The web is full of resources that can help you attract readers and customers to build a popular site. You just need to know where to look. Over the years these 101 resources have been my favorites for building website traffic. Here they are (in no particular order). Enjoy!
If you have any resources that I missed for this list, share ‘em in the comments.
- How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog) (Steve Pavlina)
- How to get traffic for your blog (Seth Godin)
- How I Really Built a Blog with 6,500 Subscribers (ViperChill)
- 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity (SEOBook)
- 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle (I Help You Blog)
- Use These 10 Tips to Write Your Most Popular Post Ever (Daily Blog Tips)
- 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers (Copyblogger)
- How to Build a High-Traffic Blog Without Killing Yourself (Tim Ferriss)
- 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic (SEOMoz)
- 17 Traffic Building Tips from Some of the World’s Most Popular Bloggers (Think Traffic)
- How to Get Piles of Links, Subscribers and Comments (Skelliewag)
- 45 Blog Post Ideas That Always Generate Buzz (The Future Buzz)
- 25 Paths to an Insanely Popular Blog (Skelliewag)
- Building Traffic to Build Your Fan Club (Copyblogger)
- 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (SEOMoz)
- 10 Tips For Content Marketing Success (Top Rank Blog)
- How We Killed Social Media (IttyBiz)
- 50 Ways To Take Your Blog to the Next Level (Chris Brogan)
- 21 Tips for Getting 500 Subscribers in 90 Days with No Blogging Experience (Free Pursuits)
- Blog Project: 30 Traffic Generation Tips (Daily Blog Tips)
- Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape (Gary Vaynerchuk)
- The Pocket-sized Guide to Blogging (Skelliewag)
- Usability 101: Introduction to Usability (Jakob Nielsen)
Measurement
What good are traffic-building resources if you can’t measure the results?
- Google Analytics — the industry standard in web analytics
- Clicky — real-time web analytics
- Google Website Optimizer — website split testing and optimization tool
- Feedburner — RSS feed tracking
- Alexa — competitive traffic metrics
- Compete — another competitive traffic metrics service
- Technorati — blog influence rankings
- Split Test (A/B) Calculator — quick A/B test decision maker
Blogs
The very best blogs that focus on building great content, attracting customers or readers and building popular sites.
- Copyblogger — copywriting and content marketing strategies
- Skelliewag — for bloggers, freelancers, lovers of the internet and entrepreneurs
- ViperChill — viral marketing
- Gary Vaynerchuk — brash wisdom and inspiration
- The Future Buzz — digital marketing, social media & online PR
- Dosh Dosh — internet marketing
- Problogger — blog tips to help you make money online
- Chris Brogan — community and social media
- Top Rank Blog — online marketing
- Chris Garrett — new media
- Alertbox — current issues in web usability
- Daily Blog Tips
- Smashing Magazine — web design inspiration
- TwiTip — Twitter tips
- Social Media Examiner — social media guide
- IttyBiz — small business marketing
- Signal vs. Noise — design, usability and more
Books and Reports
- 279 Days to Overnight Success (Chris Guillebeau)
- 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (Darren Rowse)
- Authority Rules (Brian Clark)
- Getting Real (37signals)
News and Forums
- Sphinn — Internet marketing news & discussion forums
- WarriorForum — Internet marketing forum
- phpBB — create your own forum
- StackExchange — create your own Q&A site like StackOverflow
Social Media
The biggest social media sites for building traffic.
- StumbleUpon
- YouTube
- Digg
- Delicious
- Google Buzz
Widgets and Plugins
- ShareThis — a sharing widget for your site
- Sexy Bookmarks — a WordPress bookmarking plugin
- DISQUS — advanced discussion system
- MyBlogLog — connect with your readers
Search Engine Marketing (SEO) & Link Building
When you want more traffic from the search engines, these resources will get you there.
- SEOMoz — SEO blog and tools
- Search Engine Land — SEO blog and tools
- SEOBook — SEO blog, tools and training
- WordTracker — web-based keyword research
- Micro Niche Finder — desktop keyword research
- Scribe — SEO copywriting tool
- Google Webmaster Tools — what Google thinks of your site
Connecting With Other Bloggers
- Blog Engage — social network for bloggers
- My Blog Guest — a community for guest blogging
- The ProBlogger Community — a place where bloggers to come together
Article Marketing
Write articles for these other sites to gain traffic and build links.
- Squidoo
- Ezine Articles
- eHow
- Go Articles
Blog and Copywriting Services
- Remarkablogger — blog consulting
- Men With Pens — copyrwriting, content creation and design
- The Launch Coach — for product launches that get noticed
- Blog Critique from Chris Garrett — Chris will find ways to improve your blog
Advertising
When you can afford to pay for traffic, here are some places to go.
- StumbleUpon Advertising
- Google Adwords
- Facebook Advertising
- PRWeb — for breaking news
Other Tools and Resources
Other tools for traffic-building productivity.
- TweetDeck — awesome client software for Twitter
- WriteRoom — clear the distractions and write great copy
- su.pr — url shortener, analytics and more from StumbleUpon
- MailChimp — mailing list management (some prefer AWeber or GetResponse)
- Toodledo — make better use of your time
- Woothemes — great looking and affordable WordPress designs
- Polldaddy — quickly build surveys and polls for your site
- ClickBank — find affiliates to sell your digital products
- Creative Commons — the license that improves sharing
- Flickr — find gorgeous images to use on your site
- CSS Gallery List — share your design with hundreds of sites
- Scribd — share documents, books, presentations, etc.
Articles
The kind of kick ass posts you refer back to time-and-time again.
Do you have a resource we missed? Leave a comment and let us know!
Inspiration for this list: FreelanceSwitch’s 101 Essential Freelancing Resources
5 Free Videos, Digital Books, & Workbooks
- 6 Steps to 1,000 Visitors a Day
- 18 Months, 2 Blogs, Six Figures eBook
- 6 Ways to Earn $1,000/Mo Online
- 3 Compelling Content Types You Can Use Today To Get Loads of Visitors, Shares and Subscribers
- The Essential Business Plan Template For Bloggers
Comment & Add Your Voice
Not exactly resources but great ways to get more traffic:
102: Make a huge listpost with links to other sites. Links are the currency of the internet after all and will get you noticed
103: Comment on other blogs, making sure your blogname and url are in your name. Creating your own backlinks that way.
A great post again Corbett, this will take some time to get through. A side note however is that a lot of bloggers get stuck in reading about how to do things or as Seth puts it “Learning the tricks of the trade” and not actually “learning the trade”
There comes a time when you’re so saturated with information that you actually know everything you need to create a great blog/website/trafficstream/side-income. At that moment you need to realize that reading more about it will not get you any closer to your goal. You’ll just have to extract the essentials from the mountains of info you have and apply them.
In the end it comes down to a few things:
1. Offer great (inspiring, unique, insightful, honest) value
2. Get noticed
3. Get noticed even more
4. Repeat 1 through 3 as often as you can
Yeah, Christiaan, I think building traffic is one of those things that takes a few months to learn (if you know where to look), and a lifetime to master. The problem is most people give up before mastering it because they don’t see enough results.
I disagree a little about the value of continually reading about the topic. It’s true, you should learn the trade instead of the “tricks of the trade,” but regularly reading about something you’re trying to learn can provide more value than just tricks (like motivation, for instance).
Wow, this is such a huge list and it needs a lot of time for compiling. Great job! It will take me a month to read them all, anyway, thanks very much
Man Versus Debt’s How Not To Suck At Blogging is good too. I like Penelope Trunk, she has some great advice for bloggers with live webinars through Brazen Careerist. That and LinkedIn are good places to meet other keen bloggers. Brilliant list, thanks! There’s so much reading out there it’s amazing we have time to do any blogging ourselves:)
Yes! I can’t believe I missed that post from Man Vs. Debt. It’s really great: http://manvsdebt.com/how-not-to-suck-at-blogging/
Top notch list — I’ve been blogging for quite a while now and I see some tips here that may change the way I do things.
I hope you’ll check back in and let me know what you change, Thursday.
Awesome list, I just did something rather similar at my project site. Every resource I’ve used so far….some great articles in here. Now if only I developed the discipline to focus on getting traffic instead of reading about it.
That’s right. That is a great list of lifestyle design resources you put together. Was it well received?
OMG. That is just the sort of list I need! It’s gonna take some time to read, but I look forward to it. Thank you so much!
Glad to help!
cant wait to implement these tips to my website
Thanks for the great list of resources Corbett. I just linked to this post from my own post about how best to build traffic to any blog or Web site. You can see that link in the post I’ll use in the URL field of this comment.
Awesome, Gail. Thanks for including the list.
This is a killer list. Super helpful for a newbie blogger like me! Now I have a lot of homework to do…
If you’d have included 101 images for these listings.. this post could have doubled its number of retweets
Anyways, as I’ve mentioned retweeting this post: all these are good and well-known resources
Newbie blogger here! This is a fantastic list! I didn’t know you have to go through all this to get traffics!
Great List. Thanks for sharing it with us. I will try to implement these techniques right away.
Excellent resource. Thanks for sharing. I’ve bookmarked this post to share with others as well as retweeting it!
Hey Corbett, here I am popping up on this blog now…
I agree with Annabel Candy about LinkedIn – I started a discussion on a group called Linked Strategies called “Leave Linked Groups to be better connected” – got 93 comments before it ran its course and I killed it, made some really solid connections with the contributors
Lovin’ ThinkTraffic!
Adam
Cool, Adam. Thanks for stopping by. I haven’t tried to make connections over at LinkedIn, so thanks for the tip.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to building this link list, really good traffic and helpful resources here.
wow! great post…I’ve been looking for a list like this =) A lot of information to take in but I’ll be bookmarking for sure so I can research each topic
thanks
With such blog post you’re coming up with, it’s too powerful as you gather up all the similar topic resources in one place for readers’ easy reading and searching.
Just consider how much value we gain in reading all these resources and apply it into our daily practices.
Thanks Corbett so much, will check out all these information , bookmark it.
What a list to great topics, I’ve neglected my blog for several months or about a year to be exact, lost contents, PR and Alexa ranking and 97% of my visitors. This list will save me time by going to the source instead of “Googling” and for that, I thank you!
Wait, I’m confused. There’s only 62 listed above, but the title says 101?
By the way – Even though this is over a year old, I’m still going to check out some of these great resources.
Here’s a tip: Look back through the archives of traffic generation tips from posts published a while ago. Some get lost over the years! I recently picked up a link building strategy from a 2002 post that everyone forgot about
Cheers Corbett!
Hey Jon, thanks for the note. Something was funky about that post. I restored an older revision and all 101 links are back. Cheers!
I’ve been absent for some time, but now I remember why I used to love this website
Corbett, If you do decide to make connections at LinkedIn, please feel free to send me an invitation to connect. I’ve made solid connections there and I’ve also picked up a couple of jobs simply by offering fee technical tips.
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