by Oluwatobi Soyombo

One of the major desires of every blogger is to record tons of visitors on their site every day. We all love that moment when we experience increased site traffic. This doesn’t come easy, however. There are probably thousands of articles on the WWW that teach “how to grow your site traffic within ‘so-so-so’ days”. A good portion of the online advice is worth following.

Unless you’re very popular in your field, most of your early blog traffic will come from search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and so on). So, experts recommend that sites needs to be optimized for them to rank high on search engines. While this is a great thing to do, search engines, Google especially, have restructured their algorithms such that only sites with relevant contents rank high (this is an on-going process). Therefore, to take advantage of this shift, bloggers need to create great contents.

On the 3rd of November, 2011, I was on the inaugural flight of the latest local airline in Nigeria, First Nation. I had a great moment on board, so I thought; it’ll be great to share the experience with others by reviewing First Nation Airline’s service. When I got home that night, I decided to search for possible keywords to include in my article. I discovered that there were few articles online about First Nation. This wasn’t surprising. How many articles do you expect to see about an airline that has just commenced operations?

What an opportunity to drive visitors to my site, I thought. And I seized the moment! Phiam! I got on my keyboard and drafted a consumer review on First Nation, including likely keywords. I didn’t stop there, I went on to drop the link to my blog post on First Nation’s Facebook page encouraging their fans to read my review and for the management to notice me, for good reasons. (I’ll write about why I wanted to be noticed on another day).

What followed? Traffic, traffic, traffic. Being a new airline, people began to search for First Nation online. As the airline got popular, my site became more popular and relevant on search engines. About one month after this, I noticed that a lot my site visitors were searching for “How to book First Nation Airways flight” when they landed on my site. So, I went ahead to write another post and titled it “How to book First Nation Airways flight”. This gave me more visitors.

So, what’s the catch? Be on the lookout for that rare content within your sphere of interest/influence that people are searching for online and write an awesome post on it. Is there a new service, strategy, buzz word or whatever, write about it. Never wait until the “big boys” in your industry write about them. If they do before you, they’ll probably snatch your potential visitors. Also, ensure you perform a thorough keyword research before publishing your post. When web users go searching, they’re more likely to land on your blog. It’s up to you to maintain your readership from then on.

Evolve!