Get the Blog flowing

In my last post My First Step I told you what I did to get started earning online. The second step was writing the blog. It took a long time before I finally started to get an average of five visitors a day so blogging will not get you rich quick. However it is a good way to earn a few dollars on the side. But more than just writing you have to build your traffic.

When you talk traffic in the blogging world you need to know a few terms. CTR is your Click Through Rate, advertisers will be looking at this aspect of your traffic a lot. Your CTR determines a lot of different things for an advertiser. For example if your page gets viewed 100 times in a day but only 1 click on an ad then you will have a CTR of 1%. Obviously just by looking at it you would want to improve your CTR considering the higher your CTR is the chances of getting high paying ads on your page will increase.

Here are two more terms you will need to know about your traffic, Page Views and Bounce Rate. Page views are exactly what they sound like, every time your page gets viewed counts as 1 page view; pretty simple. Bounce Rate is also very simple as well. Your bounce rate is determined by how often one of your visitors click on an internal link or just view briefly and leave. The higher your bounce rate the more people who are just visiting for a few seconds and leave. If you want to improve your bounce rate, you have to post frequently and quality posts. This brings me to my next point, posting regular gives your readers something to comeback to as well as helping search engines to find your page.

There are a lot of different search engines out there but most people are prone to use Google for their searches so don't be too surprised when you find out your first hit from a search engine came from Google. A lot of bloggers are concerned with SEO or Search Engine Optimization, of course optimizing your blog to bring in more traffic from one of the millions of searches performed every day is good. You are going to want to keep people who find your blog from searches to stay for a little while and actually become readers; you will need good content for that.

When your first starting out you will have to focus on creating quality posts so those bloggers who do find your page are willing to comeback and read some more. (My this post is running long, hurry up and end it will ya!) Anyway I will get into building your traffic in my next post, I think this one is getting a little long. Peace out!