Building traffic is a critical goal for any website, blog or otherwise. Without traffic there is, in essence, no point in existing. That’s why every now and then someone comes up with a free or paid traffic tool that initially creates a lot of buzz, but eventually falls flat. This scenario has been played out again and again since the beginning of the World Wide Web.

All of these programs are highly-acclaimed traffic tools to begin with, but they nearly all end up being not what you would expect.

There are literally hundreds–and probably thousands–of traffic programs. I’m only going to talk about one briefly for now, but if you want to take a look at them (can’t imagine why) here’s a Google Search.

I’ve tried a few and not been at all impressed, but when BlogRush was launched I allowed myself to get talked into trying it. To begin with it was touted by many to be the holy grail for those seeking an effortless increase in traffic. As far as I’m concerned BlogRush is just another failure. I removed it today since in the past couple of months I’ve received the grand total of seven visitors as a result of carrying the BlogRush widget on my blog. It’s not worth the space, sadly.

Upon reflection, what happens with most of these traffic tools, BlogRush included, is that we spend time and effort building traffic while the people who own them and their cliques enjoy the fruits of our labor. I’m convinced that traffic that should rightfully be ours is channeled into their sites. Anyone contend with that?

So what do you do to build traffic effectively? I have to tell you if you want the easy answer–there isn’t one. It takes time, effort and patience:

  1. Create content that your visitors want to read. If you don’t have time, hire someone.
  2. Create a linking strategy to get quality links coming into your site.
  3. Spend time creating social networking contacts on all the major sites.
  4. Take the time to comment on other people’s blogs–it’s really good source of quality links.
  5. Investigate Stumbleupon which can yield staggering amounts of traffic–if you take the time to reciprocate. Newsflash: you won’t get traffic if you don’t stumble. (Here’s my page–connect up!)
  6. Give something away or create a viral promotion such as a free report.

And by the way, forget link-swapping as a traffic strategy. It may improve your ranking but it does nothing for traffic flow. What you need is quality links from huge websites. I get quite a lot of traffic from SEOmoz, Sphinn and a few others but only because they’re huge and their pages often turn up in searches on Google.

For more great traffic tips, SEObook is about as good as it gets. Dave Taylor also has a great page on building traffic as does Copyblogger.

One huge advantage to building organic traffic like this is that it’s permanent. After the initial effort, apart from adding regular content, you’ll get traffic truly with little effort. With a traffic program if you stop using it the traffic stops too.

Finally, for a little bit of fun, here’s Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim with his parody, Top Ten Ways to Build Blog Traffic.