How to Get Targeted Traffic to Your Blogs

If you desire to be a professional blogger, then you most likely know, or should know, that you won't be making any money without getting targeted traffic to your blog or to clients' blogs. So. How do you get this targeted traffic to start streaming in to your blogs where you do your blogging? You aren't going to do it with SEO writing techniques at your blog sites.

Targeted traffic, for those unfamiliar, is made up of a group of people who are already interested in the products or services that are being offered or advertised for at a website or a blog. Although there will always be some readers who come to a site who only come to glean information or be entertained and have little interest in related commercial offerings, even these people can be turned into buyers once they see that they can acquire something that is directly related to what they have been so interested in reading about. Traffic to a commercial site is bad; it takes up bandwidth and gives you a lot of false leads. Targeted traffic is good; necessary, in fact. Targeted traffic turns into buyers.

What you need to do to acquire your targeted traffic or the targeted traffic for your clients that you blog for is write about something that has a particular focus. Don't blog about this, that, and the other thing. Your blog or the blogs in question won't come up very much in searches if you do that. And, when you get people into the readership at at last, they will tend to not be targeted traffic. You'll have this eclectic group of curious people.

And maybe that's all that you desire for your own personal blog anyway. You as a blogger desire this eclectic group of curious people. That is fine.

But, you are probably reading this essay because you want to make money with your blogging.

Even though a blog is not primarily about information, as an article is, it still contains a lot of information and needs to be, well, informative in some way. That's just the nature of writing.

You want you blog to be about a particular theme or a particular set of a very few themes. Begin with what really interests you when choosing this theme. That might seem obvious to you, but too many people think they have to write about a particular topic that doesn't interest them.

I have heard--actually read--one writer say it thus: "Do not write what you know. Write what you are."

You cannot write inspired blog posts if you are not writing from what or who you are. Even if you take the road of blogging for other people to make money, you still won't get much in the way of repeat blog requests, you still won't help those people that you blog for, if you choose to blog for sites that you aren't really interested in. If you are anti-abortion, why are you going to write posts at a blog that is a pro-choice blog? You can't do it (unless you make your blogs negative, but I doubt you'll ever be asked back there, and you might not even receive your pay).

So. If you would not be able to blog about things you are not at others' blogs, why in the world would you try to do that at your own blog? Your blog will, um, suck if you do that.

But you need to choose a focused theme from what you are so that you will get to become known as an expert or a specialist. You will also start being picked up more by blog directories and search engine web crawlers. Specialization is the name of the game in the 21st century. General practitioners are gone save for poets and novelists.

So. What things fascinate you? Snakes? Cucumber gardens? Marigold gardens? Skiing? The weather? The sun's behavior? Riding motorcycles across the country? Running? Music? Writing itself?

Once you have this list thought up, pick one or maybe two (if the two are related) and start making your blog all about that. When you have thoughts to write that veer off of the topic that you have chosen for your blog, don't write them at your blog unless you can figure out a creative way of intertwining said thoughts with your blog's theme. Don't write about ham and cheese sandwiches on your blog that is all about radishes unless you have a recipe that puts ham, cheese, and radishes together in one stew. Makes sense, doesn't' it?

You want to establish a readership the members of which are saying to themselves and to each other about you, "That Blogger is the expert at writing about XYZ." You don't need to know everything about everything nor do you need to try to be all things to all readers at your blog. You just need to establish yourself as the unique voice about XYZ in the blogosphere. Make yourself the best writer in the blogosphere on XYZ all the way around; the most informative, the most entertaining, the most accomplished. Do this and your readership will grow and grow. So. Successfully blogging is about key concepts, not about key words.