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How I Solved My Blog Traffic Problem

What is the biggest problem when you start a new blog or website?

If you look at most of the blogs of professional (what I call A-List) bloggers, judging from the comments, it’s getting traffic to come to your blog, read your posts and subscribe to your feed. Blog traffic is even more difficult to get when you decide to enter into a very competitive niche like make money blogging, make money online or any other variation of make money like I have.

We’ve all read the countless posts, ebooks and listened to the pitches about SEO, comments, dofollow, link building etc. etc. and every single one of these methods are the tactics and strategies that are geared for the long term. The problem is that you want traffic right now. You want to see page views and unique visitor numbers increase dramatically.

I have a few strategies that I use when I see traffic fall into a ditch but there is one tactic that works above all others when you want to drive traffic to your blog today. I’ll share this killer tactic with you on the condition that once you’ve read this post, you to take immediate action and put this tactic to work right away. Then come back and report on how it went.

This tactic, however must be used with both caution and some discretion because your credibility is paramount to your online success and if you use this powerful traffic generating tactic without putting some thought into it you will almost certainly lose your credibility and possibly worse. So I can’t stress enough how important it is that you read the entire post and fully understand this method before you implement it for yourself.

So what is this magic secret tactic that I use to drive traffic to my site? Hold on there, don’t all the gurus show you the proof and the traffic charts first?  I get a bit lazy sometimes so I didn’t get my Google webmaster data I just used the data from WP-Stats but for the purpose of this post its good enough and just as relevant.

So now take a look at this graph of my page view stats for the month of July. The start of the month looks promising but then it dies off. I write some good posts and promote them a little through the social networks but not much seems to happen. Then all of a sudden in the middle of the month BAM! Page views increase. They die off for a couple more days then through the roof again. Even that last dip, which was during this last weekend still has more page views than at the start of the month. Interesting stuff right?

And what was it that created this spike in traffic? What is my secret ingredient you ask?

Controversy!!!

Yep it’s that simple. You’re probably wondering how on earth I can use controversy to increase traffic to my blog to that scale.

First I’ll explain what happened in the middle of the month to get that fist spike. It begins on July 16th. So what happened on July 16th?

John Chow gets back into Google. I used that to my advantage but I did in a clever way, and also in a way that (I hope) didn’t offend John. So here’s how I did it.

When John got back into Google the internet was ablaze with stories about it. But I focused on the 2 most prominent stories. One being at johnchow.com and the other at shoemoney.com. These two sites are where the bulk of the traffic would be and where I could steal divert it from.

All I really did was give my own opinion, which most people wouldn’t do in fear of falling out of favor with those very famous and influencial people. Personally I don’t care that much about it. I’m not try to go out of my way to upset people, but I will take advantage of a situation when I know that I can fire up peoples emotions. I also know that John Chow doesn’t know me and couldn’t give a hoot about me but was polite enough to respond to my comments.

To get an idea of how fired up some people actually got about what I had to say go, have a read of the comments at Johns site [John Chow Gives In To Google-Back In Search Engine] and also at Shoemoney [Google Gives in To John Chow; Proves Ends Justify The Means]. I then kept the momentum going by writing my own post about it with Has John Chow Lost His Edge? Then I publicly announced on Johns site that I had written the post but I didn’t link to it.

It’s probably worth noting that I didn’t link to my own post because I didn’t want to come off as a troll or a spammer. Johns site also uses the commentluv plugin so the post showed up on my comments anyway.

If you read that post, you can see I didn’t insult, degrade, abuse, or belittle anyone but I did go against the common consensus that John had triumphed over Google. I did this because I knew it would get a reaction but as I said, also because I meant what I said.

The reaction I’d anticipated was that people would follow the link and take a look for one of several reasons. Either they wanted to know what I had written and get my perspective, or they wanted to know ‘who the hell is this knob’. To me it didn’t matter because they were instantly introduced to me and my blog. Most of the traffic came from John Chows site but a fair amount also came from Shoemoney.

I won’t know for some time to come, but I also hope that I have gained even just a small amount of respect from John for having the balls to speak my mind and to show myself to be a leader and not a follower (or a kiss ass as I more affectionately call it).

For the rest of that week traffic continued to flow into my site, accompanied by multiple page views of  all of my posts, in fact there wasn’t a single post that didn’t get a look at during that week.

So what about the second spike? Well the second spike, that really big one in the middle, I can’t really share with you just yet because I still have more experimenting to do. But that third spike is another example of the controversy tactic.

This one was even better as the graph clearly shows and currently there is no sign of it slowing down. I just hope that this one lasts a bit longer. In fact in the time it took between that screen shot and writing this post it just continued to climb up to the heavens.

Last week Perry Belcher released his Social Media Money product. Now for those who are unaware, last year Perry was arrested, pleaded guily and had more than $1Million dollars worth of cash and assets confiscated. It was headline news both online and off. The charges were based on internet fraud. You can watch Perry Belchers confession on his blog and do your own research into it.

Anyway, there are a lot of people who absolutely hate Perry now. Personally I don’t know him, don’t love him, and don’t hate him. The bloke got greedy, screwed up, paid the price, and has moved on to new things.

My attitude is leave him be and give him a chance to show us that he’s learned from his mistakes. But I also knew there were loads of people who had not moved on and so I waited for an opportunity to present itself to drive more traffic to my blog.

It came via twitter. Another fantastic marketer who I won’t name out of respect, made a very clever post, using some great copy writing tactics which basically killed any reputation that Perry may have built up for, what seemed to me to be, a personal gain. More power to him for being clever enough to see the opportunity and take action.

All I needed to do was read the post and make some comments. Now my comments in this case were probably not very well articulated and I realised in hindsight that I could have done a much better job. Basically all I did was take certain points of the post and challenge them with my own views. Views that I knew would not be openly accepted.

My excuse for not articulating it well is that it was 2am when I posted my comments.

I then did little Google search and found other similar posts. One particular post was by what I can only describe as a ranting raving lunatic with an axe to grind and a following of readers. I decided to get up in his face about his accusations about Perry Belcher. In all honesty some of what he was saying was true but most of it was simply a Blecher bashing.

So conversations went on for about 4 days. The blog that these comments were made on is not a blog that I care much about so when my IP was finally blocked (which I had anticipated) it came as no surprise and didn’t affect me in any way. This one though had a very significant and welcome side effect.

As the blog owner got more passionate with his arguments he started to search out anything he could possibly find out about me. Then he made a post with a multitude of links back to several of my blog post, as well as several of my twitter posts. The best part of all this is that his blog has a good PR value and is in a related niche to mine. He even used some great anchor text for the links and didn’t even realise what he was doing at the time.

BONUS! Free link love.

The blog owner felt really clever and satisfied in his tirade and attempts to expose something about me and I got 6 free backlinks from a relevant site with good PR. How do you like that for a double whammy?

Warning! This is something to be very careful with. It could get you in a lot of trouble if you are clumsy about it.

First and foremost you must understand that what I write in these confronting and challenging posts is from the heart, is my honest opinion, and is completely my own perspective. I wouldn’t attempt to do this just for the sake of it. Rather I must have a genuine opinion about it and if you try this you should too. Otherwise you’ll just come off looking like a troll or a spammer or maybe worse, you could get sued for defamation or libel.

Back to the topic at hand. If you look at that graph again you can clearly see that once the traffic started coming in they keep coming back. And let me take this opportunity to say a warm welcome to all my new and recent visitors, readers and commenters. It’s great having you hear in our little community.

Some guidelines for this tactic that you must follow if you want to avoid legal trouble.

1. Don’t personally attack people. Challenge people but don’t verbally confront them.
2. Give an honest opinion and try to be as objective as possible. Be passionate, but don’t get emotionally attached.
3. Be polite and if you are confronted, thank the person for their own opinion.
4. NEVER make direct or indirect accusations that could be construed as statements of fact unless you have absolute proof to support you accusation.
5. Be prepared for some negative attention as well but remember that even bad publicity is still publicity.

If you act with caution, creativity and courtesy you can use this simple but effective tactic to drive traffic to your site instantly from just about any place on the internet almost on command. Be sure you don’t make a habit of this or you will probably lose out in the end. Remember that this is a short term strategy to get traffic flowing bringing potential loyal readers of your blog, and should also be some good link bait if done correctly. In the case of Perry Belcher I already had a post in place 2 days in advance that was used to link back to.

Finally I want to say a big thanks to John Chow, Jeremy Shoemaker, my unnamed friend (you know who you are) and my new found lunatic friend who will no doubt be visiting me regularly to see if he can dig up any dirt on me.

So now that you know my little secret killer traffic driving strategy what’s your take on it? Do you have the courage to use it? For those of you that do, make sure you come back and let me know how it turned out for you.

Happy blogging.

Related Posts

1. John Chow – How I Make $40,000 P/Month With A Blog
2. Has John Chow Lost His Edge?
3. Make Money on Social Media Without Pissing People Off
4. Which Social Bookmarking Sites Bring the Most Traffic?
5. We ‘dofollow’ comments

Tags: Backlinks, blog, Blogging, Traffic