From the Desk of Asif Nawaz

I’m aware that there are hundreds of articles out there that tell you how to blog, how to drive traffic to your blog, and how to get rich off of your blog and get an independent income.  Well, that’s not what I’m going to do here.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who has made this site a success, whether or not you came here for HP QuickPlay, you contributed to making this a site where thousands of people come every month.  Here, then, before I go on telling you how I accomplished it, is proof that the site has increased traffic on a monthly basis.

Asifism.com is a domain I bought at University some time in 2003-2004, to build some kind of a personal website.  From that time, the site has taken many different faces.  However, this blog was put up a year ago, and from the 34 visitors I received in February, 2007, I am now expecting the total number of vistors to cross 5,400 for this month.  That’s a sharp increase, keeping in mind that this is a unique number of visitors, and is not the number of hits, which, as of this moment, are 14,598 for the month of February, 2008.

You’ve seen all the guides on the internet on how to get traffic to your blog: widgets, domain name, content, advertising, marketing, etc. etc.  However, ultimately, your strongest source of traffic is going to be the major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft Live Search.  Even your advertising and marketing, be it on forums, blogging networks, or via social bookmarking can help drive an extremely decent amount of traffic to your web site. 

But the magic, the key, to getting traffic, is content.  You need to have the content that people want.  If you have the right content, that is written well, you’ll get listed on the search engines, and your social bookmarking will get visitors soaring onto your web site.  95% of the traffic on Asifism.com has come from search engines, and it’s not because i’ve spent time writing some fantastic articles, but because I offered something no one on the web did.

I spent many, literally hundreds of hours pulling my hair out and trying to resolve a problem that quite possibly had a solution somewhere on the internet, but it was scattered, and scattered all over the place.  Before that solution disappeared,  I was able to collect and put all the pieces together, and become, at some point, the only web site to offer a solution.  Then, I was willing to help out.  HP QuickPlay was the product that I spent hours with, and the experiences I had with my HP laptop, support, and software were so horrid, and I figured since I’ve been able to get through, I can help others with it.  The idea was not to get traffic, but it worked wonders as you can see.

As traffic relevant to HP grew, I wrote another article on getting deported from the US.  Again, this article did well, and immigration and deportation, always being a hot topic in the US got some hits.  At one point Asifism.com was listed # 1 on google when someone searched for “US Deportation Facilities,” and people searched for that term because the beloved ICE would move people to facilities without telling friends or family of the deportee.

The social bookmarking thing is new.  I have recently started to promote the web site on social bookmarks like BloggingZoom (http://www.bloggingzoom.com), Technorati (http://www.technorati.com), Delicious, Digg It (http://www.digg.com) & Mixx (http://www.mixx.com).  Social Bookmarking can be a very effective way to drive traffic to your site, but you’ve got to be crafty and skillful to lure people to your content.  It takes practice and time, but it’s something that most people can do.

When blogging, I think the key is to not focus on the making money part.  Once you have the traffic going, you can worry about placing your adsense ads or other widgets that can help you monetize; but if you keep wondering about how you’re failing at making money, you probably won’t make it.  This article: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ways-to-make-money-online-with-website/ is a wonderful tool on how to monetize your blog, but it’s phase 2.

Remember, when blogging, quality matters.  If you have content that people want to read, that has continuity, people will keep coming back and possibly subscribe to your feeds.  That’s key, just like any business, repeat customers do the trick!  Scout the internet for what kind of articles and blogs are doing well on the web, and write content on similar things.  Alternatively, you can write on something you’re good at and come across likeminded people.  Remember, just one or two articles won’t do it.  You have to keep plugging away, add more information, and eventually, through a social bookmark or a search engine, the right people will find you. 

Concentrate on giving the information people need.  That’s the most important thing when getting traffic.  This isn’t a detailed article on how to conquer the internet, it’s me, in very simple terms, telling you how I got traffic to my site.  If I can do it, so can you.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 4:17 am and is filed under Blogging, News & Discussion. 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.