There comes a time in every blog’s life when it gets little or no traffic from search engines. It has happened to everyone at one point - getting kicked out of the search rankings temporarily. Just like with monetization, it is vitally important to have multiple streams [of traffic] so your blog can survive when Google betrays you.
Social Bookmarking/Networking
Well, this had to be number one. For many blogs one of the biggest sources of traffic are the social bookmarking and networking sites. Digg, MyBlogLog, Reddit, and Del.icio.us are just a few of the hundreds of social sites out there nowadays.
I think MyBlogLog is one of the more useful social sites for getting loyal readers. Ever since I joined MyBlogLog and put the “recent readers” widget on this blog, I’ve been getting an extra 20 or so visitors per day.
Although many users of social bookmarking sites view submitting your own content as a taboo, if your blog is brand new and has yet to get indexed, you may want to submit one or two of your best articles to places like Digg.
Type-In
Type-In traffic usually refers to people who literally type your URL into their address box (or visit it via the bookmarks menu). I view type-in traffic as being any visitors that directly visit your site without a referral URL being detected.
In human terms, I think of type-in traffic as being visitors who type in your url, click on a link in their feed reader, or visit it via a bookmark.
Blogs that get a lot of type-in traffic generally have many loyal readers and get a lot of traffic. So, write better content and write it consistently, and your type-in traffic will increase over time.
Comments/Forums
Although the idea of writing comments strictly for SEO is a gray area, everyone agrees that writing good comments can make you look like an expert in the field, which will increase your traffic over time (people will click on your URL in your comments more often).
Whenever you leave comments, read over them a few times and make sure you are not making a mistake. Also, make sure you leave good comments, and not spammy ones.
The same is true for forum posts. Try to engage in the conversation at hand. It is pretty silly to talk about Britney Spears on a forum about gadgets, ya know?
Link Baiting
Link baiting is the newest fad in SEO and blogging. Links that are interesting may get posted on forums and other blogs. On these other sites, the authors may entice their readers into clicking on your link.
Link baiting can lead to viral marketing, but technically, it is not a form of it.
To try and kick start this process, mention your best articles on forums, relevant comments, etc. Also, most bloggers don’t mind if you drop them an e-mail mentioning it as well.
If you decide to go the e-mail route, try to act somewhat professional and make sure your main goal is to help the other blogger’s readers. Do not, I repeat, do not say something like “I need more traffic, can you link to my article?” It will make you look foolish, and it will waste everyone’s time.
Viral Marketing
Link baiting, which I listed above, is separate because by itself it is not viral marketing.
The goal of link baiting is to get links, the goal of viral marketing is to get exposure and branding. More links are not equal to more exposure (or in geek terms, links != exposure). More links can lead to more exposure, but that is really only true if your link gets highly ranked on some popular websites.
If your URL gets posted all over, congrats, you have run a successful link baiting campaign. However, if your URL is only on low traffic “nobody” sites and none of the general blogosphere knows about it, then viral marketing has not occurred.
OK, so how can you use viral marketing to your advantage? Make something incredibly unique, offer free “stuff”, or even write up a press release if you did something amazing.
Remember the Numa-Numa fad? I sure do. The whole thing did not become popular because everyone linked to the video. It became a fad because it was catchy, unique, and had a lot of word-to-mouth advertising behind it. “Everyone” knew about it. Kids talked about it with their friends, and teachers showed it during class. It is a perfect example of viral marketing.
I will write more on the link baiting vs viral marketing debate sometime in the coming weeks…
If you have any more ideas feel free to toss them in a comment 
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February 13th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Couldn’t have put it any better. There are many traffic techniques that work well. Bloggers just need to determine which source of traffic works best for their blog and concentrate on that target audience.
There are, however, no easy steps to increasing a blog’s traffic. It takes hard work and dedication if you want to maintain a successful blog.
Thanks for the great info.
February 13th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
It does seem as if some of those niche affiliate site experts have an “automatic large sums of traffic” button.
Thanks for reading,
Jeremy