With a crowded internet filled with blogs and podcasts and websites to browse, it can be really difficult to stand out. Today on the podcast I'm bringing you tips for building traffic! I'm also going to share why I don't think traffic is the bee's knees (as in, my main goal is NOT to build traffic).  As a quick note, I am spending a whole MONTH talking about traffic in my paid membership community. We'll have exclusive interviews and resources and a guide to traffic. If you want to see what this exclusive community and training is all about, you can try your first month for $1! You'll have access to hours of video trainings and join our private Facebook group, plus get weekly email check-ins from me. Check the Create If Community Membership!   Tips for Building Traffic When we talk about traffic, we are talking about how many visitors you have on your blog, usually measured monthly. There is a difference between pageviews and unique monthly views, but for now, I'm talking about pageviews.  (If you REALLY want to know, pageviews are the number of times your site literally loaded and unique users separates out multiple visits from the same people, so you'll get a more accurate number of how many different people are reading your stuff. Sessions are kind of in-between-- the same user could have two different sessions and view six total pages, resulting in two sessions, one user, and six pagviews. Read this great breakdown here!)  Traffic from 2007 to 2017 In the old days of blogging, you wrote blog posts and people came. I like to think of this as Field of Dreams blogging: if you blog it, they will come. When I started in 2007, that's how it worked. People found me. I didn't seek them out, and I certainly didn't promote my blog. Social media wasn't really used for self-promotion back then. 2017 is a different world. If you write a blog post, hit publish, and do nothing else, chances are that maybe like 10 people might read your post. No one will just "find" it (unless you do a great job with SEO). Few people will share it (unless you first share it yourself). These days, you have to WORK to get traffic. Tips for Building Traffic in 2017 There are two main ways that you can build traffic to your site.  Get found by utilizing SEO best practices. This means optimizing your post with keywords so that search engines like Google or Bing and even platforms like Pinterest (which is really a visual search engine) will suggest your post. (Pinterest is considered social media, but I'll get into why I put it in this category. Keep reading.) Bring people to you by promoting on social media. This means actually pushing your link out over social media so that other people will see it, click to read, and maybe even share. The best idea is to use a combination of these two methods. When you have your SEO working for you, after the initial setup, you can expect to have traffic continue, no matter what you do. It's passive, long-term traffic. (Not to say that you shouldn't do updates or that you can't strengthen your game.)  Combine great SEO with promotions on social media, where you will see short-term spikes of traffic. It's great to diversify your traffic sources so that you can have a more secure foundation in case something major shifts or an algorithm kills off your traffic.  How can you grow the traffic you currently have? In theory, this is simple. Choose #1 & #2 (or, ideally, both) and work on your game. In practice, this is obviously not as easy as it sounds. SEO is more of a long game, which means that you can put things in place now and hopefully see some increases in the coming months. But the benefit is that after you set up SEO, it keeps going. Social media is more of a short game that will result in temporary traffic spikes. I've had a post go "viral" on Facebook that resulted in 50k pageviews in a few days. But then it dropped to 2k and then 500 and then...nothing. Social media is something you need to do once and then do again