What you should know about website building as a beginner: Why isn't my site getting any traffic?

If you've been reading The Blog! then you know I am a novice at this. Passivelyearn.com is my first website, and I had read heaps of information before deciding to take the plunge. I did the mandatory spam of all my Facebook friends, basically begging them to visit my site, and that day I had more site traffic than ever before... and the next day it dropped off. I visited reddit and posted about my site in any forum that had to do with my subject matter, and that day the traffic went through the roof... and the next day it had dropped off.

You can only spam your friends so much, and hijack so many threads before it just isn't an option anymore. So here I am, watching my site traffic drop off to almost nothing and I should be panicking. It's ok, though, because your site will not be popular on day 1, or day 10, or day 100. Everything I've read has told me that websites take a longtime, sometimes over a year, to build up any type of real organic traffic.

What is organic traffic? Basically it's the visitors you get from your site from search engine traffic. So people have to click you out of a list of hundred, if not thousands, of options depending on the subject of your site / blog. If you are lucky enough to have backlinks (a subject for another post) then you can get a lot of traffic from those aswell.

To get your organic traffic up, you need to work on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your site / blog and make sure you have long tail keywords with as little competition as possible. That way your sites show up in google higher up on the list. Where you are at on the list of sites is called your 'ranking", and getting a Google ranking without paying for it is a slow process. So sit back, keep adding content and working on your SEO and eventually your traffic will show up... or so I've been told : ) Fingers crossed boys and girls!