“I don’t get it! I am writing killer content on my blog, but don’t understand why my site is not building traffic or authority within my niche! I am at a loss about what to do, can you help me?”

As a reader of this blog, I am sure you come across many individuals like this.

The Truth Will Set You Free

Here are the brutal facts that you must know, if you want to solve this problem for yourself and for others that you work with.

Brutal Fact #1: Creating high-value content for your website is only one integral part to creating a successful internet marketing and website traffic driving strategy.

If you believe that only writing content on your blog will effectively bring traffic and links, you are sadly mistaken.

Here is some advice…

Stop listening to those individuals spreading the adage “If you build it they will come” because it isn’t doing you any favors. Planning out your content, and hitting the publish button is only half the battle. (The other half is generating traffic and links.)

While there may be the one in a billion exceptions every now and then where published content magically becomes viral, the chances that this will happen to you are very unlikely.

Brutal Fact #2: You must know how to leverage the traffic that will be driven into your site or else driving traffic to your blog will be a waste of time.

Here’s the truth…

You can take the time to create an awesome blog post and drive a ton of traffic through it, but if the content within your site doesn’t generate leads, or close sales, you are wasting your time exerting the effort to create the content and drive traffic to it in the first place.

Understanding how you will fully leverage the content on your site, and how it will fit into the entire website strategy to reach your goals is important. If you don’t have a pre-defined path taking your visitor from your content to a sale or other call to action…stop everything you are doing right now and take the time to figure it out.

Think about the exact step-by-step process you want your visitor to take after reading your blog post.

Do you want them to sign up for an e-mail list, send them to the products page, watch a video, or have people re-share the post? Make sure you have this figured out before you start publishing and driving traffic! I see too many entrepreneurs screw this up and waste time!

Brutal Fact #3: For your site to start generating a substantial amount of traffic and backlinks quickly, you will have to create and leverage your trusted Internet and in-person relationships.

Why do you think individuals who help websites drive a massive amount of visitors through them are massively connected? Do you think that is by accident?

It obviously is no surprise to those who know this secret! Here is the thing…

Taking time amid your busy schedule to grow current relationships and create new ones with individuals in your niche, is one of the unspoken secrets of successful bloggers and website owners.

Here is a tip: Make sure that when reaching out to new contacts, your intention is to create a win/win situation between the both of you. Always focus on what you can do to help the other person out first, and then more often than not, they will want to help you as well.

Brutal Fact #4: Having an understanding of your market, and knowing how to effectively create content for that market is an essential skill.

(This also includes having the copywriting skills to format content effectively that will capture and hold a visitors attention and lead them to a precise call to action.)

If you don’t know how to write killer posts for your site that will resonate with your market, you will definitely experience challenges.

Even though you think you may be creating high quality content, step back for a minute and ask yourself, “Is this piece of content something my market wants, and is it formatted in a way that will hold their attention from beginning to end?”

If you can’t say yes to this question quickly, go back to the drawing board and find a way to fix it.

Brutal Fact #5: Understanding how SEO and social media work together is a must when it comes to building backlinks and driving massive amounts of traffic through content on your site.

When you understand the impact how social media affects SEO, you really have the keys to the kingdom.

Knowing how to leverage your current relationships to drive the traffic into your site and create the backlinks to content with the appropriate anchor text, results in ranking high in google. The high rankings cause more continual traffic that is generated into your site long term from the search engines for key search terms.

Mastering these two moving parts takes skill, but they wouldn’t be possible if you didn’t focus on always continually building win/win relationships with individuals in your niche.

Summary

You can’t just write great content or create a website and expect the mere act of creating content to get you what you want, without the knowledge of how social media works, and the necessary skill of building and growing relationships with individuals who will help you as you help them.

Make sure that you take the time to learn the necessary skills, and connect with those individuals who can help you. Continue to do this as you focus on creating the best content possible for your site. If you need help in this area, go to people who are doing it themselves and ask for their help, or buy their products that teach you how to do it.

Similar Posts:

• Official Launch: Free 10 Week Internet Marketing Course [Sign-Up]
• SEM, SEO, Social Media and their Connection to Each Other
• The Importance of Commenting on Other Blogs
• 4 Ways to Use LinkedIn to Promote Your Website
• How Do I Get More Email Subscribers?

Of all methods for doing solid search engine optimization, link bait is one of the most alluring (yet mysterious) methods. Good link bait will grab attention and gather links from various pages across the web, but bad link bait won’t grab much attention and will not have the SEO effects desired. Keep in mind that bad link bait and bad attention are two different things – bad attention is still attention, and for the goal of link baiting, this is still accomplishing the desired result.

photo credit: psyberartist

To get good links and grab solid collections of links, here are 3 link baiting tips to try:

1. Strong research on a popular topic. This is especially functional if you can find a valuable topic that has yet to be covered. This is also more effective if you can be specific. For example, in a market about dog care, doing a study on which species of dog sheds the most (with actual figures, quantitative values) is something that anyone who cares about a canine impact on their home interior would be interested in. And if it’s solid information, they’d be happy to share it with a link.
2. An instructional guide. Showing people how to do something that is not naturally intuitive is a contribution to the web that is appreciated by both humans and the search engines. The more detail that is put into such a guide, the better. This can be done for all sorts of things, from how to operate machinery to how to practice a skill. Again, being tightly specific will help – a guide on how to properly shoot a pool ball (including the proper way to hold the cue stick, with pictures) will likely get more attention and links then a guide on how to play pool.
3. Setting up a contest or a competition. This can be of particular value if it’s set up with some sort of reward, specific to the market. Putting a competition up to find the 5 best horror stories about blind dates would be great on multiple levels. If giving something away of relevant value to each winner (free movie tickets, a free dinner at a nice restaurant), it will get good attention from people wanting to win the prizes as well as getting great reception when you post the results. Who wouldn’t want to read the 5 best stories about horrid blind dates? And as the result can also be solid link bait, you can get a double effect from putting together a good competition on your site.

But not all methods of using link bait that are known are good. Be careful about spending time on things that are not really worth the effort. Here are 3 areas to be careful with, when it comes to link baiting:

1. Sending everything to all major social bookmarking sites. It happens a lot – some SEOs feel the obligation to send everything to Digg.com, even if it’s obviously not socially “attractive”. This is not proper link baiting, and while getting a backlink from Digg is good, putting a post there on why your site is the best site on the web to learn about iPods, unless you are the ultimate iPod guru, this will not gather links. Being a little more picky about which social bookmarking site you send good link bait links to as well as making sure you submit pages that people will want to link to can make a major difference in your results.
2. Overcomplicating things on a single page. If you go too broad with your topic for link baiting, it can be make your page less “linkable”. A page that talks about which beer is the darkest combined with what wine tastes best freshly made combined with what glass shape is best to refrigerate for root beer floats is not link friendly. Keeping pages simple and on-topic makes it easier to link to. In addition to this, it can help target specific ranges of anchor text used by links pointing to your page. By adding too much to a single page, it makes visitors less eager to pass the link love.
3. Not spreading the word on your link bait. You can create the most incredible page in your market for a particular topic, but if no one knows about it, it will never see links. This may seem trivial, but it’s a crucial element of good link bait. Make sure people know about it. Whether you spread the word through social media, solid social bookmarking, a good combination of SEO techniques (or all of the above), you have to follow through to the end to ensure your link bait has its full effects.

One other link bait method that has both good and bad traits is using controversy to get links. This can work effectively – but it can be difficult to produce controversial pages consistently in addition to having people question the quality of your material.

If you follow these tips, you can produce link bait that is not just good for your SEO, but that can also stay friendly with the search engines by contributing quality content to the web.

And one last quick tip: keep in mind that getting negative attention (or attention you didn’t intend to get) with a link, while bad for your image, may still get several solid backlinks. Whether or not you want to get these types of links is your call, but it can still work for SEO and raising of PageRank. Just look at how well it’s worked for the (not so child-friendly) Time Cube.

Please tell us about your link bait strategies and tips in the comments below

Similar Posts:

• 6 Google Search Query Tips
• Is your Blog a Kick Ass Guide?
• Automatically Perfect Your Blog’s SEO
• 9 Search Optimization Tips with Benefits for Your Visitors
• 5 Common Link Building Faux Pax to Avoid