Whether it’s getting on the front page of Digg, receiving a bunch of thumbs up on Stumbleupon or getting a sudden blessing from Google, we’ve all grown addicted to that sudden surge in traffic.  It’s addicting, it’s exciting and it’s something we just want more of.

A reader asked me about social media and Google the other day, so let’s talk about these two today.

Social Media
Since readers will seldom be the first to submit an article into the social media networks, those who are just starting out might need to submit their own articles in hopes that it will get picked up by the main stream as people continue to vote up the post.

Something I’ve found is that the person who submits the article can be the difference between front page stardom and zero traffic boredom. In order for your content to be successful in social media networks, heavy participation is very important. This means submitting articles from other sites that interest you, commenting on the posts within the social media sites, adding friends to your network and in general embracing all activities within the network.

Once you participate, your articles will have a much better chance of gaining that traffic love you were seeking.

Google
It is possible to gain a huge surge in Google traffic. The advantage of this is that unlike front page Digg traffic that lasts 1-2 days, the Google surge can last months. The trick is to write about news that is related to your blog that is very hot with lots of new sudden searches. Since no one else has articles written around those keywords, there is a much better chance that your article will gain traction.

As an example, my friend wrote an article on the economic stimulus check when the United States government was handing them out, and instead of getting 500 visitors a day, his traffic jumped to getting 250,000 unique visitors a month. (As of this writing, he is still enjoying 150,000+ visitors a month after a few months)

Side Note: Although Google webmaster tool is supposed to tell you when the Google bots last crawled your site, I find that the date is wrong. Whenever I write a time sensitive post, Google always seems to be able to find it right away while checking the webmaster tools will often give you a day that’s a day (or more) old.

Readers ask me all the time about ways to increase traffic.  They see the success of a few of my sites and they believe that there is some secret to getting traffic that I’m not sharing.  They want to know what I do to rank high on keywords within Google, whether I pay for advertising and how much time I spent marketing my blog.

To those readers, I often tell them that the secret to traffic building is time.  There are many things you can do to increase traffic, but all of those things take time to build.  Sure you can write a killer article that gets to the front page of digg and end up receiving few thousand uniques a day for a while, but that traffic is short lived and not sustainable.

In order to increase traffic for the long term, we should look at how people come to our site: direct traffic, referral traffic and search traffic.

Direct Traffic
This category consist of readers that regularly come to your blog, the ones that regularly comment on your post, people who you know and generally everyone that remembers your brand.  It could be someone typing in your domain name in the address bar, the ones that have bookmarked your site or even those that have your page as their homepage.

In order to increase this type of traffic, it requires quality content that people value and creative branding to help readers remember you.  At first, a casual reader might read a good article from your blog and not come back, but if he/she comes across your blog and reads articles on your blog again and again, that person will become a subscriber and keep coming back for more.

Referral Traffic
These type of traffic is the best and often the most satisfying to receive.  Having other bloggers link to your posts is like others telling you that your article is one that they believe their readers will find interesting.  Links on other sites will also helps you reach new readers because it spreads the word of your brand out to different people.

Unless you are very famous or you have major advertising budget, you won’t get much referral traffic at the beginning as it takes time for other bloggers to remember coming to your site.  It takes time to build your network and it takes even more time for people to link to your articles.

The key is not lose patience in the beginning and keep writing good articles. Eventually, others will notice your great articles and links will flow to your blog.

Search Traffic
This is the area that everyone seems to spend the most time optimizing when time is actually the best optimizer.  Since a search engine’s existence is to bring qualified pages to a search term, blog content eventually will rank high because we write blog content day in and day out on one particular subject.

Search engine’s ranking are complicated but it is somewhat based on:

1. Other sources of traffic
2. Number of links to that particular blog and article
3. How long those links existed
4. How long the blog has been in existence within the search engine

Most of the factors affecting keyword rankings like the ones mentioned above are directly or indirectly time dependent.  There is no way to gain an incredible amount of inbound links naturally in a short amount of time (search engine’s actually flag your site if it happens), and unless you can manually manipulate the search engine’s ranking formula, there is no way to increase the time those links or your blog has been in existence.

Final Thoughts
You will always see some sites having a ton of visitors from day one, but if you are just starting out and don’t have the means of those people (connections, budget etc), you need to keep writing quality content. Instead of being impatient, have confidence that people will take notice the great content that you are writing.  As they often say “If you build it, they will come”.