This is the golden question of websites and blogs all over the world. How to get some decent amount of traffic. The indigoline Blog is slowly becoming 1 year old and we’ve had our good and bad days during this time, but the main thing is that I learnt a lot of things about marketing on the Internet. I’m going to share that with you now.

What’s useless?

Pretty much almost everything out there that promises you quick luck and fame is a lie. They’ll get you 10,000 views, followers, etc. in a week or two, but those followers will be of low quality and mainly spam followers. And you paid money for them. It’s just not worth it. Don’t pay anything, have 100-200 followers, but if those are quality followers then they will be more important than a million spam followers.

Don’t waste your money on Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon views and ads as well. These won’t work either. And though I didn’t try it, paying for a big banner on a site that has – presumably – millions of views a month will not get you anywhere. These are just fakes that will get your money and leave you pretty much where you were, or much worse – making you look like a spammer.

It might seem that I’m really really pessimistic, but I can tell you that experience is talking, not hate or anything like that. I tried a lot of things to advertise and better market the indigoline blog and to make it good and famous. Nothing worked from the list I mentioned above.

What will work then?

This is a great question, and a hard one. I think that it’s different for everybody. For example I have a 3d related personal blog as well. There I’m not trying to make a lot of followers, I’m trying to make quality followers and I think there are a couple of different and successful ways to do that. And I can apply these to the indigoline blog as well, and practically any type of blog or website and business.

1. Post quality content. This is a must. If you post copied stuff you won’t get visitors, because everything you write can be found elsewhere. Talk from your own experiences, share your own thoughts.
2. Make your titles catchy, and something that gets search results. What I’m saying is that there’s a pattern people tend to search. For example if the title of this article was something like “Gather more viewers to your online site“, then it would have less chance to get a good place on Google. The How to questions always rank good, I could’ve wrote gaining more traffic, or something like that. For example our article: iPhone 5 in Thailand gets a lot of traffic because it has a nice title that interests a lot of people.
3. Advertise yourself on Youtube. Advertising on Youtube is great, for example in a few weeks I gained a few hundred of views on a few videos of mine on Youtube. With this of course you need to know what people want, and what they search for. It’s a hard thing, and if they don’t search for your stuff it’s even harder. But if you have some quality tutorial for example, some interesting and rare stuff, or something that’s a problem for everybody, you can make a video and gain a few views. And of course don’t forget to mention your links in the description area.
4. About guest posts… For you it’s great to give guest posts and have your links published on an other high traffic site. But for your site it’s not too good. You can hope of course for good content and some traffic, but I tried it, doesn’t work well for the site that accepts the posts.
5. Interviews and unique stuff. This is something however that’s really great. Interviewing people can gather some traffic for your site and it can even gather hundreds of viewers if you are lucky. This happened once with me with the interview with Henning Sanden. But this thing is not something that you can calculate.