What Kind of Traffic Are You Going After?

We all want traffic right, but did you know there is profitable traffic and low value traffic? Let me introduce you.

Miss Social Traffic (Facebook, Digg, Stumble, etc) happens to see an article title thrust in front of her.  Miss Social Traffic says “Hey I’ve always wondered How to Get to Sanibel Island“ and heads off to read the article.  Then Miss Social sees How to Increase Blog Comments in the sidebar and says “hey I want to know about that” and off she goes.  The article got a view but it was worthless because Miss Social didn’t do anything to convert.  (she was a Miss for me after all).

Mr. Search Traffic says to himself “I need a job and I heard Fort McMurray is a good place to earn big bucks, I’m going to find out how to get there”.  So Mr Search goes to gatekeeper Google and types in “How to Get to Fort McMurray” and he finds an eHow article.  Mr. Search finds out that Fort McMurray is a long long dangerous drive, but he notices an ad for Westjet and says to himself “let me check on the flight prices.”  Mr Search just converted and a few cents goes into the earnings account.

Mrs. Newbie eHow Writer sees the handy dandy email feature and emails 150 “friends”  to read her new How to Get to the Tower of London article.  Some of those friends don’t even have a passport, and some are heading to Hawaii on their next vacation, but a few go read and comment on the article because they want to be a good buddy and they hope that Mrs. Newbie will read and comment on their article in return.   However, most of the eHow friends have heard of clickfraud so they are very careful not to click any ads.  She also shares it on Facebook so her high school friends can see she is now a writer and hopefully read her new article (they are not going to London either btw and could care less about ads for London tours).

After a while Mrs. “Not so Newbie But Not Wise Yet” comes to the forums whining that she has 100 views and no earnings.  It turns out the keywords stink and there are no backlinks to support the article so no one except an eHower can find the stinker of an article.

Think about who you want to attract to your work.  Then figure out how to get that traffic (hint… Google is where you start).  Creating nice anchored backlinks like I just did in this article is another key to letting Google know your work matters.

For hands on practice and help increasing quality traffic I suggest starting in this eHow forum thread.   Learn Together – What Makes an eHow Article Stink?

PS:  Since you came to read about generating traffic, how about converting for me and helping yourself out by joining Xomba and/or SheToldMe right now.  You need to be bookmarking and link building with Xomba and SheToldMe already to find Mr Search.

Tagged as: Article Marketing, freelance writing, linking strategy, SheToldMe, Xomba