WHAT IS TRAFFIC
Similar to being stuck in traffic in your car, traffic is simply how many people stop by and how many page hits do you get. Unique visitors is the term used for every "unique" ip address that hits your site. So if you yourself, visits your own page a 1,000 times you can have 1,000 hits and only one unique visitor. Page hits just refer to the amount of times your site was hit. Contrary to popular belief, there are ways you can get hits without paying. Be your own PR!
SEOMOZ has some interesting content that I have used myself. Their stuff is not fashion oriented though so be careful with that.
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Some of them include covering events. For us we can cover fashion events so when people google them, our blog comes up. Example: We did the Couture Fashion week shows by Mr. Aquino and when you googled it last year, we were on the first page. We also went to the launch party of Bellaga.com and I did a blog entry on it the next day. We got about 20 google hits (unique hits) just from mentioning them in our posts.
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They advocate creating controversy, I advocate covering POP gossip every now and then. For some reason when something juicy happens, everyone's all over it. You remember when Cassie and Rihanna had naked pictures that leaked? I posted those pictures and I received about 15,000 hits on those two searches alone. To this day, I received 1,000 hits a week from searches on those two. I believe it's called traffic or link baiting, you put a keyword that's hot and you receive a huge spike in traffic. Now if I was smart, and had adsense I probably would have made a killing.
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Social bookmarking and networking is a key point. Go past techonorati and Digg mainly because those are for tech users. Use stumbleupon, mybloglog, blogcatalog, del.icio.us, reddit (which happens to be my personal favorite) IFB(independent fashion bloggers). I love my bloglog but the discussions on blogcatalog has gotten me the most visitors out of all the social bookmarking sites. Throw a link on a friends Facebook wall or on twitter and see how many hits you get from your site. The person's whose wall you left it on probably won't come but about 10 of their facebook friends will be nosey enough to click it. You'll be surprised how many people still use myspace. You may not be on it, but there's an international market for myspace who haven't quite discovered facebook yet. Tap into it!
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Visiting other blogs is a great way to create generic traffic and comments. The "hey I love your blog" or "great post" will 9 out of 10 times get that person back to your site leaving the same crap. Out of all the ways to drive traffic, it's my least favorite. Half of the people who visit don't even read and end up looking dumb when they comment back.
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Blog rolls is another great way to drive traffic. The link back on the other blog's site won't be indexed as a valid link for you because it's not in the actual content of the site but you will definitely get some hits.
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Blog carnivals are VERY effective in driving traffic. Entering a blog carnival of at least 3 people or more guarantees you 3 backlinks effortlessly. The site that's widely known is called blogcarnival.com. It's effective because if you are entered in the carnival you have to post the links of your story and everyone else's on your blog and all the people featured in the carnival will do the same thing. This was something I wrote on my blog that was later featured in a blog carnival. The link to the carnival is at the bottom of the post. Here's another post that was entered in a beauty carnival.
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With the growing popularity of blogs, people are starting to take notice. Use this to your advantage. People from big and little companies have google alerts so when their brand is mentioned, they much sure to see it! So merely mentioning a name is enough to get attention in this day and age.
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If you are a very new blog, you may want to join blogexplosion.com it's an easy way for your blog to get some kind of traffic while building up.
INDEXING YOUR SITE ON SEARCH ENGINES
This part is extremely important. If your site is not indexed and you have all this great stuff on it, no one will find it. So you need to create a way to index your sites. You can add your url to google here, yahoo here, and bing here.
The Yahoo site explorer is excellent in figuring out how many backlinks you have to your site and inlinks as well. (Backlinks are the number of websites that have a link to your website on it)
Blog pings are a great way to get your site indexed on a bunch of little sites in a short time. You can usually ping once a day, so you're sending your content to all of these places at once.
All of these methods mean nothing if you have really crappy stuff on your blog. Which is exactly why you need to create unique content.
SEOMOZ has some interesting content that I have used myself. Their stuff is not fashion oriented though so be careful with that.
**
Some of them include covering events. For us we can cover fashion events so when people google them, our blog comes up. Example: We did the Couture Fashion week shows by Mr. Aquino and when you googled it last year, we were on the first page. We also went to the launch party of Bellaga.com and I did a blog entry on it the next day. We got about 20 google hits (unique hits) just from mentioning them in our posts.
**
They advocate creating controversy, I advocate covering POP gossip every now and then. For some reason when something juicy happens, everyone's all over it. You remember when Cassie and Rihanna had naked pictures that leaked? I posted those pictures and I received about 15,000 hits on those two searches alone. To this day, I received 1,000 hits a week from searches on those two. I believe it's called traffic or link baiting, you put a keyword that's hot and you receive a huge spike in traffic. Now if I was smart, and had adsense I probably would have made a killing.
**
Social bookmarking and networking is a key point. Go past techonorati and Digg mainly because those are for tech users. Use stumbleupon, mybloglog, blogcatalog, del.icio.us, reddit (which happens to be my personal favorite) IFB(independent fashion bloggers). I love my bloglog but the discussions on blogcatalog has gotten me the most visitors out of all the social bookmarking sites. Throw a link on a friends Facebook wall or on twitter and see how many hits you get from your site. The person's whose wall you left it on probably won't come but about 10 of their facebook friends will be nosey enough to click it. You'll be surprised how many people still use myspace. You may not be on it, but there's an international market for myspace who haven't quite discovered facebook yet. Tap into it!
**
Visiting other blogs is a great way to create generic traffic and comments. The "hey I love your blog" or "great post" will 9 out of 10 times get that person back to your site leaving the same crap. Out of all the ways to drive traffic, it's my least favorite. Half of the people who visit don't even read and end up looking dumb when they comment back.
**
Blog rolls is another great way to drive traffic. The link back on the other blog's site won't be indexed as a valid link for you because it's not in the actual content of the site but you will definitely get some hits.
**
Blog carnivals are VERY effective in driving traffic. Entering a blog carnival of at least 3 people or more guarantees you 3 backlinks effortlessly. The site that's widely known is called blogcarnival.com. It's effective because if you are entered in the carnival you have to post the links of your story and everyone else's on your blog and all the people featured in the carnival will do the same thing. This was something I wrote on my blog that was later featured in a blog carnival. The link to the carnival is at the bottom of the post. Here's another post that was entered in a beauty carnival.
**
With the growing popularity of blogs, people are starting to take notice. Use this to your advantage. People from big and little companies have google alerts so when their brand is mentioned, they much sure to see it! So merely mentioning a name is enough to get attention in this day and age.
**
If you are a very new blog, you may want to join blogexplosion.com it's an easy way for your blog to get some kind of traffic while building up.
INDEXING YOUR SITE ON SEARCH ENGINES
This part is extremely important. If your site is not indexed and you have all this great stuff on it, no one will find it. So you need to create a way to index your sites. You can add your url to google here, yahoo here, and bing here.
The Yahoo site explorer is excellent in figuring out how many backlinks you have to your site and inlinks as well. (Backlinks are the number of websites that have a link to your website on it)
Blog pings are a great way to get your site indexed on a bunch of little sites in a short time. You can usually ping once a day, so you're sending your content to all of these places at once.
All of these methods mean nothing if you have really crappy stuff on your blog. Which is exactly why you need to create unique content.
