How To Build Traffic Without Marketing
There’s something I’ve come to realize about most of my fellow bloggers – you guys and girls are not great at marketing.
Don’t take offense, marketing is not something that comes naturally and most people enter the blogging world as writers or hobbyists, not business people.
Some look at marketing as advertising and their current perception of advertising is akin to lying. With that attitude in place, no self respecting blogger wants to learn how to lie in order to promote their blog. This may be an inaccurate assumption about marketing, but let’s face facts, most people don’t know what marketing is and their world view of the advertising industry is framed on their experience with television commercials, magazine advertisements and billboards.
Some might say I’m a good marketer, but I want to be honest with you – if I had a choice, I’d rather sit down and just write to my blog and not worry about how I’m going to “get my message out there”. I’m lucky because I have some momentum here at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, so in a lot of ways I can just publish content and my traffic will grow, but chances are for you, if you build it, readers won’t just show up and read your blog because it’s there.
…or will they?
The Long Road To Blog Traffic
You’ve possibly read the varying arguments about targeting the Long Tail for traffic as a blogger. Some argue that you can’t leverage the long tail for traffic in the same way that a business like Amazon does for profit selling goods.
This is true, in some respects. Amazon, iTunes and companies and services like them, have massive scale and can reach the entire long tail of a product catalog and thus truly leverage the full breadth of the tail.
Bloggers cannot realistically do this since it would mean writing content to hit every single topic and keyword phrase in a niche – effectively millions of articles.
Any blogger who has managed to stick to writing regular content for at least three months – and it really kicks in after about six to eight months – knows about the gift you receive from Google. If you check your traffic statistics regularly, the traffic coming from Google and in lessor respects from the other search engines, will increase if you stick to regular content production long enough.
Thanks to search engines, bloggers who specialize in writing voluminous amounts of content but with poor marketing skills or a lack of motivation to do much more than put creative thought out on their blog, can still succeed – it’s just a bit slower this way.
