Tim Christie

Whats the secret to getting quality traffic, and mountains of it, driven to your website? Finding the answer to that single question has been my mission in this last week. I have been surfing all over the net looking at other How To Make Money Blogs as well as finding information about Making Money From Affiliate Programs and Understanding Google Adsense.

What did I find? Lots of sites that tell you you can make mountains of money by monetizing your blog, while making you believe that the information they give you is the secret. Somehow I think that they are holding back the crucial elements that make all the difference. I dont blame them though really. If I had the single most effective way of guaranteeing that I could make mountains of money from my website then I would only tell a select few and most probably make them pay for it. Ethical?? Maybe not, but that is the way the world we live in works. But then again I also believe that there IS unlimited wealth in the world and plenty to go round, so if I do find the surefire way then I might just share it with everyone. I will cross that path when I get there. By reading between the lines and trying to put it all together though I have come up with what I think is the key to making it all work.

Backlinks - Bandwidth Busters.

Backlinks. What are they and how can they bust your band width?

People dont just randomly type in web addresses and hopefully land on your page. You need to have something they want and they have to be directed there. Usually it is from typing in a search string on Google or Yahoo or one of the other major search engines and they forward traffic onwards to you. If your content is good enough and people really like it then they place links on their site to you. Alternatively they might even index you on one of the major social networks like Digg, StumpleUpon or Del.icio.us and if you are lucky enough to make it to the front page then WOOT!! Instant traffic blitz. If you have this happen to you and your article is what the world wants, then you had better hope that your servers are strong enough to handle the traffic because it has the potential to be monumentally huge. Just remember though that this is only one source of massive traffic and there are heaps more that are beyond me listing in this post.

Now is this the secret to quality traffic, maybe? It will drive lots of traffic for a short amount of time but long term I dont think it will really help build growing momentum that lasts. How do you get that long term QualityTraffic through backlinks that really lasts the distance. My theory to that is what I call Tim Christie’s Chinese Whispers Theory.

Tim Christie’s Chinese Whispers Theory

How to explain this? Well lets use a real world situation that possibly might just happen in some far off distant galaxy. Lets say that I slept with some major big celebrity like Paris Hilton and I wrote about it on my blog (Lets make it clear I am very happy in my marriage right now, I chose her because she is a very strong keyword at the moment as she is looking for a new boyfriend at the moment) All the people on my RSS feed would automatically be told about it straight away and they would come and read my post. Then they might think its a great story (whether it is true or not) and decide to submit it to a social network via the buttons at the bottom of my post and with every one of my feeds. After appearing on the social network, if people think it is read worthy then via the Networks, traffic will be driven to my site to read the story. From here the whispers begin. People start talking about it.

Some of those people reading the listing might be from celebrity mags and websites, so being such a huge breaking story they would not only republish the story with their own twist on it (whisper about it), and being the ethical publishers that they are they would also provide a one way backlink to the original article, which just so happens to be my blog. As momentum grows the whispers go further and more people want to ride the wave of the story so they do the same by putting their twist on the story as well as link back to my blog and the Backlinks network gets stronger and stronger.

Excuse the crappy graphic, I put it together in about 5 minutes but it shows just how expotential this explosion of traffic can be. Now its not your usual heirarchical tree where information is fed back to the person immediately below you. The links from people even 10 people deep still link directly back to your site (the green and blue lines) and those are the ones that count. I have only used 2 people on my first level but initially people who find out about the story theoretically is unlimited. And momentum ie An explosion of Quality Traffic begins to build.

If your lucky a media circus begins and traffic goes wild and all of a sudden you have so much quality traffic driven to your site that your bandwidth limit gets busted. This may be a good thing as long as your hosting package can handle it. The longterm effects of these backlinks are far more important than the initial hype from the social networks because once you fall off the front page then traffic flow drops significantly. Although it seems that Stumbleupon has a much better longterm traffic flow than others. Because the news of your story has spread wider than just the people who go to the celebrity gossip sites, for the next few weeks even months, people might still want to read about your article and follow the link.

There you go. Quality traffic a plenty, from people who want to read about your article and while they are there they might just read some of the other related articles that you have previously posted. The longer people are on your site and the more pages they view then the more chance there is that an ad from Google Adsense or one of your affiliate programs might spark their interest and they would definitely click on it. That means money, and making money from your blog is what its all about people isnt it? Clicks equal dollars.

I know it has been said so many times before but the key to traffic is unique content. Write about stuff that people need to hear and others are not posting about, keep your posts on topic and write about something that your readers will be interested in enough to tell others about. If they tell enough people then the Chinese Whispers Theory begins and you have found The Secret To Quality Traffic!

Just remember when you hear about my Chinese Whispers Theory elsewhere that you heard it here first at timchristie.com