Blogger: Traffic building

If your blog or site is new, you will need to understand the mechanics and rules of engagement on the internet first. Especially if you are a firm believer like me in "no fee advertising"...

1) The average blogger on the internet may make a few pennies or upwards of a few thousand $$ from the website. There is nothing weird about it. You need to decide why you are building your website. If your site gets the traffic it warrants, fame will come anyway. You need to decide whether you want to money or not. If you do want it, then you can move on. O/w skip through the rest of this post...

2) The nature of the content will decide almost all factors which determine whatever money you make. The content will determine the audience, viewership and their tendency to click on ads, buy stuff etc. Content will also determine the "freshness" of the blog which eventually determines the frequency at which certain events happen. For example, if the content doesnt change fast enough or you dont update the blog too often, then you will be in a totally different money bucket than you should be. Also, the theme of the website will give you some idea of what bucket you should be in and how much time you should dedicate on your blog.

3) There is no chicken and egg problem with a blog. Content always has to come first and the website should look appeasing. Any form of advertising is focus of a later stage. So don't spend too many cycles looking at where you need to get that from

4) Getting indexed and your popularity high is important. Google determines your rank from ranks of other websites pointing to yours. So cross indexing with other established sites (getting your blog listed in directories, rating systems, forums etc) is very important.

5) Again, I cannot stress the importance of good content. Getting viewers in first time may happen by luck. But you need to make sure viewers are second time visitors or third time visitors etc. There are basically two kinds of users - casual browsers and power browsers. You need to see how you can get power browsers hooked onto your content. If you build viewership, everything else is easy...