Over the last 2 weeks of testing I’ve found a great new way to build sustained traffic for a blog.

The typical approach for a blogger is to leave comments on other blogs, or to submit their site to social bookmarking services, or directories.

Those approaches work to get traffic but typically they are short lived bursts.  You typically get one good day of traffic if you’re mentioned on a bigger site.

So I started thinking about building a sustained traffic source in the same way that I think about creating passive income.

Ideally, we’d like to do a bit of work up front and then pull in continuous traffic from that for a long time with very little maintenance.

What I realized is that blog posts rarely get read after they’ve left the front page and gone into the archives.  A week after the article has been published it’s unlikely you’ll get any clicks on that link again.

Instead, the approach should be to find sustained traffic to go after in a very targetted way.  We want to target timeless items that people will always be searching for.  So that’s what I decided to test.

I started with some keyword research, on a topic that I would like to write about on the blog.  In this case I’m looking for a moderately popular search, and an amount of competition that I can feasibly get on the first page of results. 

In this test I wrote the post on cash flow analysis for this blog.  The post was optimized for the phrases “cash flow statement” and “cash flow analysis”. 

The second step was to find other phrases that I could easily get on the top spot for the search results.  Using a keyword research tool I found a couple of related keywords that I could get into Google’s first page of results.  These phrases only get searched on about 10 times/day so there isn’t much interest in it.  I wrote a Squidoo page for each of these phrases and used “cash flow statement” as the link text back to the individual post on my site.

The result?  Those Squidoo pages have been giving me a steady traffic every day since I put them up.  Yesterday, links from the 3 pages I did accounted for 5% of my traffic.

Scale that up and you can imagine just how powerful this technique could be.

So I tried it again, this time with the “What is Leverage” post.  I wrote the post and one Squidoo page.  Both pages were optimized for keyword searches. A day later I checked the Google search results for “What is Leverage” and I had made page 2.

Stumble it!
Click Here to subscribe to my RSS Feed

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.