Amy Porterfield

During the 12 New Media Days of Christmas, we’re counting down the days until 2012 comes by featuring some of the best blog posts of 2011 from awesome writers within the BlogWorld community! Skip to the end to read more posts in this holiday series and don’t forget to leave a comment if you’ve written a post about today’s topic!

When it comes to blogging, the numbers matter. Without traffic, you can’t build a brand. Without traffic, you can’t sell advertising. Without traffic, you can’t spread your message. Without traffic you can’t sell your products. Unfortunately, the “if you build it, they will come” model of blogging doesn’t really work. Great content is often buried in the bottomless void of the Internet, and even the best bloggers in the world occasionally write posts that are fantastic, but go relatively unnoticed. So the topic of traffic is relevant to all of us! Here are some awesome posts about this topic:

1. How to Drive Massive Traffic To Your Blog—With Less Effort by Amy Porterfield at AmyPorterfield.com

This is the last post in an entire series by Amy called “How to Create Bite-Sized Content Your Readers Will Devour and Share.” In this post, Amy talks about the need to find your own sweet spot when it comes to the effort you exert trying to get more traffic to your site. The answer is going to be different for each person, but the overall concept is that you don’t need to do everything. You just need to do what works for you. Writes Amy,

The good news is, you’re probably already doing a lot right. Really. You’re probably already doing at least 90% of what you need to do to hit your own sweet spot.

In fact, you might be doing too much.

Let’s look at what you HATE doing. Some people hate, hate, hate Twitter. If you hate Twitter, maybe you’re doing too much there—or maybe you’re wasting your time. Often, when we don’t love something, we don’t do it very well. The same goes for Facebook, your blog, and any other social media you do.

Amy created the 4-week video training program The Simple Social Media Formula: Social Media on Your Terms and is the co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies. You can find her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter @amyporterfield.

2. Why Guru Strategies for Blog Growth DON’T WORK… and What Does! by Danny Iny at Firepole Marketing

This post from Danny covers everything you need to know about building your traffic, using the idea that you don’t need to use the “slow and steady” strategy, but you do need to do what’s right for your current level of success. That’s why what’s working for someone with a million hits a day probably won’t work for you. You need to get to that level first! From the post:

No, this isn’t a post about how you should be patient and take things slow and steady, because eventually you’ll win the race.

(As Sonia Simone said in a recent radio interview, “slow but steady works, but we’ve all had the experience of being beaten to the finish line by a jack rabbit with ADD!”)

The point of this post is that the fastest way to grow is by using the strategy that fits with your current stage of growth. The more appropriate your strategy is to your stage of growth, the faster you’ll outgrow it, and be ready for the next one!

You can find Danny on Twitter @DannyIny. He’s also the co-author of Engagement from Scratch! and founder of Bowl of Goals.

3. 49 promo ideas. simple, grand + the tried n’ true. by Danielle LaPorte at White Hot Truth

I love the ideas for promotion that Danielle offers in this post. Some of them are old standbys that everyone tells us to do to drive traffic. Others are pretty unique ideas that I haven’t heard anywhere else. All of them are fantastic! Go through the whole list or pick and choose what makes sense to you.  Whether you’re launching a new business or trying to build traffic to a site you already run, these are great ideas. Here are a few examples of the tips Danielle gives:

15. Don’t be shy about all the awards and accolades you’ve earned—create a special section on your site’s About page just for that.
16. Have ongoing giveaways on your site to engage customers, generate content, and build up subscriber base. e.g. “Answer Today’s Q&A and you’ll be entered to win the Awesome Gift of the Month.” Get cool people to donate the Awesome Gift (or Service) of the Month and they’ll help with the buzz.
17. Host a Story, Poetry or Photo contest that’s related to your industry. You could take the best submissions and turn them into an e-book, or you could partner with a print magazine and the winner would get published.

You can find Danielle on Twitter @daniellelaporte. She’s the creator of the Spark Kit and Your Big Beautiful Book Plan and has a number of free downloads available for readers.

4. Are You Taking Advantages of Recurring Posts? by Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income

What are you “known for”? What do readers enjoy looking forward to reading on your site? Hopefully, every post your write keeps them coming back for more, but doing a recurring series makes a lot of sense. Traffic isn’t just about finding new eyeballs. It’s also about keeping current readers coming back to your site more often. In this post, Pat talks about how doing a recurring series can boost your traffic. He writes,

Are you giving your audience anything specific and regular to look forward to?In other words, is there some type of post that you publish consistently over and over again that becomes a true unique element to your brand?

Pat’s free ebook guide is available on his blog’s sidebar. You can also like Smart Passive Income on Facebook and follow Pat on Twitter @patflynn.

5. How to Improve Google Rankings for Your Older Posts in 4 Easy Steps by Ana Hoffman at Traffic Generation Cafe

Oh, Google. You are the bringer of traffic, but the bane of my existence. I couldn’t write a post about traffic and not include any links to information on boosting your search engine rankings. In this post, Ana writes about the step by step process to actually put your old post to good use. You’ve probably spent hundreds or even thousands of hours writing those old posts, so you deserve to get a little traffic from them! Just a few small changes can help make good (but old) content more visible on search engines. Writes Ana,

Blogging is never a “publish and forget it” sort of deal.You publish a post, you answer comments, you build links to it in hopes of ranking it high in search engines so that you can start getting organic traffic on autopilot.

Then comes the day of publishing a new post – for many of us, it’s the following day.

And what happens to the previous post? Previous 10, 20 posts? That’s right – who has the time?

If you make the time for your old content, you can see great results! After checking out this post, you can find Ana on Twitter @AnaTrafficCafe and add Ana to your Google+ circles. She’s the author of 7 Steps to Complete Search Engine Domination, which is available for free on her sidebar.

Other posts in the 12 New Media Days of Christmas series will be linked here as they go live:

12 Bloggers Monetizing
11 Emailers List Building
10 Google+ Users a-Sharing
9 Vloggers Recording
8 Links a-Baiting
7 Community Managers a-Managing
6 Publishers a-Publishing
5 Traffic Tips (this post)
4 New Media Case Studies
3 Must-Read New Media Interviews
2 Top New Media News Stories of 2011
And a Partridge in a Pear Tree

You can also check out the all the posts from 2010 and 2011 here, and don’t forget: If you wrote a post in 2011 about today’s topic (traffic), PLEASE leave the link in a comment below to share with the community!