The Worst Way To Generate Traffic For Your Blog

Get rid of the sidebar calendar. Choose your niche wisely, not to big and not too small. Use blog carnivals. Use trackbacks. Interact with other bloggers. Participate in online forums.

What is the worst way to generate traffic to your blog? Well unfortunately or fortunately I know a bunch of them because I’ve tried them and they’ve failed.  The good thing is even though they failed I learned now to use them more and move onto more efficient ways to drive traffic to my blog. So here are a couple of ways I’ve generated traffic to my blog and why I think they are a waste of traffic sources.

Worst Ways To Generate Traffic

• Yahoo Answers –  before I thought it was a fantastic way to generate traffic to my blog. Now I think it sucks and this is why.  It takes soo much effort to get so little traffic. At least in my mind it does. Maybe I’ve been using it wrong but I got traffic and a decent amount at times but it took me too much work to get that traffic. I like to work as little as possible to generate my traffic and I had to think of clever ways to get around Yahoo’s blocks, write tons of answers, and questions and all for a bit of traffic that wasn’t really that targeted. It didn’t convert very well and in the end I just didn’t like it
• Link Exchange Website -  ones like LinkReferral.  There are other ones as well that I’ve participate in in the past but the names of them are slipping my mind right now. However the point with these sites is that you link to their site and they link to yours and you guys get points for things, etc. Honestly I think its a shady way to get traffic and search engines like Google don’t like them. You can get banned from Google Adsense when using sites like those. I thought before I was a great way to generate traffic and now I know it isn’t. You get traffic that will bounce 99.9% of the time and you won’t really increase your rank. So don’t use it! Update – the name of the other link referral site I was talking about was EntreCard. Don’t get tricked by it. It may look fun but it won’t help your blog
• Payper Click - At least for me this isn’t a great way to generate traffic to my blog. Why? Because it costs money! Why do I want to spend money generating traffic to my blog when I can send free traffic to my blog through natural search engine results? So That is why I don’t like this method for traffic generation. In my mind it isn’t worth it. I guess it could be worth it to jumpstart a new website and you had money but besides that I don’t think it would be great.
• Banner Exchange - I use to like this way to generate traffic and now I don’t anymore. I don’t like to bother communicating with people to put up the banners and then find out that the other person tricked me and took down their banner.  All the effort for probably very little traffic in the first place. What if the blog you exchange banners with has less traffic then you? Then its a lose – win situation. They get traffic and you don’t. Overall it takes a lot of effort for little traffic and isn’t fun in the end

Summary

You need to be careful when picking source of traffic. You need to be smart about it and pick something that will bring in traffic on a steady basis with little to no work. You don’t want to have to work on getting the traffic 24/7. You need to focus on other aspects of your blog. Like writing content, networking, monetizing, research, etc. Traffic generation is really important for your blog growth but it can’t consume all your work. So be smart about it and do it right!