sued by the Olympics committee and had to release all of them. That’s why it was still available for us to snatch up so late in the game. But there are lots of other urls that would have worked just as well for SEO purposes.

One last thing is that we got a lot of natural links, my favorite of which was a link from AOL’s Olympic home page:
http://sports.aol.com/olympics

They linked to a couple blogs from their Olympics home page, and for some reason they picked ours. Originally, it was first in the list although now it is second.

There are other ways to get traffic like: press relesaes, forum participation, etc. But we didn’t use all of the avenues available to us, partly for time reasons.

Feel free to ask other questions. At some point, I plan on writing a lot about blog traffic on the site that my name is linked to.

I hope that helps,
George

Great article and thanks for the inspiration!