If you’re an Internet Marketer, you should have a blog – no two ways about it.
Your blog is going to be the focal point of your business, your empire, and it should be a high quality and eminently readable account of your journey to whatever goals you’ve set for yourself.
It’s going to be the center of your empire, kind of like a Taxi Cab office. Imagine; there are cars coming and going all day long, with the Office at the start and end of each trip. There are people endlessly shuffling their way in through the front door all day and sitting down, reading whatever material is there while they wait for their cab, – again all using the Office as the focal point for their journey.
And the phones are running hot 24/7 as people make call to make bookings and plans to use your cab firm in the next day or week or month. Again, the Office is the important point of focus for their call.
So you need to start your blog with this end in mind, as you will want to provide all the things these people want. They want the basic service the firm offers; they want lots of great quality stuff to read over and above the thing that they came to your site for, and if they buy, they want to be able to pay by convenient means.
You see, the people constantly phoning your Office, or coming through the front door to purchase your goods are the visitors coming to your blog to look over the things you have there. They might have come to buy something specific that they know you have there.
They might just be there to read, but while they’re on your site, they may buy something if it looks like it fits their needs. Or they may like to visit just because you always have plenty of great stuff to read; stuff that’s helpful to them; stuff that makes their job or their lives a bit easier.
So whatever niche you’re in, if you start to build your blog like this, with quality information that is designed to be helpful and readable, you can easily get a very reasonable flow of totally free traffic from it. And you do this as follows:
Blog Hopping, Blog Commenting and Guest Blog Posting.
The idea of Blog Hopping is to build a collection of ‘fans’ who love your blog. And as you can imagine, fans become friends and friends remain loyal to you and your blog – kind of “Love me, love my blog”. Hmmm – or was it ‘dog’?
I recommend you take full advantage of this. It’s easy to do, and fun too. Simply Google your niche plus blogs, as in;
Niche + Blogs
And dozens, even hundreds will come up.
Just go to one of the top ones. Read the posts and the answers. Offer a high quality relevant comment to as many posts as you can manage. Click on the links to other posters comments and go to their blogs where you do the same all over again.
If you do this regularly for a few weeks, chances are you’ll notice you’ve been visiting many of the same blogs, and ‘meeting’ many of the same people over and over.
When this happens, you’re well on your way to forming a set of valuable ‘friendships’. You should also have noticed by now that your own site is getting a reasonable number of reciprocal visitors from these other sites.
You can help yourself greatly in this quest by only ever posting 100% relevant and high quality content and responses. No “Great post”, or “Totally agree man!”. But if you do this, you’ll succeed in making this a great source of reliable, free, and repeat traffic.
Plus, when you have a product you’ve created and want to have affiliates drive traffic, these ‘friends’ you’ve made will be only too happy to help you get it launched. Or at least, they’ll help by allowing you to put a banner on their blog.
Similarly, you’ll almost certainly find that other people you’ve met will regard you the same as you regard them, and will value your ‘friendship’ too. And they’ll feel totally free to ask you to do the same favours for them. And of course you should do everything in your power to help them. Always give or do more than is asked of you, and the ‘karma’ will come back round tenfold.
To help this system along, I recommend you create not only valuable content, but also content that is engaging and kind of reaches out for customer interaction. Like you ask their opinion on something, or run a survey or ask what their ideas are about your post. Basically just ask questions in the best way you can without making it appear in any way like you’re just asking for asking sake, cos no-one wants to waste their time.
Sometimes a controversial post can be great for interaction, as long as it’s not inflammatory or offensive. Some people love to disagree or argue – have you noticed that? It’s almost as if they have to make their point no matter what. I suspect these people are often quite boring to be around, but if it helps the cause, then we have to give a little 😉
In any case, if you’re clever with your words, you can often turn their disagreement to your advantage, like how they perceive the added attention will benefit them whilst if you keep it going cleverly, it can turned into a huge discussion with you coming out king-pin, since you’re the blog owner.
I’d make a point of allowing people to really blow their own trumpets about their own ability to do whatever it is they do well. This helps conjure up nice warm feelings of acceptance, and with that comes a willingness to help when the need arises.
I don’t want this to sound as if the idea is to use people. Certainly not – but there’s nothing wrong with simply committing to help others the best you can, whilst allowing them to help you as the need arises.
This makes it a win-win arrangement, the very best arrangement by far than any other where one party comes off second best. Those arrangements don’t usually last too long, nor do they bare too much fruit either come to think of it.
Before long, friends of friends will be bookmarking your blog. And to give all your sites an added SEO boost, you can of course exchange links with the people you’ll come to know. This is another way that friendships will add to your traffic.
Don’t be in two minds about this folks, – the great secret to decent blog traffic is not just writing quality content. That’s essential, sure. But have you noticed how all the best blogs online are chock full of comments? Quite simply that’s because they stimulate interaction and conversation amongst a raving fan audience.
And that friends is what you’re aiming for.
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