What do you do to get people to visit your site? Do you adopt the ‘publish and pray’ method? Or do you actively go out looking for people to visit your site?

Having created a few sites over the last few years, most of which have had little to no traffic to the site, there are a few things I have learnt.

Before going into what I have learnt about creating over 10 sites, you may wonder why I have not given up on creating blogs.

The reason is quite simple. Each blog that has been put up had a purpose to it, and that purpose for most of them did not require any traffic visiting the site.

Now, with me having only 2 sites, technically I have 3 as one is an eCommerce site which I do absolutely nothing with, I am able to work on driving traffic to them.

When looking to drive traffic to a site, it is worth knowing that there is short term traffic and long term traffic.

Short Term Traffic - is defined as traffic that comes to your site through constant activity on your part. Without this constant activity, traffic would drop drastically.

Long Term Traffic - is defined as traffic that comes to your site through things that were done in the past.

Social Media

This is a short term traffic generator.

Social media is great for creating awareness for a site. Using it to gain traffic requires keeping up with a posting schedule, which can become a full-time job. Especially as the lifespan of a post on social media is short lived.

In other words, using social media to drive traffic becomes a bit of a monster that needs to be constantly fed.

Question And Answer Sites

This is a long term traffic generator.

Sites like Quora can be used to drive traffic to your site. The more questions you answer, the more people will click on links or seek out links to your site.

As questions remain on Quora for years, the traffic it generates can last for years to come.

Pinterest

This is a medium to long term traffic generator.

By pinning images with links back to your site, there is potential to get lots of traffic to your site from Pinterest.

The key to doing this is to have a visually appealing image, that people are interested in.

It is not uncommon to have a single pin being found months or years after being pinned, giving it a new lease of life.

The most important thing with pins is that they do not go to dead links.

Backlinks

This is a long term traffic generator.

Getting backlinks can be quite an involved process, which, once mastered truly allows your site to take on a life of its own.

I liken getting backlinks to having a sales job. You are constantly knocking on doors showing people what you have to offer and trying to get them to buy.

When working to get backlinks, there is a lot of rejection. There are a few successes as well which will keep you going.

The key is to develop an outreach method that works for you so you can refine and repeat to help get those backlinks.

Helping Others

I would say this is a medium to long term strategy.

By helping others, you inadvertently end up helping yourself. Of course there are those who only take and thankfully, these people tend not to get very far.

Through helping others you get recommendations as those you help share their experience in dealing with you.