In this part of The Internet Trifecta I wanted to touch base on one of the most critical and sometimes challenging aspects of being a blogger or web developer. It’s content. Pure and simple it’s finding the time, energy and devotion to maintaining your blog or website with new and fresh content and doing so without driving yourself totally nuts. That by itself is a tough job but add to that the need to constantly attract traffic as well and you can easily see why so many bloggers and website owners sort of wither on the vine.

Fortunately there are a whole bunch of tools to help you with these issues.

CONTENT:

When it comes to content you have two basic choices. You can write it yourself, which in my opinion is the best way to build your blog or website community, or you can have it automatically fed by a wide variety of feeds and automated programs such as TwitterFeed or WordPress Auto Poster for text and Daiko’s YouTube Widget or YouTube Poster for YouTube videos. One of my reasons, as mentioned in earlier posts for using WordPress instead of Blogger or creating a typical website, are the incredible number of plug-ins available for Free to enhance your blog.

When adding content you really want to try to make it personal and pertinent to your audience regardless of the method you use. My concern about automating the actual content is that it tends to become a bit impersonal. But, mixing automated and personally written content is perfectly acceptable and will go a long way to making the process a bit less perplexing especially for the newbie.

TRAFFIC

When it comes to getting traffic there are also numerous tools available to help you accomplish this goal. There are plug-ins to maximize your placement on search engines (SEO) such as All In One SEO, tools such as JumpStart2 to get more views of your videos which in turn will help you get higher placement on Google and a whole slew of plug-ins and applications to help increase your number of Twitter Followers such as Tweet Spinner and Tweet Adder. There are widgets you can place in your WordPress blog sidebar to allow your visitors to become one of your Twitter Followers to add to your Friends at Google. All of these tools, as well as many others, contribute to adding huge amounts of traffic to your site over time.

There is no quick and easy way to get traffic overnight. Please do not buy into all of the hype out there that claims to be able to get you thousands of targeted visitors overnight. I’ve tried several of them and truthfully, they’ve all failed miserably. The truth is that it takes time, energy, useful tools and a bit of hard work to build a healthy traffic pattern.

You also need to think of traffic as a funnel with the wide edge of the funnel at top and the smaller end at the bottom. You should have multiple inputs coming into the top of the funnel. Never rely on just one tool or trick to get traffic. You need to use them all so that at the bottom of your funnel the traffic is continuous and predictable. That is really one of the keys to success on the web. Remember it and use it and you’re on your way.

Check back tomorrow for the next installment of The Internet Trifecta. Please tell your friends and neighbors about TwitterRight. We also appreciate your comments and love to hear from you.