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Online networking is vital for the continued success of your blog. Each blog receives traffic from all sorts of sources. For instance, the Unconventional Marketing blog and That Mutt get traffic from StumbleUpon, Entercard, search engines, blogrolls, Hub Pages and Adtoll. I don’t actively pay for Adtoll traffic, but I’m using up free coupon codes.

The more sources of incoming traffic your blog has, the better. Everyone knows this. But getting balanced traffic from different sources takes time and effort. The greatest thing you can do to increase your blog’s performance and tenure is increase your dedicated traffic. I am talking about the traffic that stops and reads your posts, not the Traffic Swarm visitor that has no intention of looking at your blog. So, what does my traffic look like and how will I continue ot increase it?

First, I have about 6 or 7 categories of incoming traffic. I say categories because breaking it down further than that will get messy. Right now, my #1 category for incoming traffic is StumbleUpon. This is in part thanks to a post Lindsay did on euthanizing dangerous dogs on her blog Thatmutt. That post made the Buzz page on StumbleUpon under the blog category (still currently there). This one post alone brought in almost 7,000 visitors to her site. Being that our blogs are tied together through Entrecard and our blogrolls, my site received an extra boost.

The 2nd breadwinner for our blogs are the members of Entrecard. After that, its the use of Blogroll on our sites and the sites of other Entrecard members. The fourth category is the search engine crowd. Then come the others like Adtoll, HubPages, Digg and so on. Here is a diagram of how my traffic flow looks.

As you can see, my traffic sources look chaotic at best but pretty straight forward. The key to driving traffic is pretty simple. Get involved. When you want your pages stumbled, find people you like and ask them to do so. Most people will gladly Stumble your page for free if they know you will also in return. When you find people like that, add them as friends and keep the relationship two-sided. I often Stumble pages for people even when I don’t have a post myself that day. The same goes for those who use Digg or Pigg.us or any other free traffic-driving source. This relationship is why the traffic quality you will receive will be much better and longer lasting.

The second step to getting involved is to spread your traffic over a number of sources. I believe you should have at least 5 different traffic sources. No single traffic source should equal more than 40% of your traffic. I am vigorously working toward this rule, but for now I am getting people through the door and signed up for a RSS subscription. The biggest reason to limit the flow of incoming traffic from one source is to minimize damage control if something were to happen to that source. Image if your site were to get banned from StumbleUpon and that is where 75% of your traffic came from. How would that affect your traffic? If the answer is drastically, then something needs to change.

The best way to avert a traffic disaster other than avoiding I-5 during rush hour is to spread the load. A well-balanced traffic load spread across multiple areas will serve all of us well. My next picture illustrates this.

Here we have a network structure resembling a circle. The idea of this setup is to draw visitors and traffic into the circle and get as much mileage out of it as possible. It becomes easy to see that having multiple sites working loosely together will help propel and add to their bases. Each site continues to draw in different traffic from the various sources except they also direct that traffic to their companions instead of the open Internet. Imagine 5 or 6 websites sharing traffic and visitors in a favorable way. It won’t take long to get great returns on time vested. This system also allows for the support and extra buffer in case a traffic tragedy occurs.

As the saying goes, “don’t put all your eggs in the same basket.” This is ever true in the realm of blogging as in most business models. The truth is, you will get by for some time focusing all of your efforts in one spot. But the law of numbers will always catch up and bite you. I am currently working on building up my own network of about 5-6 like-minded individuals, and I would encourage you to do the same. It reminds me of the Three Musketeers motto, “All for one and one for all.”

Related posts:

1. Hi y’all, Sitehoppin delivers traffic and now 25% OFF
2. Driving social media traffic to a blog, a bad business model?
3. Lessons learned from Sitehoppin
4. Entrecard Sucks, but Entrecredits is Money in the Bank
5. Entrecard Sucks, but Entrecredits is Money in the Bank Part 2