Introduction

Blogging is a fantastic way to make money online, but most bloggers fail miserably. I say that not to discourage you, but to present to you the harsh reality that you can't just put up a blog, post to it now and then, and expect to make money with it.

Making money with blogs requires a couple of vital components. First of all, you need content. The better your content, the more often people will return to read it, the more they will trust your product recommendations, and the more links you will attract to your blog.

Great content will get you more of the other vital component to blogging success - traffic. Without traffic, it is impossible to make money.

Brick and mortar businesses like shops and restaurants also require traffic. They typically call it foot traffic, or the traffic that walks by or through their establishment. Online, traffic means the people who visit a website or blog.

Without traffic, the best blog in the world isn't going to make money. It's like a restaurant with no diners or a store with no shoppers. You must get traffic, and the more of it the better.

Of course, it's not enough to just get traffic. You could easily order 100,000 random hits from a traffic purveyor for a few bucks, but that doesn't mean it's going to make you any money.

The most important factor is the quality of the traffic. If you get 10,000 highly targeted visitors, it's almost always better than 100,000 random visitors, especially if those random visitors are from low-quality sources like pop-unders or redirects.

Think about it like this. If you owned a shop selling pizza, would you rather have 100 rabid pizza fans who hadn't eaten in 24 hours walk in to your restaurant, or 1,000 people who had just eaten a 5 course dinner and may not even like pizza-

Web traffic is very similar. It's much better to have a smaller amount of visitors who are very interested in what you have to offer than a larger number of random visitors who might just cost you a lot of money in bandwidth without making you any money.

We're going to look at the top ten ways to get more traffic to your blog. We'll focus on getting the best quality traffic possible, and all of the traffic methods will be free, because you shouldn't be spending a lot of money to get traffic to a blog unless it's very well monetized and proven to convert extremely well.

You should never buy traffic until you are pretty sure you can expect a reasonable ROI (return on investment).