Gaining Access to More Traffic

Search engines have traditionally been great sources of traffic for new blogs, who might not have had the time to develop the community that will support the site in the long-term. Beyond search engines, there can be hundreds of other sources of traffic that you could get, but many people do not harness them to their full advantage.

For one, look at the traffic that you can receive just by linking to another site. In most cases, when you have trackback support enabled on your blog (the links generally have to be displayed on the linked-to site), you will receive additional traffic from the visitors to the article you have linked to.

When you take into account that individual posts can contain nearly a dozen links or more, depending on how generous you are about linking out, you can certainly see a decent stream of traffic from these articles. In reality, this traffic won’t exist forever. If the site owner decides to delete the post or the entire blog, you won’t receive the traffic, and trends for the traffic will see declines unless the individual post sees an increase in traffic.

Even though you might think that trackbacks can’t deliver a strong amount of traffic, you have to think about what users are looking for when they visit a post, especially one where the conversation or additional details are continued elsewhere. This is also the reason why no single site has been able to dominate a niche and “steal” the traffic from every other site. People want to read other users’ thoughts on the particular news item or ideas.

Other forms of traffic can be from email messages, although a declining trend when everyone seems to be using Twitter and other tools for staying in contact with others. The “sharing” widgets that are present on many blogs allows visitors to connect with their friends, sharing the posts that they might have enjoyed the most through various forms of medium.

Beyond search engines, there are many ways to get quality traffic. You just have to learn where to look and how to harness it to your advantage.