In this article we will discuss some techniques on how to get traffic to your design blog or freelance site. Now the old adage is the more traffic you have the more you will earn. To this I have to say Yes and No. There are many sites that have thousands of hits and day and don’t make a penny. Why? Well there could be a number of reasons for this. Most often the case is one of untargeted traffic. That means the visitors that visit your site can’t find on your site anything of interest to them. 
They may have entered your site via Search engine, and the keywords that brought them don’t match the content you have on your site. Another factor might be that your site lacks any unique content. Putting the same content on your site ,that is on every site out there. That is a “Do not do” in the Search engine traffic world.. Without further ado lets look over some important points.
Now what has helped me a lot is to integrate a blog into every website that I have. The reason behind this is that a blog is generally much easier to regularly update. The most important thing is search engines love sites and treat them better where the owner is looking after. That means I would recommend updating your new freelance or design blog with a new story or article every 2nd day or at least three times a week. Not doing it everyday gives you more time to put together more interesting and riveting stories. Now the most important part of this method is write your own articles! I can’t stress this enough. Fresh Content is the most important of all. In my experience the worst time waster move I have made was to try to build auto blogs using those content scrapers. Purest nonsense the only gaining out of the transaction is the one selling you the kit. I like many believed the lies of many of those Affiliate marketing product producers, don’t fall for the same thing.
Next step optimize your site for the Search Engines aka organic traffic. This is not hard to do and you don’t need to hire an expensive SEO specialist which will charge a fortune to do next to nothing. Visit a site like seobook.com and spend a few hours perusing the articles and tools on there. Else hit me up on my site visualmagick.com and I will help you out with some of the basics.
Next step be active in social media sites like myspace, facebook, twitter, youtube, Social networking sites are the latest fad. Facebook is now almost comparable in size as Youtube. More and more people all over the world are joining up. If you don’t put your business on there you are losing out on a lot of traffic. When you write your articles I would submit them as well to “community news” sections on various blogs. Here is a small list but once you visit these you will find many more. Designbump.com, Designfollow.com, designjuices.com , 
designnewz.com, designfloat.com, dzone.com, abduzeedo.com , tripwiremagazine.com, speckyboy.com, queness.com and many more. You can submit articles to regular article directories but don’t expect too much traffic from them, simply because they have an overabundance of submitters. Also join online forums like sitepoint and digitalpoint post there and put your freelance services in your signature.
Now this is a just a short summary of the techniques to gain traffic, there are hundreds of tracks more, of course the obvious one is that you want to try to build back links to your site. This I would do with caution as well, avoid paying for cheap useless back link on your site that is unrelated to your site. Try to build back links naturally and slowly. One thing I have seen that weighs a lot in Google and Yahoo search engines is that is domain age. I have seen 7 or 8 year old sites with relatively few back links rank high in search engines. So basically what I am trying to say it is not a race, everything takes its time. Despite what all those product ads offering instant money!
