Increasing traffic to your blog is something that can be a challenge for lot of people. So how do you get traffic to your blog? Well, there are many ways. For one, you can pay for traffic. I’ve never done that, but many people do. But what about free traffic to your blog? You might feel like you have great content, and a nice looking blog, but you don’t have traffic. That is where the buzz factor kicks in.

There are many ways to generate traffic with creating buzz. Some people offer contests, some people create blog memes and others write posts on controversial topics. Along with the various buzz building tactics comes a reaction. A reaction is the result of blog buzz. The reactions are either negative or positive.

Depending on what kind of buzz tactic you use will warrant which kind of reaction you get. So the key to getting traffic is by creating a buzz. But, within that, it’s your goal to create a buzz that scores a positive reaction. Anything less, then you’ll create what I call, one hit wonder traffic, which are people who visit your blog and don’t like what they see and never will return again.

How Do You Create A Positive Buzz?

Here’s something that I say to myself when I’m writing content for my blog. Following this for the last few years helped me create some of my best articles. I call this SEMI.

1. Stimulate. People want to stimulate their brains. Our brains are filled with thousands of pulsing receptors that need to be stimulated at all times.
2. Entertain. People want to be entertained. Why else do we have The Comedy Channel and a million and one Blond Jokes?
3. Motivate. People want to feel good. They want to be encouraged and supported. People want to be motivated and pushed towards achieving things.
4. Inform. People want to be aware. We want to know whats going on, how did it happen, who was the cause of it, when did this happen and where do I go?

Now, in the process of creating a positive buzz, you should remember SEMI and ask yourself this, “Is my post going to stimulate, entertain, motivate or inform people?” If you can get a yes for all four questions, you then have yourself an excellent post.

The great thing is that it doesn’t matter what topic you have chosen for your blog, you do have an audience. The best way to reach out to your audience is to give them SEMI! Take what you have learned in this post and write one today that follows the basic rules of SEMI!

There are many tools and software available to help you study the performance of your website. But, wouldn’t it be cool to have a visual interpretation of the activity that takes place on your site?

In other words, instead of seeing the data in the form of stats and numbers, wouldn’t it be neat to see a visual representation of the clicks and the hot spots on your site? Being able to study your site in this sense could easily allow you to increase performance. Luckily for you, the technology is available, and it doesn’t cost you a dime to use it.

Checkout CrazyEgg.com. This site allows webmasters and bloggers an easy way to study analytical data in a visual form called a heat map. Simply add a few lines of javascript on your page and instantly you can start tracking data visually. CrazyEgg.com offers this free up to 6,000 visits per month. If you need to track more than 6,000 visits, you can upgrade.

After you install your tracker code CrazyEgg.com will begin creating a heat map of the page being tracked. The more people who click certain links, the brighter in color the area will appear on the map. Even though you can discover this data in analytics, having the data presented to you visually may allow you to see potential improvements. An example would be the “About Me” page on my own blog. This is one of the most popular links on my home page.

I wouldn’t have realized that simply by studying Google Analytics. Even though the data is there, it isn’t something I am looking for. But, having it appear brightly with the heat map, I can instantly see that quite a bit of my daily traffic migrates there. This has lead me to take a closer look at my “About Me” page and see if I can make any improvements to it.

Give CrazyEgg.com a try for yourself. Set up a free account and take advantage of tracking up to 6,000 of your visitors at no charge. If you exceed 6,000 in a month, you can either wait until next month to have your amount reset, or you can upgrade. Regardless of what you do, it’s well worth the time registering for a free account.

I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t have an interest in increasing traffic to their web site or blog. In this article I am going to show you how you can increase traffic using Google Analytics This is a free tool that Google provides to anyone who wants to track web site traffic data. There is no cost to sign up and only the only requirment is that you to register for an account, which is free too.

Gaining traffic to your web site or blog is probably the single most difficult element to achieve. Building a web site or blog indeed has its own share of challenges; however, what commonly happens to many people is that they do finally build a very nice site but fail to get traffic to it. I don’t want this to continue happening to you. So today, I am going to show you a very simple trick that will make a world of difference for you. If all this sounds wonderful to you, then let’s continue on.

How To Prepare Data Using Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics is very simple and this system produces some amazing statistics. Today what we are going to do is discover which individual pages of your blog or web site are scoring the most traffic. The goal in this tutorial is to show you how to find out which pages are hot and how to improve them to make them even HOTTER! But, is that possible, you may ask? Yes! This is very much a possibility and this is exactly what I do. So today, in this article, I am indeed revealing one of my own “personal secrets” in my success with search engine marketing.

Log into your Google Analytics Account. Click on the “Content Tab” found on the left sidebar. By default, the screen will show you results from the last 30 days. That is fine, you can work with this. However, sometimes because I deal in more “seasonal” type of keywords — holiday shopping deals to be specific — I tend to narrow my results by the previous week, as well as the same 30 day period from last year. However, for sake of simplicity, let’s just leave this set to default for now. Later you can experiment with this on your own to figure out which blend is best for you and your site. Please see the above screen shot for example. You can click on this to view it in full size.

Now what we have here is a simple snap shot of the individual pages that have received the most traffic within the last 30 days. You can see this section circled in red in the screen shot above. The next step I do is click on “View Full Report.” If you are following along with me, please do this now. After you click on view full report, you should see a screen that looks like this:

Once again, please click the screen shot above to view in full size. Now this screen shot is called the Google Analytics Top Content Performance Report. It will show you exactly which individual page(s) are receiving the most traffic and why. If you look closely you’ll see little “Arrow” icons to the left of each web page listing. You can click on these and a new page or tab will open up direct to the page that is scoring all the traffic.

You can do that now, if you’d like; however what I would like to do is actually click on the blue underlined text of each page. In this example, I am going to click on the /wal-mart-photo-center-vs-walgreens-photo-center.html listing. At this time, please follow with me and click your #1 most visited web page on your site. When you do, your current web page will update to a new screen. This screen will look something like this:

Once again, please click the above image to view in full size. This is called your Google Analytics Individual Page Content Detail Report. This report will give you quite a bit of information about this paticular web page. The element that we are concerned with is where the traffic is coming come (i.e. social network, search engine, direct referral, etc.).

Now at this time, please click “Entrance Sources.” By doing this, we will then discover where majority of the traffic is coming from. This is VITAL to know, because depending on where the traffic is coming from will dictate how we go about using strategy towards modifying the page to allow us even more traffic in the future. And real quick, what I mean by that is this. If more traffic is coming from the StumbleUpon.com social networks, it would be better for us to promote our StumbleUpon social network profile. If traffic is coming direct from Google, it would be better to promote a mailing list option or a RSS feed subscription sign up form. Please click “Entrance Sources” and you will see a page that looks like this:

Once again, please click the above screen shot to view full size. In this example above, you will see the StumbleUpon.com delievering the most traffic to this page. Second place is Reddit.com, third place is Google. Now, real quick… I want to talk to you about Social Network Traffic. This is VERY temperaory traffic. Meaning you will indeed only get a few days of “Burst Fire” Traffic from social networks. Social network traffic has a very SHORT shelf life.

Depending one how much time you want to invest on each of your individual pages, you very well may want to modify these pages twice. Once, to capialize on the social networking traffic and then once again about a week later to finalize your final edit towards a very fine tuned search engine marketing campaign towards increasing traffic.

With that said, in this example, I am going to bypass doing anything with the “Burst Fire” traffic I am getting to this page and focus on Google. As you can see, Google is the 3rd most popular source of traffic and quickly this will soon become #1.

At this time, please click “BACK” on your browser. What I would like to do now, is show you HOW GOOGLE IS SENDING ME TRAFFIC TO THIS PAGE. Please stay focused becausee this next step is CRUCIAL towards the goal at hand. After clicking back on your browser, click on “ENTRANCE KEYWORDS”. Here is a screen shot of what this page looks like:

Now, once again, please click the above screen shot to view in full size. Ok, folks… this is where the money is at. We have now hit jackpot. What we have in front of us is the “Answers” to HOW GOOGLE IS GIVING US FREE TRAFFIC. This report gives you a complete list of exact phrase keywords that people search for in order to find your web page. There NOW is absolutely ZERO mystery!

What Can We Do With This Data?

This data is worth more than gold! The reason being is the fact that you have totally UNLOCKED keywords and phrases that are delievering you free traffic to your web site. I have said this once, and I will say it again many times, in order for you to be highly successful in the business of search engine marketing, you have GOT to have skills or software that allow you to predict which keywords and phrases are HOT. It is all about keyword predictibility. Nothing less and nothing more.

With this list of keywords and phrases, I can then go back to my web page and better optimize, add to and rebuild the content on this page. Further research of these keywords may show my page being listed on page 3 or page 4 of Google and by going back and enhancing the content and improving my keyword saturation, I can then achieve page 1 on many of these popular search terms.

In my previous post, I mentioned how it is very important is it for a business to start a blog. If you have a blog, you could then add these keyword phrases as tags. Tags are additional pages that can be built with the snap of your fingers and instantly you have additional pages that get indexed in the search engines and are automatically optimized for the keyword or phrase you are trying to target.

I hope that you enjoyed this tip today. Stay tuned as I am going to do it again and show you how you can use Google Insights, yet another free tool by Google, that will once again, give you yet another blend in discovering and predicting keywords and phrases that you can use towards increasing traffic to your web site or blog.

For now, please share your feedback with me by leaving me a comment using the form below. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to help answer them for you.

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