It wasn’t easy, it took a lot of work and experimentation, but I finally figured out a formula to literally push traffic to my blog. Once I executed the plan, the results blew my mind.

Before you get disillusioned, or think I’m pulling your leg, know this; While the traffic boost happened over night, it took months of preparation, planning and experimentation to formulate the plan that resulted in the boost. So if you’re looking for a quick, easy way to get these results, stop reading and go back to hoping you’ll find a magic bullet. It just doesn’t exist. On the other hand, if you’re serious about increasing traffic to your site, and not afraid to spend some serious time and effort to get results, then please continue reading.

Now here’s the part that’ll blow your mind. The traffic didn’t come from search engines.

Change the way you think about traffic
If you think website traffic all comes from search engines, you’re among the majority of Internet users and even marketers, but you’re wrong and this is one of the fundamental problems with most Internet marketing campaigns. They’re targeting search engines and not search traffic (also known as people; Internet users; potential customers etc.)

Coming from a background in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), where the main focus is to move your website to the first page in search engines, it was difficult for me to wrap my mind around this concept too, at first. But then my eyes were opened to the truth about traffic, and it was like a light came on and now it’s completely clear to me.

Thing is, even when I was heavily into SEO and doing some pretty amazing things with clients websites, I never experienced a jump in traffic like this. At least not without paying for traffic. The reason is, that search engines take a long time to rank well, if ever, and the traffic increase is a gradual process. Don’t get me wrong, search engines are still very relevant, I’ve just never experienced a boost in traffic like this, coming from a search engine. With that said, don’t go out and abandon your entire SEO strategy to try something new.

Where does website traffic come from?
In my experience there’s only a handful of places people will come from when visiting your website. If you want to increase traffic to your website, be sure you’re in one or more of these places.

• Search engines
• Social media networks
• Online communities (web forums)
• Website Directories
• Other websites
• Direct traffic
• Links in emails

But that’s not the best part. Keep reading!

A note on Social Media
Social media is by far the most important development in online marketing since the search engine. With social media, anyone can now actively participate in the promotion of their business, products, services and website simply by building an online network and staying involved.

Building the foundation.
I’ve been on Twitter for over three years, but only in the last year have I become really active. By that I mean, posting multiple ‘relevant’ tweets daily, following and unfollowing other users, sending messages to followers from within the Twitter interface, retweeting and favoriting other users tweets and using # hashtags and @ tags in my own tweets. Now that in itself doesn’t equate to a dramatic increase in traffic, but it helps. However, by engaging other users and building rapport, people start to become familiar with you and over time they will begin to take a sincere interest in what you’re saying.

And here’s how I quadrupled my traffic in one day:
Once you’ve built your network, and developed trust among your followers by continuous interaction, you now have the foundation from which you can go to the next step. Write an article and post it to your blog. Next send out Direct Messages (DM) to your top 250 Twitter followers. That’s the maximum DM’s, Twitter allows each day.

Also, be sure to post a link to the article in your Twitter feed, with #hashtags and link to the artcle, as well as a plea for other users to retweet the post.

Here’s one example of a DM that I like to use:
Thought you might be interested in my latest article on #Topic (Link to the article). Please leave comments on the site and RT if you like the article.

In your DM include a #hashtag to identify the topic, include the link to your article, ask followers to post comments about the article and Retweet (RT) the post if they like it.

Get even more traffic:
You can use this same strategy with Facebook and Google+, and even use all three if you have time. While this allows you to reach a larger audience and could potentially increase your website traffic even more, remember the key is building relationships with people who are interested in what you’re talking about.

This formula should even work with smaller networks, so long as you’ve spent quality time building trust with the people you’re networking with.

Please use the section below to post comments and questions. And if you’ve tried this or plan on trying it, please share your results.