Those of you who have read this blog for any length of time know that I highly believe in the use of social media marketing and I have personally benefited at my blogs from from being able to draw traffic in various ways, including social media.

I get a lot of questions by email and blog comments from readers who want to know more about social media and other forms of marketing so they can put it into practice on their own sites, and I try to address these issues in blog posts. However, for those who want a more personalized approach and some guidance on putting things into practice, a service like this is more appropriate.

You can see a more detailed description of the service, as well as some testimonials, at the Evaluation Service Page, but here are a few things to point out about the service:

- You’ll get a written document that evaluates your current website or blog and details ways in which it can be improved in order to encourage more traffic.

- You’ll get a list of ideas and suggestions for creating content that will attract social media audiences and some suggestions for marketing/optimizing this content.

- You’ll get a personalized approach that takes into consideration the specific goals of your website and what you are after.

- You’ll get the opportunity to ask questions about anything that needs further clarification.

The cost of this service is $100 and can be paid via PayPal. If you’re interested in getting your site evaluated, please use the contact form to get in touch.

Win a Free Evaluation!

To make the launch of this service a bit more interesting for readers I’ve decided to give a free evaluation to one reader. This evaluation will be the same thing you would get for $100, so it’s a pretty nice deal for someone who wants to increase traffic to their website or blog.

To enter this giveaway, please leave a brief comment on this post mentioning why you would like to win the evaluation or how it could help you. On Wednesday, January 21st I’ll  read through all of the comments, visit the sites of commenters and select a winner. The winner will be chosen based on who I think could really benefit from the service and who will get the most out of it.

Please leave your comment on this post, and good luck.

There have been several guides written in the past on the subject of increasing or maximizing pageviews, of course some are better than others. Some of the advice given falls into the category of tricks that can hurt the usability of the site and have adverse effects in the long run. For example, using partial feeds is sometimes recommended so that more subscribers will click through since they can’t read the content without doing so. Also, splitting up posts onto multiple pages is another tactic that’s sometimes used. Methods like these are those that I personally stay away from (although splitting posts onto multiple pages can be justified in some situations).

My approach to increasing pageviews per visitor is to try to give them a reason to continue on the site rather than by using a gimmick. Helpful sites will experience happy visitors that stick around, and that will produce better long-term results, in my opinion.

When I redesigned my primary blog, Vandelay Design, several months ago, one of my primary goals was to increase the average number of pageviews by putting more useful information within easy reaching distance of subscribers and first-time visitors alike. My average pageview stats on the blog have never been anything too get excited about, in part because many visitors come from social media sites, but I wanted to see a noticeable improvement. Starting almost immediately after the redesign, and continuing now for several months, the average number of pageviews has increased by about 0.5 pages per visitors. That’s certainly not drastic improvement, but it does result in more than 100,000 extra pageviews per month with the same number of visitors.

Take a moment to do some math. A website/blog that draws 25,000 visitors per month with an average of 1.5 pageviews per visitor will have 37,500 pageviews. If you were to experience a 25% increase in number of visitors still with 1.5 pageviews per visitor, you would have 46,875 pageviews. However, by increasing the average to 2 pageviews per visitor you could reach 50,000 pageviews without even gaining a single extra visitor.

Websites and blogs that naturally generate more pageviews (as opposed to using tricks) will generally be more useful and more user-friendly. Focusing on these issues will help to build loyalty from visitors and they’ll be more likely to come back when they need something specific, because they’ll know where to find it.

Challenges for Increasing Pageviews for Bloggers:

All website owners face challenges when attempting to improve the average number of pageviews. Bloggers face some of the typical challenges along with others that are unique to blogging.

Loyal Readers

Believe it or not, building loyal readers can sometimes decrease the number of pages those visitors see per visit. Some loyal readers will read everything you publish. In this case, it’s likely that they’ll see one page before leaving to go somewhere else. If they’ve already read your old posts it’s possible that they stop by each day just to see a new post and never browse through the archives or follow internal links.

Although these readers may just visit one page before leaving, that certainly doesn’t mean that loyal readers are bad for a blog. Not even close. However, if you do have a lot of visitors that come back each time you post something new, be aware that this does present some challenges.

Social Media Visitors

Most items that get significant traffic from social media are blogs of one kind or another. Social Media visitors are well-known for their short attention span and their quick trigger to leave a site. Encouraging more pageviews for Diggers or Stumblers certainly is possible, but it is also a challenge.

Outbound Links

Many bloggers use a lot of outbound links, and it’s a good practice, especially for new bloggers looking to get noticed, but it also leads some visitors away from you blog, never to return. While outgoing links aren’t something that you should avoid, you need to also realize the impact that they can have in terms of losing visitors and you should have some efforts in place to keep visitors that don’t want to click on outbound links, rather than just losing them too.

Tips for Improving Pageviews:

Use Internal Links Within Posts

Sidebars are often used for a bulk of the navigation of a blog. Unfortunately, many visitors don’t pay much attention to sidebars, and subscribers who are just reading a feed won’t even see them. By using links within you posts in appropriate places you can get those links in the eyes of more readers/visitors and place them in a way that will use the context to encourage click-throughs.

Link to Related Posts at the End of a Post

There are a lot of related post plugins that you can use if you want to automate this, but I personally prefer including some manually created links to posts that I want to highlight. I do this a lot on my primary blog, with good results, but it’s something I need to do more of here at Traffikd. By creating the links manually you can have more control over which links are included (some plugins aren’t very accurate) and you can usually make the links more noticeable to readers, as many tend to ignore lists or related posts.

Make Sidebars as Useful as Possible

While many visitors will ignore sidebars, some will pay attention to them, and for this reason it’s an important part of the blog design/theme. Focus on providing links to content that will attract visitors, rather than just placing a list of categories or archives by date. I like to use a popular post section, but I’m bad at updating the list when new posts become popular.

Keep Pages Loading Quickly

If a blog’s pages load very slowly, visitors will eventually stop visiting more pages, sometimes sooner rather than later. A blog that has quick-loading pages is a pleasure to browse and it encourages more clicks.

Make Use of Pages, Not Just Posts

The most visited page/post on this blog is the list of social media websites (although it does need to be updated). It’s easy to focus on creating new posts and forget about the opportunity to set up pages that are more timeless. Think of some ways that you can extend your blog by using pages. A good example is Creating a Blog from Scratch at Blog Design Blog. Vinh uses a page to link to several related posts on a common topic, and it serves as a landing page that can funnel traffic to other parts of the blog.

Cover Related Topics

If you write series of posts or just write on related topics you’ll have more opportunities to use internal links to point to older posts.

Improve Old Posts

Many bloggers, myself included, tend to overlook opportunities to improve old posts. If you have posts that draw decent amounts of search engine traffic, go back to those posts and look for places where you can link to other posts and pages on your blog. These could be newer posts that didn’t exist when the original post was published, but they may be very relevant and helpful for visitors.

Focus on Being Useful

In general, make an effort to give readers a positive experience and you should see improvements in pageviews. Often the focus goes to creating new content and we overlook how visitors are able to interact with the site, and its general usability. Focus on making a great overall blog and the results will come.

What’s Your Experience?

This post does cover some things that I’ve learned through my blogging experience, but it’s also a list of things I need to work on myself. What have you experienced to impact the number of pages that your visitors view?

For more on growing a blog, see:

• 7 Ways to Extend a Blog
• Using Pages Instead of Posts for Social Media Traffic

• Inbound links from other websites and blogs
• Search engines
• Bookmarks
• Internal links (popular posts lists for example)

While the number of daily pageviews may be overshadowed by your most recent posts, if you look at your stats over a longer period of time you may be surprised to see how many visitors are coming to your old posts that were big hits with social media. This presents a great opportunity that most of us don’t maximize.

The natural reaction is to look at the stats and appreciate the fact that social media and link building have worked well to produce ongoing traffic to these posts, but that’s usually where it ends. We don’t consider how we can improve these high-traffic posts to capitalize on the exposure that they are giving us.

Ways to Improve Popular, Older Posts:

1. Link to Related Posts

The posts on your blog that are drawing considerable ongoing traffic are a great starting point to attempt to funnel those visitors to other posts on the blog. Chances are you have a few other posts that are related to the same topic that many visitors would also be interested in. If you use a related posts plugin this should already be in place, however, you can still improve upon it. With related post plugins you’ll have no control of what posts are linked to, and those links are generally ignored anyway.

Try adding a brief parargraph at the end of the post that will mention the other related posts, and give readers a reason to stay on the site. Also, you may benefit by going back through the post and looking for places where you can add a link within the post to other posts/pages on your site. These contextual links will often have more of an impact than a list of related posts generated by a plugin.

2. Add a Comment and Link to Newer Posts

Some of your commenters may be subscribed to the comments (if you offer it). If you have a newer post on a related topic, consider adding a comment with a link to the new post. Anyone who is subscribed to the comments will then get your link in their email. Additionally, the link will be there in the comments for new readers that decide to also check out the comments.

3. Submit it to Other Social Media Sites

Form time-to-time you may come across new social media sites that you start using. When this happens, take a look at your most popular posts and see what might be a good fit for that audience. I’ve used this approach for my primary blog when I started using Design Float and Design Bump. With social media you’re not just limited to your new posts, although that’s often all that we consider. If an older post was successful with one social media site, maybe it will be successful with others.

4. Add a Call for Subscriptions

Your old posts that draw consistent search engine traffic may be an excellent source of new subscribers. To encourage more visitors to subscribe, you could add a message or link to specific posts. Maybe you have a post that’s a year old that draws good search engine traffic, but it’s a bit outdated. You may want to put a paragraph at the beginning or the end of the post stating that the post is older, but to stay up-to-date on the subject they can subscribe to your blog.

5. Add Affiliate Links

If you have old posts that are getting decent amounts of traffic, you may be able to monetize those pages be adding some relevant affiliate links. Take a look at the subject of the post and see if you can find any affiliate products that are related or that you could market to the same target audience. However, be careful with affiliate links, some visitors/readers will not appreciate if you do it too much.

6. Promote Your Own Product or Service

If you are a service provider, older posts can be an excellent form of marketing. Consider adding some info at the end of the post about the services that you offer and how you can help readers. This is something that I need to do more of at my primary blog.

7. Update the Post from Time-to-Time

Some blog posts are highly time sensitive and others can stand the test of time and continue to draw traffic and interest from readers. For those that are time-sensitive, consider updating them every now and then. Keeping them somewhat fresh will improve their usefulness for future visitors and will help them to continue to be productive posts for you.

What’s Your Experience?

What do you do with your older popular posts? Do you make an effort to improve them or to get more out of them?

Relying too heavily on social media traffic is pretty easy for bloggers to do. If you have some time to work on your blog you can go after social media and maybe see a few thousand visitors within 24 hours, or you can work on developing some other types of traffic that might lead to a trickle of 10-25 visitors per day in the short-term. That’s a pretty convincing reason for most of us to concentrate our efforts on social media optimization. However, despite the potential to get a quick rush of visitors, that’s not a good reason to ignore the need to build other sources of traffic as well.

The Costs of Over Reliance On Social Media Traffic

1 – It’s not reliable

Sure, you may be able to get to the front page of Digg or generate a bunch of traffic from StumbleUpon, but can you count on that happening next week? Next month? Next year? No, you really can’t. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I do believe that social media traffic can be very valuable to a blogger, but it’s simply not a traffic source that you can count on for the future. It might lead to thousands of visitors, but it also might lead to none. If you abandon other sources of traffic in order to concentrate on getting huge results from social media, you could find yourself facing a huge drop when your blog is suddenly no longer popular with social media sites.

2 – It’s short-term

Most bloggers would love to land on the front page of Digg, and many spend hours on Digg adding “friends” to try and help their chances. While Digg will send an amount of traffic that is almost unbelievable to most of us, it will be gone within a few days. Say you do get to the front page of Digg and it sends 15,000 visitors over the course of a few days. That’s one-time traffic. If you’re able to build some links and optimize your pages to get an extra 50 visitors per day from search engines, that totals over 17,000 visitors over the course of a year, and it will probably continue or even increase beyond one year (not to mention the fact that search engine traffic is generally targeted more effectively than social media traffic).

3 – Social media visitors are generally not responsive

When compared to other types of traffic, social media produces visitors that don’t click on as many ads, are less likely to subscribe, and less likely to purchase anything. That certainly doesn’t mean that all visitors from social media are unresponsive, but as a whole if you compare 1,000 visitors from social media to 1,000 visitors from just about any other traffic source there will be a noticeable difference in response levels. In my opinion you can make up for this by having higher volumes of traffic from social media, but it’s undeniable that in general, visitors from social media sites are less responsive.

4 – Social media traffic may not be highly targeted

If your blog gets thousands of visitors from social media sites, chances are many of them are not targeted very well and are probably not that interested in your blog as a whole. Some traffic from social media can be very well targeted, such as visitors from niche social media sites or visitors who come from a specific category page on a major social media site. However, in general you will find that traffic from Digg or StumbleUpon is not targeted as well as many other traffic sources.

5 – Social media traffic requires constant effort

Because traffic from social media is so short-term, in order to consistently drive traffic from these sites you’ll need to continually add new content to your blog that will attract votes on social media sites. With search engine traffic you may be able to sit back and watch traffic flow in to posts that you published a year ago, but that’s not likely with social media. StumbleUpon is about the only social media site that will still send traffic months after a submission, but even then it is typically just a small trickle.

What Should You Do To Build Traffic Diversity?

If relying too heavily on social media is bad for the long-term health of your blog, what do you need to do to build some diversity?

1 – Start with a search engine-friendly site

Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process that will never really end, but the first step is to build a website or a blog that is search engine-friendly. By that I mean it should contain nothing that will give search engine spiders difficulty crawling through the site, internal linking should be done effectively, unique and descriptive titles on every page, heading tags used effectively, etc. While SEO requires much more than building the site a specific way, your efforts down the road will be hurt if the site is not build properly to begin with.

2 – Build links

Inbound links are critical for search engine rankings and for click-through traffic. Click-through traffic also gets a boost from the added trust that comes with a link. As an example, I’ve recently written two guest posts for Darren at ProBlogger. The links to my blog from both of those posts have brought a nice amount of visitors, but nothing close to what I might get from StumbleUpon on a good day. However, I’ve had much, much better jumps in my subscriber count on those days than I ever get from StumbleUpon. Why? The links from ProBlogger send visitors that have already gained some trust for me because they trust Darren. Whatever method you use to build links, you should see an increase in traffic that will be a bit more long-term than social media traffic.

3 – Work on getting more direct traffic

One of the pleasant surprises I’ve had over the last year of working on my primary blog is the increase in direct traffic that it receives. So much attention goes to every other source of traffic that direct traffic really gets badly overlooked. Direct traffic is when someone types in your URL directly into their browser and comes straight to your site rather than using a search engine. Direct traffic can also be from bookmarks, emails, and feed readers.

You shouldn’t neglect direct traffic because it shows that others are recognizing you and they’re turning to you rather than doing a search to find something. As you work on branding your site, direct traffic should increase.

4- Build subscribers

If you have enough subscribers to your blog you should always be able to get a reasonable amount of traffic just from click-throughs in RSS readers and emails. Subscribers are critical to a blogger’s long-term success.

5 – Network with other bloggers

A network can help you in so many ways that I can’t possibly cover everything here. You’ll find that a strong network will lead to more readers, more loyal readers, more comments, more links, more social media votes, and more of just about anything else that’s good for a blogger.

When I started blogging I had no idea how valuable a network truly is, but it becomes evident pretty quickly. To work on building your network, start commenting more at other blogs, use networking aspects of social media sites, link out to others, email others when appropriate, use forums or any other type of site that is home to others who are similar to you.

What’s Your Experience?

Do you struggle with relying on social media traffic? What steps do you take to establish diversity?

When looking at the posts on my blog that have drawn the most search engine traffic from Google since January 1^st of this year, 8 out of the top 10 posts have been on the front page of Delicious, and most have also been successful with other social media sites like StumbleUpon.

While Delicious doesn’t send nearly as many visitors as a Digg front page appearance, it does do a good job of leading to inbound links for popular items. Some Delicious users automatically post their bookmarks to their blogs, which leads to a few easy links if your posts get to the front page.

Of course Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimization get plenty of attention due to the quick bursts of traffic that can result from a successful post, but the lasting effect of ongoing search engine traffic is sometimes overlooked. The idea behind linkbaiting is that social media will lead to links and links will lead to search engine traffic. I think this is supported by the statistics at my primary blog.

The Down Side

While this search engine traffic is great, most of these posts are resource lists or similar collections that are not a typical article. As a result, I think this traffic is a bit more difficult to convert into repeat traffic because these posts don’t really sell the blogger (in this case, me) to the search engine visitors like an informative article would.

In order to improve this, I think I could go back and make some additions to those posts and include some more internal links that might steer visitors to other parts of the blog.

The Up Side

By looking at this data it’s clear that you can create specific posts to target certain keywords and search phrases. By getting that post to the front page of Delicious and having some success with other social media sites, you may be able to earn a decent search engine ranking for your targeted phrase.

What’s Your Experience?

Do you draw significant search engine traffic to your posts that have done well with social media?

Here are some tips for new blogs that are looking to increase search engine traffic.

1. Build your blog on a solid SEO framework.

Search Engine Optimization is much more than just building a website in a particular way – it involves a consistent, ongoing effort. However, the work that you do each week or each month to improve the search engine traffic to your blog will be far more effective if the blog is created to be search engine-friendly. Taking the time up front to set up your blog theme correctly will make all of your other work more productive, and once the framework is set up properly you will only need to make minor modifications over time.

2. Be patient.

It takes time for a new blog to earn the respect of Google and other search engines. You won’t launch an SEO-friendly blog and have hundreds or thousands of visitors overnight. Be consistent with your efforts to build a successful blog and be patient as the search engine traffic slowly increases.

3. Build links.

Most bloggers know that in order to increase the amount of traffic they get from search engines they’ll also have to find ways to attract links from other bloggers. Link building is a huge topic in and of itself, so I won’t go into details here. But you need to find a few link building methods that work for you, and use them consistently to improve your impact in the search engines.

4. Add new content regularly.

Adding new content to your blog is important to SEO for a few different reasons. First, it shows the search engines that your site is regularly updated. Second, some Google searches indicate that new content has a temporary priority over old content in the SERPs. Third, the more pages you have on your blog, the more opportunities you will have to be found by searchers. This doesn’t mean that you should publish worthless posts just for SEO purposes, because that is unlikely to work, but it does mean that if you are consistent over a period of time you will have a much larger blog that is easier to be found. This is one of the keys for my increased search engine traffic. I have been posting consistently several times each week, and now about a year later there are a few hundred posts waiting to be found rather than 25 or 50 posts.

5. Promote your blog with social media.

Many of the links that I have built for my blog have come as a result of social media marketing. Again, this is probably not a surprise to most bloggers, but I think a small percentage of bloggers are actively and effectively using this strategy.

6. Pay attention to post titles.

The page title is one of the most significant on-page factors for SEO, and most blog posts will use the post title as the page title. Because of this, you should give some extra thought to the titles that you choose. WordPress users can use the handy All-in-One SEO Pack plugin, which allows you to specify the title of the page so that it doesn’t necessarily have to match the post title. This gives you more freedom to title the post whatever you want and still be able to use an SEO-targeted page title. The title you give your posts will often by used as anchor text by other bloggers that link to you, so it is also important for that reason.

7. Remove duplicate content.

Probably the biggest SEO pitfall for blogs is duplicate content. Category pages and archives are common culprits for creating duplicate content. My suggestion for removing duplicate content is to use a robots.txt file to instruct the search engines to ignore certain types of pages, such as the archives and categories, which will reduce the chances that the individual posts are flagged for duplicate content. Shoemoney has a useful post for WordPress blogs and robots.txt files.

8. Use custom slugs.

One of the more under-used, in my opinion, functions of WordPress is the ability to control the URL of the post. Longer URLs are not as friendly to search engines, so creating a custom slug will allow you to keep the URL as short as possible, plus you can get keywords in your URLs this way.

9. Use Google Webmaster Tools to identify to most productive search phrases.

Webmaster Tools provides users with a report that shows the search phrases that produce your highest results on Google, plus a list of the search phrases that bring the most traffic to your site/blog. If you see certain words and phrases appearing over and over again, you know that you rank well for these phrases. Why not create even more content to target the phrases that already produce results? With this method you may be able to get even more of your posts drawing traffic from search engines.

10. Research keywords.

One aspect of Search Engine Optimization is keyword research to find the right words and phrases to target. With effective research you may be able to find some keywords that can be used in your new posts to draw search engine traffic. Personally, I don’t go overboard with keyword research, but I do occasionally use some free tools online to identify the best words and phrases to use. If you are looking for some effective tools to use, see 30 Keyword Tools to Use for Your Website.

11. Write for people, not for search engines.

This may sound counterproductive, but it is my personal opinion that if you do an effective job of writing useful articles for your readers, your search engine traffic will improve. This of course assumes that your blog is built to be search engine-friendly, and that you are still using other methods listed in this post. I believe that items such as page titles should be created with search engines in mind, but when it comes to the text of the post itself, if you try too hard to attract the attention of search engines the posts really won’t be worthwhile to human readers.

1 – It’s Temporary

With most social media sites, success equals a burst of traffic for a day or two, and then it’s back to life as normal. While the surge in traffic can be exciting, it can be equally depressing when things return to status quo.

How to overcome it: It is possible to get steady traffic from social media. To increase your chances you can post frequently, develop high quality content, build a strong profile, and focus on sites like StumbleUpon that send lasting traffic rather than sites like Digg.

2 – It’s Not Targeted

Many of the visitors that you get through social media would not fall within your target market. They may just be clicking through based on interesting headlines or because they see a lot of other people voting for your stuff. Having a lack of targeted traffic means you will receive less significant results from the traffic.

How to overcome it: Take advantage of niche social media sites. They may have a lower number of users, but the quality will be higher and they’ll be more likely to fit into your target market. When you do submit to larger, general news sites, be careful to choose the most appropriate category. Many users view submissions according to the category they are associated with. Finally, don’t force a submission when it just doesn’t fit. Not everything will be a match for the social media audience.

3 – Too Much, Too Soon

Especially with the major sites like Digg, traffic can come so fast that many servers can’t handle it. The “Digg Effect” takes many sites down every day. Obviously, if your site is down the traffic is doing you no good. Some people prefer not to even deal with Digg traffic for this reason, because it can be more of a headache than it’s worth.

How to overcome it: If you plan to market with social media you must have quality hosting. Most low-price shared hosting services can not hold up to high traffic volumes, like the ones you will get from being on the front page of Digg. Quality hosting isn’t that much more expensive than some of the cheaper options, but the price won’t even be an issue once your site has crashed and you’re missing out on traffic. Trust me. I’ve been there.

4 – Negativity

Some sites, especially Digg, have notoriously negative users. Even very popular submissions to Digg will likely be filled with negative and derogatory comments (the comments on Digg itself, not necessarily on your blog). When you get your first submission promoted to the front page of Digg it can be pretty discouraging to read these types of comments.

How to overcome it: One of the keys to overcoming it is to simply expect the negativity and understand that is it usually not a reflection of the content itself, but rather a reflection of the audience. Another option is to not even read the comments. However, by not reading the comments you may be missing out on some valuable feedback. Although it may be hurtful, some of the comments can help you to see how you can improve.

5 – Visitors Take No Action

Huge volumes of traffic are nice, but ultimately you will want your visitors to take some kind of action. Maybe you want to gain subscribers, make sales, or get people to click on ads. All of these things can be very difficult with social media traffic. These visitors are generally interested in only taking a quick look at your site before returning to place where they found you. The conversion rates that you are getting from other sources of traffic will almost certainly see a big drop from social media traffic.

How to overcome it: Yes, conversion rates will be lower with social media traffic than with most other types of traffic, but the enormous potential amount of traffic from social media can more than make up for lower conversion rates. First, you need to understand the habits of social media users and adjust your strategy accordingly. Trying to sell a product directly to these visitors is almost certainly a losing effort. Rather, you may be better off focusing on using social media to build links or improve brand recognition, both of which can eventually lead to increased sales.

Know what you want from social media visitors and make it easy for them. For example, if you want to gain subscribers be sure that your subscription link is somewhere on the page that will be seen immediately. Keep the content very closely-related to the primary topics of your blog, and consider adding a small welcome message that reminds visitors to subscribe.

Having multiple and diverse sources of traffic is important to the long-term success of any website. Although it can be tempting to only pursue the traffic sources that produce the most visitors, relying exclusively on a particular traffic source can have adverse effects. Diversity is important for the following reasons:

1. Relying on one source of traffic is dangerous. What do you do if that source dries up? In that situation your website will be very seriously impacted and in extreme cases it could become almost useless. What is Google penalizes you for something that is outside of your control? What is the social media traffic that is pounding your server suddenly stops coming? By building up several different sources of traffic you won’t be so dependant on any one source, and you’ll be safer if something goes wrong.

2. Diversity of traffic means that your site will get exposure to more people. If you are only targeting Google users or social media users, you are missing tons of potential visitors. By drawing traffic from many different sources you’ll increase the chances of being exposed to visitors regardless of how they find you.

3. Different types of visitors respond differently. Maybe Digg is a great source of traffic for you right now, but those visitors are going to be much less likely to turn into repeat visitors, to click on ads, or to buy anything from you than search engine visitors would. Likewise, visitors who come from other websites that refer you will also have a different perspective, and they will likely respond differently. Each type of traffic has pros and cons. Diversity of traffic gives you a well-rounded approach.

4. Diversity of traffic allows you to track and analyze different sources. If you are relying only on one source of traffic, how do you know how it stacks up to another source? How do you know if PPC ads generate better response than organic search traffic or referrals from other sites? When you have traffic coming from a number of different sources you can use analytical tools to determine which types of traffic are the best for your purposes.

A Six Step Approach to Build Diversity in Traffic

1. Build a Search Engine-Friendly Website

Of course, we all want targeted search engine traffic. By building a site in a search engine-friendly manner you will give yourself a chance to draw this traffic. Part of this is knowing which keywords and phrases you want to target. Do some keyword research if necessary and come up with a few terms to target and optimize the site accordingly.

2. Build Links

Inbound links are important for search engine rankings and for click-through traffic, so link building should be a focal point in building traffic diversity. There are a number of different ways to build links including:

• Linkbait
• Directory submissions
• Paid links
• Reciprocal links (within reason)
• Link requests

3. Focus On Building Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is often overlooked when discussing the various sources of traffic. Those who visit your site directly are some of your best visitors. They’ve been to your site before and they’re interested in what you have to offer. I wrote a post at Daily Blog Tips, Direct Traffic: 5 Reasons Why You Should Care. The article included 3 tips for growing direct traffic: 1) create a strong brand, 2) be remarkable, and 3) use a domain name that’s easy to remember. Direct traffic can’t be taken away by a change in search engine algorithms or by fickle social media users.

4. Take Advantage of Social Media

Social media traffic is notorious for being fairly low quality, but it’s also highly sought after because of the huge spikes of traffic that can result. Although it is certainly less targeted traffic than many other sources, it is one of the best free methods for quickly gaining visitors and exposure. Especially for new websites and blogs that aren’t going to rank well in search engines for a while, social media can be a valuable source of traffic. Find a few social media sites that are a good fit with your website, and start getting involved.

5. Grow Your Network

A strong network can help you in a number of different ways. Bloggers who are well-connected get more links, more social media votes, and more personal referrals from other bloggers. Of course, networking is also about what you can offer to others, so be willing to help and you will get back what you put into it.

6. Advertise

Although many website owners and bloggers don’t like to pay for traffic, it can be extremely effective and open up new sources of traffic. Low cost methods like PPC and banners on other blogs are a good place to start. Paying for advertising is one of the few ways you can control what traffic you receive. Even new sites and blogs can get traffic with a bit of an advertising budget.

What’s Your Experience?

How do you go about building diversity of traffic? Have there been particular methods that have worked or have not worked well for you?