Building Traffic To Your Blog

There are two main ways you can get people to your website. SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and Social Media. We'll be be taking a look at both of these. Before moving on, you should be aware that there are very extensive websites (even books) devoted to small subsections of both of these topics. They can be as simple, or as complicated as you want. With that said, let's begin.

Let's start with probably the most popular and traditional method of traffic generation: Search Engine Optimization. Don't get bogged down with the fancy lingo; SEO is just getting your website to rank high in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. etc.

There are two major components to SEO. The most important thing is quality and unique content (or product). The other major part of SEO is building links to your website. A more in-depth introduction to building traffic.

The other method of traffic building is through Social Media sites. These include bookmarking sites like digg and del.icio.us, social networking sites like facebook and myspace, social blog sites like technorati, simple one-page sites like squidoo and gather, and many others. Getting traffic through these sites can be slightly (or extremely) more complicated than generating traffic from the search engines.

There are no basic techniques for gathering traffic through social sites, because there is such a wide variety of types of sites and interfaces. The basic idea, though, is to build relationships with people and then put a link to your site somewhere. This can work for you in two ways, because it will give you a one-way link, which is good for SEO; it can also generate direct traffic (people seeing the link, becoming interested, and clicking through to your site).

A great blog to visit if you're a beginner in the world of making money on your blog (and of course monetizing it).