Happy Monday Blogosphere.

In today's post I'm going to quickly discuss strategies for the blogging goal: increasing traffic to your website. This post is based on a recent post I wrote on setting Goals for your company blog. Increasing site traffic was the first of those goals and thus the first I'll be discussing strategy around.

Blogging Strategies for Increasing traffic to your website

WARNING: For those of you who have Increasing traffic to your website as the goal of your blog, THIS IS A MUST READ. 

Increasing traffic to your website is by far the most common goal I hear from business owners and marketing managers in regards to blogging. It's also the most vague and to be honest one of the most worthless goals.  My first question for you is what is the point of the increased traffic? Traffic for the purposes of traffic won't get you any closer to achieving your business goals. Targeted traffic, yes. If you're not a publisher and not monetizing your website based on ads paid on a CPM (cost per thousand views) basis, the traffic actually costs you more money as your hosting company will charge you for spikes in traffic as your site uses more bandwidth. If you are a publisher making money on ads charged based on views, write about anything that's relevant, current and gets a bunch of searches on Google... For the rest of the 99.9% of you, in today's post I want to talk to you about refining your Goal to something more meaningful and actionable. 

When someone says, I want to increase traffic to my website, what I really hear them saying is one of the following things:

1. I want to increase my websites awareness within my Target Market
2. I want to increase my keyword rankings in Search Engines for the terms people search to make purchasing decisions etc.
3. I want to sell more widgets or whatchya-ma-call-its
4. I want to increase my visibility within my industry
5. I want to engage and network with more people within my industry

If you goal is to increase traffic to your site by blogging at least one of the above are also goals you have for your Internet Marketing and blog.  Having a blogging goal of increasing traffic is a good goal, but you need to frame it in a way that connects to a larger business organization goal. If you set out with the sole purpose of increasing traffic to your website you will be disappointed with the results 6 -12 months down the road. I would compare it to incentivizing a sales person on the wrong metrics; if they're incentivized to sell accounts that are not in line with your organizations overall business goals the sales they make can be very detrimental to the organization. 

I apologize for the bate and switch (telling you I'd give you strategies for increasing traffic to your site and instead giving you more homework, refine your goals, however, you and your boss will certainly thank me later). 

I promise in the weeks coming blog posts I will discuss actual strategies for creating more awareness, increasing your search rankings, selling more products/services and much much more in relation to your business blogging goals. Thanks for tuning in!