Philosophers have long asked, “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” It’s a great question for college freshman, but it’s also very relevant to anyone who is looking to start a successful Internet business.
Websites, like falling trees, need an audience if they’re going to make some noise. After all, you can have the best content in the world, and the best deals in your product category, but without a steady flow of visitors, your efforts will be doomed to failure.
Traffic Takes Time
Building an audience for your web site is not an overnight process. In fact, you can expect to spend weeks, or more likely months, faithfully adding content and promoting your site, before ever seeing any meaningful traffic.
Besides getting the attention of actual people, your site is also going to need to grab the eye of one of Google’s ubiquitous search bots. These small, but extremely sophisticated, programs are used to index the content of various websites and that information is used to determine their ranking when users search on that subject.
Search bots don’t appear overnight and it may take them weeks to even notice that your site is up and running. When they arrive, you’d better be ready with plenty of good, relevant content for them to survey.
Some bloggers spend a very long time building up a body of bot-friendly content with little expectation of making sales or even seeing human audiences. This process is called, “aging,” and it’s just one piece of a good traffic-driving strategy.
Building Links :
Besides the quality of your content, the bots will also be looking to see what kind of sites your content links to, and what kind of sites are linking back. This is an incredibly important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) and it’s something new site owners will want to look at closely.
You can read my article about “10 Best Link Building Strategy” to set your strategy to build link.
When linking out to other sites, it’s crucial that those sites have some relation to the topics covered on your site. Linking your cooking blog to your buddy’s MMA site is doing a disservice to both of you. Linking that same site to a site that reviews new kitchen gadgets is win/win.
Guest Blogging :
One increasingly popular method of building up the kinds high quality links that Google prizes is by offering other blogs and websites your content through guest blogging opportunities. Guest bloggers write up posts for other blogs in exchange for a link back to their site. If the site you’re guesting on is a high quality source of content in your field, Google will reward you with increased page rankings.
If you are worried about where to get guest posts then you can take a look at my article “My Blog Guest – The Best Guest Post Exchange Site“.
The key to guest blogging success is finding a site that’s authoritative in your field that’s also willing to run your copy. This means your content has to be high quality from the get-go. If you’re not 100% sure about how this process works, you can hire a guest posting service.
Finally
Building an audience for your website takes time and there really aren’t any shortcuts. Just put in the time; build up the content; and you’ll be in good shape.
