Driving Traffic on the Web? It's like Pushing String Uphill

You can drive people crazy, you can rent Driving Miss Daisy ... but why the heck anyone thinks you can "drive traffic to a web site" is beyond me. Do you actually think that you can round 'em up and head 'em to your site like driving dogies on the range?

The sooner you stop thinking that web users are cattle to be driven, the sooner you will be able to understand the essentials of attracting traffic to your site. First of all, you have to attract traffic, not drive traffic. Instead of thinking you are re-enacting the big cattle drive scene from City Slickers, think about the scene in E.T. where the kid lures the alien out of the bushes with a trail of candy. Lay a line of bait and see who or what follows it. It's that simple.

Let's look at one of the Web's most successful blogs and websites - successful not because of how much money the founder makes, but because of its influence on its intended target audience, the number of awards it has recieved, the number of references to it, and who links to it.

What does it take to get 1,000,000+ Google references with your blog name mentioned? What does it take to get your website mentioned in your industry's on-line professional journals? And get traffic like this on Alexa?

It takes about 3 years, a tight focus on a topic of interest to a small but intensely interested audience, personal knowledge of the topic, a lot of work, and a bit of luck.

Groklaw began as a personal interest blog about a couple of internet-related lawsuits, started by a pathologically shy paralegal, and it eventually attracted a few readers. They passed the link to a few of their friends, who emailed the link to a few more, and it did the whole viral marketing exponential growth thing.

The geeks were hungry for information about the lawsuits, and this site has it, well-written, focused, and in depth. The focus has broadened a bit (watching civil lawsuits is like watching glaciers calve ... lots of waiting, with an occasional big splash), but it's still focused on news and legal issues of interest to the original audience.

So ... how do you develop a niche area like this? Forget worrying about becoming successful and think about what you have a compelling interest in, and a bit of personal knowledge about. Write about it, write about your journey to understand it, and you might turn around in a couple of years and find out that you have a whole bunch of people following in your footsteps.