How to survive in the battle for traffic: some nice & not nice tricks bloggers use

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In this post, you will find some tricks bloggers use to get more traffic for their blog. It’s not a secret that many bloggers want to monetise their blogs. Some actually START their blogs hoping for some fortune in the future.

After some research, I created a list of ways of getting paid for the blog. Those activities include:

1. All forms of advertising
(Google AdSense and so on). Only worth to use if your traffic is stable and has a growing trend (and already exceeds …)

2. All forms of affiliate programs
(Booking.com, Skyscanner, and plenty of others). Also, work with a significant traffic

3. Sponsored posts
Well in order to receive a request, you also need traffic.

4. Freelance writing & consulting services

…. and so on.

tricks bloggers use

So, what do we see? The basis of the blog monetisation is traffic. As much as possible. The quality doesn’t matter because some companies pay for ad impressions.
That means you need to get that traffic. If you’re a bad ass female solo traveler wandering around Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll probably get attention anyways. But what can you do if you feel like average? Don’t get me wrong, all travel blogs are amazing and unique. It’s just some are very easy to remember and some fade in the memory with plenty of other blogs. So how do average bloggers who really want to get income from their blog survive in this battle for traffic? Here it’s up to every blogger.

You can ask me: «Hey, why do you care?». Because I like to observe. I like to reveal. I like to warn people. Save them from negative thoughts like «Oh why I’m not getting much traffic to my blog? Am I so boring? Or what’s wrong with me?». Well, it’s because you probably don’t follow aggressive promoting strategy.

I’m not an expert in blogging or promotion. But here are some nice & not very nice tricks I have observed over time:

– Attracting audience by promising them to give them unique insider information how to grow their traffic, become a millionaire and other bullshit.

And then, of course, the audience is kinda curious, arrives at their website, subscribes to the mailing list in order to download an e-book or any other doc and gets a very generic piece of advice that everyone already knows. Because no one wants to share some real stories of success (e.g. I was reaching to this 500 people asking for guest blogging and so on, and surprisingly one of my articles was spotted and yep, I suddenly got some visitors /I placed ads /I had friends working for newspapers etc).

– having multiple Twitter and Instagram accounts.

Sometimes it’s even ridiculous. Especially if these bloggers are using scheduling systems (in order to make this easy they just tweet the same post to all the accounts at the same time, because who has enough time to keep posting to 2,3,4 or even more Twitter accounts? I can barely post to 1….)

– Everybody is sinning with it BUT still : mass following and like for Like on Facebook (because it’s the only way to get spotted, even though it’s not so nice)

The mass following is currently the only way to get followers to your Twitter and Instagram accounts. And well, I guess, 90% of bloggers are doing it. There are billions of Instagram accounts, there’s no way that your new Instagram account will be spotted and gets 10000 followers in 2 months. Even with the mass following strategy getting 10000 followers is kind of hard, without it is almost impossible.

– Posting stuff with way too creative headlines like (OH GOSH WE ALMOST DIED)

Yep, these headings usually DO get people’s attention. But when bloggers exaggerate too much and all their posts are like this, it’s a little bit too much.

– Excessive commenting to other fellow bloggers’ posts not because of sincere and genuine interest in their content but in order to get a backlink (which does not really contribute to SERP of their blog) and some occasional clicks on the embedded link in their name

I’ve seen that many times, especially on popular blogs. People write comments like: “Oh Gosh that’s so interesting” or “thanks for your post” and yep, most of them just want to be spotted, nothing more. Genuine comments are usually longer and more personal and contain questions.

Well, that’s pretty much it. It’s up to you, how to fight in this battle for traffic but it’s always better to remain decent.

Read my other post: Revelation: don’t believe everything bloggers say

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