Building traffic can seem like one of the most challenging aspects of being a webmaster or running your own blog.Though I do admit it can be challenging when you don’t know where to start. Plus if you’re building your blog for profit, traffic is everything when it comes to affiliate marketing and paid ads. There are several methods of building blog traffic, such as link exchanges, better search engine optimizing, advertising and other various ventures. However, you can make all the effort in the world to build visitors but that doesn’t mean much if you do not have content. Having little or no quality content can lead to your sites death faster than you think. Before I start explaining anything or getting into the guide, I just want to point out (once again I know but it’s important) before you try to drive a ton of traffic to your site, you should make sure your site has quality content. At least have some content and a functional site. Even though you may get hits/visits, the percentage of return visitors shrink when the site or blog has absolutely nothing to offer.

As you’re building your blog or writing your articles, think to yourself  “Would I read this?” more so “Would I bookmark this?”. These are two things you should keep in mind, chance are if you wouldn’t be interested in the articles you’re writing, someone else isn’t going to be interested either. You can earn a considerable amount of traffic an return visits just by having quality content and providing a service or services that users will need or search for using search engines. For a little more info on this, you can check out my article on getting started with a blog. Anyway on with the traffic guide!

Traffic Programs -
Though they may not seem too useful and maybe a little confusing at first, traffic building programs or link exchange programs work very well for driving targeted traffic to your website or blog. Traffic programs all have their own different ways that they work, most work on a credit system. The credit system usually works by you earning credits for each website in the exchange or program that you view, these credits then go towards visits to your site/blog.

Alternatively you can usually purchase credits from these programs without the needing of viewing other peoples websites for credits and usually for very cheap prices, some of these programs even pay users for referrals or credit them extra viewing credits that can be used towards their blog. I have already compiled an updating list of traffic programs located here.

Link Exchanges -
Link exchanges are one of the older and more known methods of building traffic to your site. Link exchanges work by you linking to a website or blog on on your site, the linked to site in return links back to your site. If you’ve found a site or blog related to yours either by topic or niche, browse around the site to see if they offer a link exchange.

If you cannot find a link exchange, you can always try contacting the webmaster to see if he/she is interested in exchanging links with you. More often than not if your site is decent, they will accept.

Social Media Sites -
Social media sites are the new era in online marketing. You can earn a considerable amount of traffic from submitting your articles to popular social media sites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and other niche social news sharing and bookmarking sites.

Search Engine Optimizing -
Search Engine Optimizing or usually know as ‘SEO’ for short is a very important part to your site. By optimizing you blog or website for search engines you increase your rankings in search engine results and in turn increase your search engine traffic.