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?
 

My 5 top blogging mistakes as a Software(Java) developer

Mistake #1: Wrote blog posts for adsense and SEO robots. The tell tale sign is checking my adsense income and keyword ranking every hour or so.

Lessons learned: Write blog posts for people. Not for adsense or not for SEO robots. If one of your reasons to write blog is to monetize your site, then you need traffic. The only way to drive traffic is by writing quality content for human. Your blog must add value to your readers, and consequently your readers will frequent your blog by bookmarking your home page and subscribing to it. So, blogging is all about unique content, unique content, unique content. Even if the content is not that unique, it needs to be written in a unique style for human. I have 150+ blog posts on my site, but only 15 blog posts contribute to 80% of the traffic. For many bloggers, 1 or 2 great blog posts become the life changing ones. So, shift your focus from frequently checking your adsense income or spending hours on the internet for great blogging tips to writing quality content.


Mistake #2: Splashed my blog posts with advertisements. Wasted lots of time hoping someone will click on those advertisements and searching for that secret tip that will increase my adsense income. The secret tip is not to make the mistakes #1 and #2. Just keep writing unique content and see where it takes you. Think of cliches like "quality over quantity" and "less is more"

Lessons learned: Having lots of advertisements will not only irritate your readers, but also your users will become immuned to the advertisements and will learn how to not click them. Some users will never bother coming back again. I am a firm believer in 80/20 principle. Only 20% of your blog posts will contribute to 80% of your traffic. So, place only 1 or 2 advertisements in those high traffic pages without irritating your readers. Relying only on adsense income is like putting all your eggs in one basket. Your key purpose of blogging is to create a brand for yourself so that you can

• find development work as a freelancer through your networked resources. Create a link to your blog from your resume and professional profiles like LinkedIn.com to establish yourself  as a talented freelancer. It is a great promotional tool to sell your services. This is what going to bring you the main portion of your income. For many, the adsense income is going to be not more than a small pocket money.
• sell your books and products via your blog.
• sell others' books or products.
• provide training or consulting services.
• provide guest speaking or blogging.

All these need traffic, traffic, and more traffic.

Google uses "Authors' Ranking" for its SEO rankings, hence key to get good  "Authors' Ranking" is by writing quality content and connecting with people. Writing software is all about building relationships with your clients. Same is true for blogging. Writing blogs is all about building relationships with you readers and discovering new opporunities. In on of my freelance assignemnts as a Java developer, my hiring manager was one of the readers of my books. 

Mistake #3: Not putting myself on my readers' shoes. Initially started writing my blogs as a repository of my knowledge. As a freelance software developer, I wanted to maintain a journal of my experience. Software development is very vast, and it really pays to maintain a journal so that it will become handy in my future assignements. I might work on a framework A, and never work on it again for about 1-2 years. I did not pay much attention as to my readers will understand or not.

Lessons learned: Learnt to write blog posts with good diagrams and code snippets to make it easier for my readers. Also, started to track each blog posts' popularity via google analytics and number of comments posted. Good thought provoking blog posts will result in feedback via user comments.  

Mistake #4: Did not pay much attention to my blog titles. Bland titles will not   encourage readers to read your blog posts. Recently, I saw some impressive titles like 

• How my Dog learned Polymorphism?
• Serious About Your Software Career? Leave your job

Lessons learned:  Many people judge a book by its cover. Quantifying your title does make a difference. For example:

Instead of: Job Interview Questions and Answers

use: 150+ Job Interview Questions and Answers.

Instead of: Blogging mistakes

use: 10 Blogging mistakes you must avoid.

Mistake #5: Subconsciously repeating the mistakes #1 to #4 and lacking patience. It is a human tendendency to keep making the same mistakes and seeking instant gratification. It took me a good 2 years to get around 65,000 unique vistors per month to my Java career training blog.  

Lesson learned: Repeatedly train the subconscious mind to not make those mistakes again. For example, spend less time on searching for those great adsense revenue making tips, and spend some quality time with your other passions. Spend more time thinking and researching for some quality content for your next blog post. Start blogging early and give yourself enough time to grow and learn from your mistakes.