Blog Outposts – Master This and Traffic Isn’t a Problem

You want traffic for your blog, right? Who doesn’t. Your blog’s RSS feed is the answer to all kinds of great things. Herein I will show you how you can set up outposts for your blog and why you need to institute this strategy immediately if you’re not doing so already.

Here is an image from a mind map I created which shows a general map of incoming traffic to PCMech.com. This doesn’t represent everything I have going on, but it is still a pretty good overview.

As you can see, there are multiple black arrows (representing incoming traffic) going into PCMech. The red arrows represents inter-connecting outposts, all powered by the blog’s RSS feed. This means that, from the RSS feed, my blog stories are showing up all over the place.

All those traffic sources are outposts for the blog. In other words, they are all EXTERNAL sources of referring traffic to your blog. In this mind map, outposts include things like:

• All the videos I do (all of which are uploaded to multiple sites via TubeMogul)
• Our PCMech LIVE broadcast, on Ustream.TV and Mogulus)
• Social bookmarking sites
• Twitter
• Search engines
• FriendFeed
• Facebook (via importing blog posts as Notes)
• LinkedIn

And the list goes on. Bridging out from all of these are a multitude of smaller outposts, many of which I probably don’t even know are there because they were created by other people.

Each outpost is exactly that – a little section of internet real estate which represents my blog. It is almost like how a country will have an embassy in a foreign country.

Now, your RSS feed makes a lot of things possible. For example, using Twitterfeed, blog posts are sent to Twitter. From Twitter, they are cross-posted to FriendFeed and Facebook. Our Ustream channel has a blog widget which shows the latest blog headlines which is powered by, you guessed it, the RSS feed.

Herein is how social media marketing works. And this is just the automatic version of it. When you couple the human element to it, the power of social media amplifies many times. Sure, search engines still represent a major source of incoming traffic, but all these outposts bring in traffic as well. In fact, it is a safe bet to assume that your search engine rankings will increase because of all the incoming links to your blog from all these outposts you set up.

As John Reese said in his Traffic Secrets course, the answer to lots of traffic is to “own more of the Internet”. You need to be everywhere. Set up a network of outposts for your blog, and all these things will point back to your blog.

Getting traffic on the Internet really isn’t that hard. The answer lies in creating a lot of valuable content and then getting that content all over the place. Strategically place outposts all around the Internet, then get busy creating some killer content. The traffic will come. Of course, putting some marketing skills on top of that will speed it up.

So, what do you think?