How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 4: Building Traffic

Yes, it’s time for the next installment of the series that started with How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Pt. 1.

In the last post, we talked about using keywords to create titles and content that would help attract search engine traffic. Unfortunately, that’s only part of the equation. If you want your blog to appear for popular terms in the search engine results, you have to prove to Google, Yahoo, etc. that your site is worth displaying.

How?

By convincing the search engines that your blog is an authority in your niche. It doesn’t matter if you’re reviewing cook books or chatting about the latest science fiction ebooks. Search engines strive to return the most relevant results from the most trusted sites.

While few know the exact algorithms Google and the other big boys use, it’s generally accepted they give more weight to sites that have a) been around for a while (an authority site won’t be a flash-in-the-pan that gets updated a lot in the first six months but is then abandoned) b) are updated regularly (an authority site consistently adds new content to stay relevant) and c) have lots of links pointing to them (links are a way of voting for a site’s usefulness, so more links tends to mean a site is a good resource).

We can’t control the first aspect, as that depends on how old your blog is, but we can certainly control the second and we can do a lot to assist with the third.

Posting Regularly

I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about adding content regularly, since that’s self-explanatory, but I do want to emphasize that most people won’t draw much search engine traffic or make much money in the first six months because, as you can see, everything is stacked against a newcomer. Your site is new, it doesn’t have a lot of content, it doesn’t have a history of regular updates, and it doesn’t have many links pointing to it yet.

Hey, I started this blog in November, so I can commiserate!

Making money with a website is a game that favors the tortoise over the hare. Instead of getting excited about your new book blog and posting two posts a day every day in the first month and then burning out to the point where you’re only posting once a week, if that (trust me, I’ve been there), think in terms of pacing yourself.

Save some of your great ideas for down the road, so you can update regularly for the long term. Not only do the search engines like this, but your visitors do too. They’ll quickly stop checking a blog that isn’t updated from one visit to the next, whereas, if they know they can always find fresh content, they’ll be more apt to follow along.

Acquiring links to your site

This is huge. Honestly, if you do nothing else (i.e. post infrequently and throw “search engine optimization” and keywords to the wind), but lots of people link to your site, you’ll get traffic. Not as much as if you do it all but at least some. Some of that traffic will come from those links, but even more will come from the search engines as a result of your blog being seen as a popular authority site.

Every link is like a vote for your site. Someone, somewhere is saying your content is worth reading.

Natural links

The best links come naturally, meaning people you may or may not know link to your blog or a specific post because they consider it worth mentioning to their own readers. Maybe it’s informative, maybe it’s humorous, or maybe it’s simply a good reference.

This is really what the search engines have in mind when it comes to ranking sites based on the number and quality of links (quality meaning votes from popular, established sites count for more than those from newcomers). The problem is it’s a chicken-and-egg deal: it’s hard to acquire those natural links when nobody knows about your blog yet.

“In your hands” ways to get links from other sites

• Guest posting (volunteer to write articles for related blogs and work in a bio with a link to your site)
• Article syndication (submit to ezinearticles, isnare, articlesbase, etc. with a bio including live links)
• Social media (network with buddies who will submit your posts to StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter, etc.)
• Forum posts (join a couple relevant, high traffic message boards, fill out a signature with a link to your blog, and post useful information)
• Directory submission (submit your blog to DMOZ, Yahoo, and some of the bigger blog directories, though don’t bother if they require payment or a link back)
• Ask folks (it never hurts to ask people, especially if you know them, to link to your blog from their established sites)

A note on link trading

Years ago, webmasters learned the benefits of links and would trade them with other site owners to increase overall links to their site. With bloggers, you’ll see a lot of folks maintaining “blogrolls” or lists of links (often mutual) to other blogs. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, especially if it’s for the sake of readers who you may want to direct to similar blogs in your niche, but Google has greatly devalued the worth of a “two-way” link, which is what it’s called when you link to someone who links to you.

When you’re deliberately going out to build links, strive to get one-way ones, meaning another site links to you and you don’t have to link back.

More information:

My post 7 Quick and Dirty Link Building Tips has more information, not only on how to get links but on what those links should say and where they should point (not just to your front page but to back pages too).

Also check out Two Link Building Tips Perfect for Writers for information on guest posting and syndicating articles (you can include bylines with both as a means of getting links).

While both of those articles were written with authors in mind, everything goes for book bloggers too!

That’s it for the traffic-building section (and, I promise, I’ll stop talking about links for a while). In the next part of this series, we’ll get to the good stuff: making money!