As bloggers, our main concern is to write good content so we can drive some traffic to our blog, but also build backlinks. One thing you’ve probably noticed is how hard it is to get backlinks from articles. Unless you have a good users base or write an extremely unique and valuable article, people won’t talk about your posts. We all know it’s impossible to write everyday the best post ever and nobody starts a blog with an instant 20,000 readers. So, what can you do?

Think outside articles

If you can’t initially drive thousands of visitors with your posts, you have to think about an alternative way of doing it. Even if you have thousands of visitors, it’s always interesting to increase your traffic and alternatives to articles are still of interest for you.

I know you’re asking “what alternatives can we use?”. Well, there’s nothing specific I can say here but there are a couple of concepts you can learn from. Being a developper, I always think of tools/plugins I could develop to help the community. This can be a WP plugin, a Google gadget or whatever web-based tool. How can you drive traffic with that? Well, if you host the tool on the same domain as your website, people will visit your website and subscribe to it if they like what you do. Many bloggers are doing it and it’s usually working great.

How is that different from an article? Well, it’s really unique and it’s something people can’t copy so they have to link to you. Let’s say you develop a great WordPress plugin, other bloggers will surely talk about it, use it and link to your website to actually download the plugin because it’s not available elsewhere.

One example I can give is a Google gadget I developed for one of my website. The website isn’t a blog, but the concept remains the same: not rely on Google ranking to get traffic. I’m a big fan of the well known Rubik’s Cube, so a couple of months ago I built an online Rubik’s cube timer with statistics so that people could record their best times. I had to find a way to be really different and not only rely on Google search to get some traffic, so I built a Google gadget people could put on their Google home page. I had to do this because at first, I wasn’t ranked very well for the keyword “Rubik’s Cube Timer” (Now I’m #2). While very useful, the gadget is a simple version of the timer and it’s lacking a lot of features so people still have to visit the website. The gadget is on Google directory, has a user base of 380+ users, help me drive additional traffic and is a free advertisement for my website on Google!

The gadget looks like that:

And see how it’s giving me free exposure on Google:

People searching for a timer or something similar for their Google home page ended up using my little timer. Whenever they needed additional features, they ended up on the main website. This was a great way at first to drive some important visitors and get people to talk about the website.

I’m not a developer

Ok, this was just an example to show you how can something you usually wouldn’t think about could drive traffic to your website. I’m a developer so that kind of tools is quite easy to do for me, but not everybody is a developer. There are a lot of other ways to drive traffic and backlinks to your website. Contests are particularly popular among bloggers. Having a contest on your blog will help you drive additional traffic and there are good chances other bloggers will talk about your contest if it’s any good. I’ve seen some contests like 25$ by Paypal for the top commentator of the month and stuff like that. Why not have t-shirts with your website logo and give that away once a week/month? Things like that work and you really just have to be creative.

I’m working on a couple of things outside articles only for SEO Horror and these should be live in the next couple of months. It’s OK if it takes time to develop or to get online because you’re not in short term blogging…Are you?

Be creative

I’ve said it a couple of times in this article: be creative. There aren’t any exact techniques but it’s just important to think about what else outside your articles you can use to drive traffic. One of the most successful blogger John Chow isn’t even ranked in Google for “John Chow” because of aggressive SEO techniques. How does he drives traffic then? Well, he has found numerous ways over the years to do so and he still has one of the most successful blog on the Internet with 27,000+ subscribers, whithout Google. You want to drive traffic from Google, but it’s just to show that Google isn’t everything, you can use alternative ways.

Today, ShoeMoney published an interesting post about a recent “mistake” he made. That mistake was to remove his feedburner subscriber count from his website. He was actually annoyed of people reacting to the ups and downs of his subscribers count, so he decided to remove it and it’s understandable. Now, it seems that since he removed that feedburner count, his stats have completly plateaued at something like 16,500 readers.

We’re all sheep

I actually never bothered putting the feedburner count on any of my website/blog, I thought it was pretty useless for people to know the amount of people subscribed to my feed. Now that ShoeMoney published this article and that I think about it a little more, I feel like I made a mistake too by not bothering. Why? We are all a little like sheep: we like what’s popular and want to be part of it. When someone visit your site and sees something like 100, 300 or 1000 subscribers, it’s easy to say: “Wow, that many subscribers? This website must be great, let’s subscribe too!”. Now I feel it’s important to take advantage of the sheep in all of us.

Be careful

While it’s great to show your subscriber count if you are over 100, I don’t think it’s a good idea below 50 subscribers or even 100 readers. Why? Well, you will get the opposite reaction: “Only 22 readers, it must be an average/crappy blog”.

It’s your call

I will definitely try to put the subscribers count in the next couple of days because I really think this can have a positive impact on a website’s credibility. In the end, it’s your call wether or not you should show the counter. Like I said, you have to figure out when it’s time to show it so it can have the desired effect and not the opposite. I think 100 is a good number, but it’s up to you!