“The art of blogging involves thinking up great topics and blog titles, performing research where required, then authoring great work.” –Nicholas Whitmore.
I’m a writer, like most of you reading this blog. Also like most you, I want tons of traffic — millions of visitors, if possible. Here’s the problem; the more I market, the less I blog. So now I have spent all my time marketing instead of writing content. Even funnier: I have no visitors. I mean, I’ll be honest, I suck at driving traffic to my site. Until I realized the more I just blog and produce content, the more visitors I’ll get. I don’t mean to make it seem like magic, but just focusing on content increased my traffic about 20%.
Here’s how (I think!)
- The more I blog the more Google bots come to my site. This increases the chances of me appearing on search engines.
- Content gives my readers a reason to come back. They’ll have a reason to visit continuously and that increases the chances of them sharing my material.
As far as marketing goes, I’ll take the advice from Nicholas Whitmore: “If you publish blog content that’s truly awesome, everyone else will market your blog for you.”
I’ve spent tons of money on SEO, backlinks and PPC. Some of them actually worked, but only for the short term. I’m now going to try to stop marketing my blog altogether.
I’m not saying forego announcing it on Facebook or Twitter. Just don’t make marketing more important than your content. Remember, people come to your site to see you or get the information, not because you have a great marketing plan.
Of course, I’m going to blog the results as I go along.