Getting traffic to your blog!

This blog was started in December 2007. It has been quite an adventure! My time has been split between writing and trying to increase blog traffic! Attempting to cause a blog explosion that would provide me with thousands of daily visitors to click on the ads and use my affiliate services!

The Internet is full of blogs and free offers on how to make money from your blog. How to increase traffic to your blog and Internet marketing. Of course all these offers are totally free!

The offers include free ebooks, marketing tools and advertising. Each claims that the other sites are total garbage. Only this one has the true secret! The secret of how to make money from your blog.

I soon discovered that on the Internet "free" has very mixed meanings. Usually it involves spending money – sonetimes quite a lot of money. A down payment of $89.99 and a monthly subscription of only $29.99 – “guaranteed” to bring thousands of new visitors to your site every day!

My quest for traffic also took other routes. Blogosphere is really free. Display your widget and your site is displayed on other member sites. Yahoo offers some facilities to help promote your site. The I discovered Webring. Webring is a website containing hundreds of rings. Copy the widget, add your site to the rings and behold! More traffic.

My most recent attempt has been through Blog Explosion. Similar to the Webring, it is more open and blogs are not limited to small rings. The site works on the principle that you earn credits by browsing through the featured blogs. These credits can then be used to 'pay' for your site's promotion! A wonderful idea. Although I am still awaiting the approval of my blogs on Blog Explosion, I have come across at least one blog that really stands out.

I have also listed on Blog Catalogue and Technocrati. All of these are genuine sites offering a great free service. Not the type of free that you have to pay for. Their widgets are spotted around the blog. Click on them for more information.

So far, the most successful of my attempts to increase traffic was to take up a special offer from Bidvertiser. $20 of free advertising. The money lasted for four days. Yes, it did bring in traffic. It also generated about $5 in advertising revenue. Not a good enough return to actually pay for the adverts!

Of course there are always Key Words. These are very important to get onto the search engines! Google adwords has a free facility to generate key words, and there are many other free offers to get key words on a paid subscription basis.

Traffic to my blog is gradually increasing. I have also started a local blog in South Africa - Breathing Space , and have joined a get paid to blog site - MyDigitalLife.co.za - also local, and they do attract some traffic with little effort!

So generating site traffic is tough! Getting people to return is also tough - and maintains the pressure on to produce regular new material!