How long did it take you to get reasonable traffic?

alexaherself

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Alexa makes a good point about content syndication.

Have you ever gone to a high traffic blog, read one of the posts, and then at the end of the post it says something like "This blog post was written by Joe Smith, you can check out his blog at XYZ"? This is actually a pretty common traffic building tactic called guest blogging. Essentially, you find a high traffic blog in your niche, then ask the blog owner if she would like to publish your blog post

Exactly so. A tremendous traffic-generating technique.

no duplicate stuff BTW, this has to be unique stuff written specifically for that blog

No ... not so at all.

"Syndicated content" and "duplicate content" are two completely different things. Both in Google's eyes and in the eyes of all the owners of blogs where I've ever any done any guest blogging. (And I've been doing it for over 5 years.)

Every guest post I've ever done on anyone else's blog has been something that was originally published (and indexed) on one of my own sites first. That isn't "duplicate content".

People who want guest posts want them to be unique to their readers/visitors; that's all.

If "syndicated content" were the same thing as "duplicate content", a lot of the world's leading news and sports websites would be in quite a bit of trouble. ;)
 

veinglory

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Ever since Panda, Google has been punishing guest blogs with live 'do follow' links as non-organic links. I have had guest posters ask me to delete or remove links from posts wrote did for me. So I think the rules have changed.
 

WritingIsFun

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hey, that's great that your at least seeing some traffic. I think one way that you may increase more traffic is by allowing other users/followers to retweet/repost your links. With wordpress, usually you can download a sharing plugin, that shows next to every page and post that allows the reader to share the link on their social websites. If you add that to your content pages, you may see a boost in traffic.
 

WritingIsFun

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I think someone else has already gave an answer to your question, but I will kind of say the same thing. Social websites help you out a lot. the more fans you can get on your facebook page/twitter and other social websites the more likely they will follow up with you on your blog. The way you strategize your posts and content, can help as well.

Don't just post content because you can, post it because your readers want to read that content. This means that you should talk about things that have caught your readers attention before. So write about things that you know your readers are interested in.

Kind of repetitive, but I hope it helps. It has helped me a bit.
 

alexaherself

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So I think the rules have changed.

They have (and probably always will? The "Panda updates" are still ongoing, in spite of the appearance of the "Penguin" and "Hummingbird" updates).

Google has taken trouble (both on their own sites, and per Matt Cutts in videos, interviews, and so on) to clarify and confirm their attitude regarding the very significant differences between "syndicated content" and "duplicate content".

"Duplicate content", in this context (which is not penalized by Google, as is now openly explained on their Webmaster Central blog), refers expressly and solely to "multiple copies of the same text-file within one domain". Content "duplicated across the web" is not "duplicate content".

They try to go out of their way to make it possible for people to understand all this stuff ... but not always very successfully, it must be said! :tongue

(The bottom line, here, is that Google knows perfectly well, and now acknowledges openly, that syndicated content is both entirely legitimate and necessary, and is interested in penalizing only forms of content which are designed specifically to exploit their site-ranking algorithms.)