You spent time getting your squeeze page up and running, but now, how do you get traffic? Traffic has been called the "lifeblood" of the Internet. Without it, you won't build much of a list and you probably won't make any money.

I have discovered 17 ways of driving traffic to your website, but of those 17 ways, you have to decide what's best or should I say, what works best, for you. In a series of articles, I'd like to give you a little more on these ways in a series of articles.

Our first way is through blogging.

You may be thinking, Sure, that's easy for you to say, but I'm no writer. OK. Well, you don't have to be a great writer to start a blog. If you're a decent writer, I mean that people can read what you write and get something out of it; you can get people to read your blog. If you're building your list around something that you're passionate about, and that you're sure other people will be interested in, that's cool. If you aren't sure how many people will be interested, that you probably shouldn't have even built the squeeze page yet. But you've done your homework. You know that at least 3,000 people a month search for your keyword, and you're all set to go.

Let's take something pretty unique, like battleships for a topic. You've probably read tons of books about them, if that's your passion. You may even have visited one or two that are on exhibit, like the U.S.S. North Carolina or the U.S.S. Missouri, and you have pictures aboard both ships. Well, cool. Post those and write a little paragraph about each photo. Use one per post. Don't just string them altogether. Write short tidbits that people might be interested in reading about battleships or that particular battleship in between. Use things they may not already know. Or, if you're using a well-known fact, give your personal spin on it. Easy!

You still don't think so? Well, then, as I've written many times before, you can hire writers. They charge between $2 and thousands of dollars per article. What's the difference? Well, skill level for one. You won't get much of an article out of a $2 writer. Expect to pay between $10 - 15 for a decent article, but one that's not very research intensive. If you have a very specialized topic, you may want to pay more, and if you have lots of money and no time and want to hire one of the highly-paid variety of writer, just be sure that they have some solid publishing credentials to back them up. It's all up to you.

Just be sure that your main keyword appears in your post early and use it often without making it hard to read. It needs to flow and to make readers want to read it. If you stuff keywords into it, you have two problems. First, people won't want to read and second, you'll be penalized by the search engines. Now, it's thought that 2% keyword density is about optimal. It's because Google may have gone to LSI or "latent semantic indexing," which means that if your keyword is Britney Spears, you'd better have a site all about dear Britney or Google's spiders won't like it. And you'd better use words and phrases in your content that points to your subject matter, too.

Google's opinion of your site is important because their system metes out a page rank for each page in your site. The higher your page rank, the higher your page will be in the results pages, and the more traffic you'll receive. Though getting into the first three pages of results is considered to be good, the first page is best, and of course, #1 for your keyword is optimal. That's hard to achieve, but it can be done, if you study ways to do it. Just don't make the mistake of getting too pushy with the keywords, or you may get a penalty.

Search engines also frown upon duplicate content. If you place an article on your blog, and then, upload it to 500 directories, you'll have lots of duplicate content floating around in cyberspace. You don't want that. Why? Because search engines want their results to be as unique as possible. Google, for instance, will only give credit for one of those pages and it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be you. If you're going to submit the same content to article directories, rewrite it completely.

The great thing is that search engines love blogs. Because they're primarily text and not as much code, spiders don't get hung up when looking at them. So, blog pages are usually indexed pretty quickly. Plus, they consider each post to be one page. The more pages your site has, the more page rank, and the higher your site will rise in the search engine results pages. That gives you more traffic.

Plus, you should put a call to action at the bottom of every page that gets people to click through to your squeeze page. Be sure to include your keywords in that phrase, too. Now, there's traffic going directly from your blog to your list building page, as well. How cool is that? If you work at making the blog better every day, you'll soon see your traffic grow.

Next time, we'll talk about getting even more traffic to your blog.