Importance of Residual Traffic From Blogging

You’ve probably heard that blogs are a great way to get traffic fast, and in massive truckloads. But what you need to understand is there are two very different types of traffic when it comes to blogging:

• Active traffic – The increased, slightly volatile amount of web visitors you get when you are actively writing content, leaving comments of other people’s blogs, and getting your content into Digg, StumbleUpon or other social bookmarking sites.
• Residual traffic – The decreased but relatively stable (over long periods of time) amount of web traffic that you get as a result of your past linking campaigns, search engine rankings, and visits from people who have already bookmarked your site. Traffic from StumbleUpon can also be somewhat residual in nature.

Of course, those definitions are my own.

Some time back I created 3-4 blogs on music marketing and electric guitars and wrote content for all three of them. It was fun and although a lot of work was involved, I kept on doing it. Then as my business in other niche markets like blogging and WordPress started to get bigger and more profitable, I also ran out of time. A few part-time writers and bloggers filled in the void, but soon enough all three blogs went dead with no new content published since September 2007. That’s close to a year now.

I eventually combined all three blogs into a single blog by importing the content, but the new blog was just as dead. I assumed therefore, that the amount of traffic this blog would be getting was pretty low and didn’t bother to do anything about it.

To my surprise, when I checked the statistics a few weeks back I realized that this blog was actually getting between 5,000 – 10,000 unique visitors a month. Since I had no Google Adsense or any affiliate marketing links on it, all that traffic resulted in zero income for me. I was basically sitting on a gold mine and didn’t realize it.

My point with this whole article is simple: blogs continue to generate traffic even after you abandon it.

Sure, the traffic would not be as much as when you were actively writing and commenting, but it’s still a lot of good traffic that probably isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. A lot of people think that when you stop blogging you’re doomed, but I think it’s important to realize that while active traffic is inspiring, residual traffic that your blogs get are just as good in terms of making money online.

And at the end of the day, it is residual traffic that is going to help you quit your job and make money full time on the Internet. There are several tactics you can use to turn this traffic into cash, which I will cover in later articles.

Related posts:

1. Niche Blogging: Blogging Models That Work!
2. Blog Traffic That Works
3. Authority Blogging: Blogging Models That Work!
4. Importance of holding a Contest on your Blog
5. Autopilot Blogging: Blogging Models That Work!