ClearView Writing

There are Billions upon Trillions of websites on the Internet, all of them beating at each other for a share of the ever elusive website visitor. Building your website can take time and effort, but the real work that will make the difference is your content.  To Build a Website or Blog that Receives High Traffic you have to work hard, work regularly and write well, but if you do it well it WILL pay off and you will find Thousands of visitors making their way to your website each and every day.

There are several basic things you need to do to build a high traffic website or blog, they are all fairly simple but do require you to put the work in.  If you are willing to work for a Job Free Lifestyle read on!

1) Create Unique Content

The most important thing you MUST remember is that to gain thousands of search engine results and visitors is you MUST create unique content.  Unique content drives much more traffic to your website than any other tool or practice ever could.

Search engines will instantly remove duplicate sites from their search results, not to mention people who realise you are copying content will most likely never visit your website again.  Copying content is the worst thing you can do if you want a high traffic website.

I personally have learnt from experience how badly this can effect a website. In my younger days I built a small technology review site, I spent so much time filling it with complex features and brilliant design that I forgot about the content, which I ended up copying off other websites. The result was seeing the website get hit with a Google ban, I saw in a single day the visitor count I had drop like a stone.

2) Create Valuable and Interesting Content

When you create your content make sure it is not spam like or poor quality you should ensure it contains useful information and can hold a visitors interest. Remember there are Billions of websites out there made by poor quality authors with little interest in the subject they are writing about. If you want more visitors to your website or blog then it is imperative that you work on your website to make it stand out from the crowd! I tend to mix things up a little, but the majority of my work is 1500-2000 words minimum, this ensures my content is thorough, interesting and concise. It also helps protect against the moving trend that search engines are making about ignoring spam content, which tends to be small blocks of poorly written text.

If you want to build a high traffic website you will find that most of your traffic may not come from search engines, but from thousands of people linking to your site and its content. This may sound like a far away dream but many blog or website authors will link to your site for free if they find a particular post interesting and informative. This alone can drive thousands of daily visitors to your site without costing you a penny!

To get to this stage you need to build up a reputation for having Unique, Useful and Concise posts. If your content is loosely worded spam that you have knocked up in ten minutes people will NOT be interested, will not link and will not come back.

You may find it helps to shirk the ‘post a day’ image and instead write longer, high quality posts.  Google’s long term aim is to include only quality, useful content; you should have the same goal in mind. If your content is useful everyone will be interested in it, not just Google!

When you are writing a post you may find it helps if you visualise yourself as criticising someone else’s work, ask yourself how it could be improved. Imagine that what you are writing is a speech that you must give to a million people; you need to keep them interested, you need to entertain and most of all you need to inform!

If you look at your work from the outside you can see where your writing gets boring, rambles and puts off someone who would otherwise been interested in what you write.

If you work hard on your writing, edit it and improve I you will finish the day with a high quality post that brings in thousands of visitors every month for a great length of time, compared to a spammy 250 word article which is more likely to disappear of the search engine rankings quickly, never get linked and turn out to be a waste of time your yourself and your visitors.

3) Write for People, Not Search Engines

The biggest mistake new web writers make when building up websites is to focus purely on Search Engine Optimisation. Sure optimising your site content to bring in more visitors is important. It is wasted though if the visitor then leaves and then never comes back, without looking at your site, its content or more importantly for the money makers, it’s advertising..

When you write your articles keep SEO in mind, but put it second behind keeping your article readable, interesting and informative. Repeatedly spamming key words is going to make reading your writing a drag and put off prospective visitors.

When aiming for a high traffic website or blog it is vitally important that you concentrate on the People not the Content, remember, word of mouth is the biggest advertising tool, even on the internet. Great companies like Amazon, Google and EBay had nothing to do with search engines, but were purely to do with developing a useful and unique service.

4) Create Content that Lasts

Many Websites focus on ‘fad’ trends, gadgets or gizmos that come and go within a couple of years. Sure it can bring in a high amount of traffic for the short term, but after that then what? You could have put months of work into a product which has become essentially useless.

I have firsthand experience of this on two counts, one was a PSP website that saw huge traffic but little profit and then died completely after 2 months (despite me preparing and building it for 6 entire months myself!

The Second is a World of Warcraft Website, that is doing OK, but relies on people playing one particular game and requires constant revision and updating. If I do not update it the content becomes obsolete in weeks and the number of visitors will exponentially drop into nothing within months.

Building up a good website profile means that you have to create timeless content which will attract website visitors for years to come. If you are reading this blog the information it holds now will be useful for decades to come. There are however plenty of websites out there that last only for a few weeks, even when the webmaster has put months of time into it.

While money can be made by following the latest trend your target audience will be limited in size, lifespan and interest. You will also face similar competition from thousands of other people creating spam like content trying to follow the latest trend, or as I like to call it, pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

If you are writing for the future it will help you stay focused on the core subject of your writing, ensuring your content is not only focused for future users but focused for people now.

5) Keep Things Personal

It may seem strange but take a look at any advertising or entertainment structure in the world and you will notice how they promote personal. Look on TV and they make a huge amount of money from soaps, quiz shows and even the drivel that is Big Brother. They do this quite simply because they are showing personal issues on platform where people will see it.

People like to see how things have affected someone personally, include in your writing how things have affected you, situations in the past that have taught you lessons relevant to the topic and what you think about what you write.

This is a difficult thing for many people to master but once you have a grip on it you can write with a passion that will shine through your writing, how do I know this?

Quite simply I used to try and write objectively, I wrote from an angle which did not have any emotion or liveliness. It turned out my writing, rather than being technical was infact simply dull.

When this struck me (After I read through my own content) things suddenly took a turn for the skies. I was suddenly receiving hundreds more visitors each and every day, with people actually subscribing to my feed, something that had never actually happened previously!

Not only that but people started approaching me to write for them, sometimes offering huge amounts for a relatively small article.

I cannot stress enough the importance of involving yourself in the article, showing the readers that there is a person behind the text and slowly but surely getting them to know you.

If you do this not only will you entertain the visitor but they will also return to read about you, they will, to put it simply, want to find out how the story ends!

6) Write About What You Love and Honestly Think

It takes a huge amount of skill to write dishonestly. The truth is that most people who write dishonestly, such as spin doctors or politicians actually do so by being amazingly good actors. They pretend to be someone else and then write from that particular perspective.

If you cannot do this I find it help to simply not try. Instead pick jobs and write articles on things you know about and enjoy. By doing so you can write honestly, easily and without having to think hard about every single sentence to ensure it is correct.

The same goes for what you enjoy, make sure you write about things you are interested in personally. I write for several gaming, technology and business sites because that is what I enjoy. If you enjoy selling try writing for marketing companies. If you like dogs or cats then write about them, you can guarantee there are hundreds of thousands of people out there with exactly the same interests!

If you write about what you love it will show, especially to those who have found your site, and those are your target audience they are who you need to appeal to.

Sometimes your own personal views may offend someone, on my personal blog http://ramblingsofanofficeworker.blogspot.com and my political blog http://www.imapundit.com I can provoke a reaction from my views on everything from Immigration to the fallacy of environmental and animal rights groups. This may offend many people and lose me even more readers. But the fact of the matter is that because I am portraying my beliefs honestly and succinctly, backed up by facts the number of people I insult is more than outnumbered by people who find my posts interesting. They may no even agree with me, but they may go away thinking a bit more deeply, wondering about what I wrote or be prompted to write a response on what I proposed.

7) Promoting Discussion

When you first start a site it is more than likely you will be talking to yourself. I am writing this now with the clear knowledge that the people reading this now (You guys) you will probably be reading this 2, 3 maybe even 12 months in the future. But even then this article will be relevant and I can only hope that you will infact start to think about what I write and decide to reply, question or ask for clarification on part of my content.

When you write for the site one thing you should do is try and get people involved, if they are part of your site they are more likely to return and pass on your site to friends. If you get a community feeling within your site it will grow exponentially, more people will join and become involved with what you are writing, how people respond and what they value. Creating this kind of ‘family’ atmosphere is a great way to get a regular readership which will draw in new readers and provide addition content for your site which will also challenge and build upon your initial work.

Remember Your Visitors are People

Remember that people who visit your site are infact your audience. When you write make sure you imagine that you are talking to a crowd, this helps to make sure what you say is interesting for people to read, no matter what the subject matter.

Keeping your visitors entertained as well as informed is a number one priority for your writing; you must ensure that you keep peoples attention, and that you write your article like a script, or performance.

This can sometimes be hard, not all subjects are interesting, but simply remember to direct your content towards the visitor, refer to them a lot and make sure they feel included in what you are saying.

9) Remember What You are Working For.

When you started thinking of working for yourself and building websites for income, what did you do it for?

Some people do it for money; some others even built a kind of fame out of it. Me?

I’m doing it for freedom, I want enough residual income to allow me to travel the world, doing a bit of work on sites here and there but otherwise just travelling, meeting new people and having a good time.

You need to ask yourself

a) Why did I start doing this?

b) What are my goals?

c) Am I achieving them?

d) Or have I been distracted?

Once you have taken a good look at these and answered them honestly you should be able to see if you have done things well, if you are following your plan or if you have changed your plan but for a good reason.

Maybe you were writing about something that you loved but it wasn’t bringing any money in. You wanted money so instead you should write about something else you like.

We all like to get money but how much of your focus is on that?

Personally I am going to keep building my market and my income up until I can comfortably afford to go travelling, then things may drop off a bit, but I should be able to keep things going with the occasional stop off at an internet café, and I can keep writing without a computer, I just need to copy it onto the internet when I get the opportunity!

If you are working to become rich you may avoid residual income and instead work at becoming a well known writer. The best internet Writers can get around $1000 for 250 words, sometimes more. The quality comes with years of experience and practice, but it has obviously gone well for them. I have been talking to two people who have become millionaires simply by being the best at what they do. They can write with fluency and skill that I can only hope to one day achieve!

So Where Are You Now?

Ask yourself this question, if you have found that you have followed the plan, congratulations! Hard work and time is probably all you need to succeed, try new things don’t lose hope and one day you will hit it big.

If you haven’t followed this plan, well if what you are doing now isn’t working try giving it a shot, if what you are doing is working, congratulations! But remember, you can always improve.