Over at SmallFishBigMoney Fabian has this article on building traffic to your blog, Blog Traffic: The Missing Manual. He’s got several good tips but I mentioned another in his comments and I thought I’d expand on the idea here. That idea is using social media networking sites to build traffic.

The Big Boys

Everyone who’s looked at blogging with a serious eye knows about Digg and StumbleUpon, the big two social media sites. Getting recognized by the audience at one of them can result in hundreds or even thousands of hits in a day. I had over 500 StumbleUpon hits on my Don’t Make One of These 3 Mistakes With Your eBay ID article when this blog was only a few days old. Even if you don’t get a huge hit, you can still often get a trickle of traffic as people do searches or browse those sites. 

You never really know what’s going to be a hit or miss when write an article, particularly when it comes to the fickle audience on the major sites. You almost have to go for something radical, very humorous, or both to jar them out of their often jaded view. The other option is to write short, snappy, articles with wide appeal and have an attention grabbing title. This may not go as viral but will bring in traffic.

The problem with this traffic is that it often isn’t targeted and it will bounce off your site rather quickly, sometimes even before the page fully loads. It also is known that it doesn’t monetize well nor does it build long term visitors and RSS subscribers. So what can you do?

The Niche Media Market

One of the keys to getting longer lasting social media traffic is to explore niche sites that provide the same features as the big names but are focused on a narrower niche. For example, in software development we have DZone and DotNetKicks. I used them to build my traffic on my software development blog, VB Notebook for .NET, to a level nearly 10 times what it was before.

The ’secret’ here is that you’re getting targeted traffic instead of untargeted or semi-targeted traffic. A much larger percentage of visitors from these sites are going to be interested in your topic and much more likely to bookmark your site or subscribe to your RSS feed. They’ll even be more likely to click your ads if they’re targeted right.

No Niche Media Site? Build One!

But what if there is no niche social networking site for your niche? Fortunately there is a great solution, create one. There’s an open source toolkit for such sites called Pligg that you can use to build one for your favorite niche. Of course, this will require some work to get going but it might be quite rewarding.

What are your traffic building ideas? Share them either through a comment or pingback to your own posts.

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