5 strategies I used to drive traffic to my blog/website on software development

• Are you planning to write a Software development book via a POD publisher and don't know how to promote it?
• Are you having trouble driving traffic to your blog on software development even though you have great content?
• Are you planning to become a freelance developer and going to create a blog to promote your skills and experience to find work continuously. 

The focus is on converting

visitors --> audience/customer --> better "Google Author Ranking" --> better SEO ranking


Here are some free and paid strategies to drive traffic to promote your skills, services, products, and books.

Strategy #1: From my personal experience and hearing from the so called the digital marketing experts, the best strategy for getting massive traffic has nothing to do with Google or search engine optimization. The single best strategy is all about building relationships with your visitors. You build relationships with your visitors by finding other high traffic sites in your niche that has spent years building their audience. You need to visit these niche sites to promote your site/blog. Don't spam. Work within those sites' rules. The key focus must be to add value to those sites by helping their visitors and audiences. If you are a Java developer, sites like "javacodegeeks.com" is a good example to publish articles.

Example #1:

Frequenting industry specific forums and sites like dzone.com, javaranch.com, infoq.com, etc to publish quality articles on software development and helping others solve their problems and dilemmas. If your readers find your articles and suggestions to be useful, they will show interest in learning more about you and your work by clicking on the links you provide to your website/blog in your signature.

Example 2#:

These high traffic sites do promote their products, services and books. Become a customer of those products and do a thorough product review and post it on your website/blog.  Notify the product owner of the review and they may link to it or tweet about it.


Strategy #2: You need to convert your visitors into audience. The best way to achieve this is to write unique content that adds value to your visitors. Know what your readers want. When I wrote my blog on "Java Job Interview Questions and Answers", it was a quite unique topic. There were thousands of sites on Java tutorials, but not many on Java job interview preparation. I made it even more unique by providing lots of diagrams, examples, and code snippets in my answers compared to other sites, which just provided only 2 line answers. Still my blog provides a more comprehensive questions and answers for Java developers. You can also provide free eBooks, and get your visitors to subscribe to your network via email, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, RSS feeds, etc. This will enable you to expand your network and build relationships.


Strategy #3: Using Google adwords. This is not free and you need to pay for each click. This strategy is handy if you already have a product or book that you sell via your website or blog. You can afford to drive some traffic by placing advertisements via google search.


Example #1: Initially, I placed adwords advertisements to promote my book entitled "Java/J2EE Job Interview Companion" to drive traffic to my site. I reasearched on the google adwords tool to pick key words that are a) relevant to my book, b) has reasonable search volume and c) has less competition (means low cost per click). So, picked the key words "Java Interview" and Java Interview Questions. It did work for me and sold around 25,000+ copies. I don't use adwords anymore as my blog has a decent traffic to promote my work.


Strategy 4#: Know your visitors and audience and provide relevant contents. I have basic and advanced Java related blog posts, and the posts that get higher traffic are "posts on "Basic Java" stuff and not advanced stuff. This shows that my audiences are basically beginner to intermediate level. So, I tend to write more posts targeting beginner to intermediate  level. It is also imperative to sign up for Google analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.  For example, countries, operating systems, mobile versus browsers, organic search versus other sites, etc. It is also imperative to analyze the "bounce rate" on google analytics. This indicates the rate at which people bounce out of your site. Aim to keep this rate to under 80%. Also, try to increase the "Avg. Visit Duration". 


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Strategy #5: Organize your content so that people can easiliy navigate to your site. Your content must be short and sweet without any fluff. Your first half of the content must attract your reader to read further. Have links to your top 10 most popular blog posts easily visible to your visitors. Provide search functionality and tag cloud so that your visitors can search by category. For example, if you are a Java developer, have tags like "Spring security", "Spring configuration",  "Hibernate", "Core Java", "Jasper Reports", etc.


The above five strategies will increase your conversion rate from

visitors --> audience/customer --> better "Google Author Ranking" --> better SEO ranking


The bottom-line is building relationships with your fellow professionals. This will become very handy if you are planning to sell your products/books/services or working hard towards becoming a freelance Software (Java ) developer. Why not do both?