Rich Sage follows 11 Traffic Building Steps, which you can use to dominate your niche.

I made a joke a while ago that on the first day I made my site live, I had 3 visitors — Me, myself and I. Those days are history. Now I am getting a “following” bit-by-bit as I immerse myself into the role of THE Rich Sage. This is me –as I’ve lived most of my life –even without knowing it in the early years.

When I started to look into traffic, the only comparison that I had was the Alexa ranking, which put me at 1.5 million rank late last fall. Well, with over a billion pages of “stuff” and 150 million + blogs, web 2.0 pages –well, just a lot of published and abandoned “dreams”, I felt good starting out at the 1% rank. I had beaten 99% already. Ok, that’s a good spin on things… Now it seems that my rank is rising by the week!

But, the question after that is “How do I improve 10, 100 or even 1,000 times FURTHER?” That is what my drive, my momentum and my success are all about. I will share with you what I have done… So, these are my humble stats: Just over 140,000 various hits from 4,000+ sites. Everyone has to start somewhere. This is my start. Now, momentum is *vital*.

Here’s my story regarding what I am doing, and why:

#1 - Broadcast Good Posts: I am writing just about daily. However, only posts that I consider very helpful to online business building are posted to the top “broadcasting” services such as Digg, Sphinn and lately Reddit. >> The more an update is vital to the success of my readers, the more places I tend to go to tell everyone about it. If you are blogging, or have a niche that you are focusing on, I advice to do the same –Stick to great content and don’t “cry wolf” with every post being vital. Tell more people when you have newsworthy information!

#2 - Use WordPress: Life without WordPress? Imagine living without a phone. Perhaps, you can get away with it for a few months, but sooner or later, things get tough. I “got away” with a regular site for years, but when it came to automating the various tasks such as RSS and PINGS –all the updates, it got tough. WordPress is great as it does all the work, and leaves me free to write and experiment.

#3 - Send to RSS: RSS is the future tool for communicating with readers. It does all this behind the scenes, using Feedburner. For any type of online success, you should enable the Feedburner plug-in on WordPress to do it’s work. Then promote the idea of subscribing by doing things like this: In my contest, I have advised that all a person has to do to win something is to subscribe. I have no idea who the subscribers are, but by notifying them via RSS I can let them know they have won something. This helps greatly increase the subscriber count.

#4 - Use xML Plug-in: All the updates create and renew an xML sitemap for Google, Yahoo and MSN. Early on I found that Google likes me, and I love Google -well, that extends to Yahoo and MSN. OR as I write this, they are one! May be. I’ll keep doing things to please Google as often as I can. All this “love” comes from reading my xML sitemap file as it creates a lone file that search engine crawlers (bots) find easy to read. Enabling this WordPress plug-in will allow for easy communication with all search engines.

#5 - Publish Articles: I’ve done two things with articles, apart from posting here. I take what I post from time to time, and create a better article that I then put on the leading article sites, manually. Remember, when writing original content, make changes as you post to the leading article sites to keep each as unique as possible.

#6 - Automated Article Publishing: Publish via Automated Article Submitting System called JetSubmitter >> from time to time to send them versions of articles that I have gotten as PLR (private label rights), that I send to around 400+ article sites. I don’t send my original content to these sites, and I feel that my special content should only go to the best sites. I have to admit, that I have not been consistent using this service. I will keep trying to make it part of my routine for 90 days, and will most likely stop using it after there are many links to the Rich Sage.

#7 - Directory Submission: I hired a service in November to register my site with a lot of directories. The service did that, and sent me a record of each registration. I was impressed. I will write a review about that service in February as I think that it’s a vital step to building traffic. It was not that expensive, and the results were good.

#8 - Forum Participation: I am a top-tier member at the Warrior Forum, >> where I help answer a lot of question about technical issues to marketing ideas. I really enjoy that aspect. The forum allows members to have a signature, and I have a “sig” with 4 lines –one pointing to the “Rich Sage Blog” and 3 other lines pointing to various projects and free services. These links generate a lot of visitors, and does so consistently at no cost. Using the sig line with some “FREE OFFER” generates many more visitors than any other type.

#9 - Great Content: I do my best to make each post as informative as I can. I think any product that has value creates demand. I try to make each post have some value –anything from business success to philosophical value to the more technical “how to” aspect. If I write 1,000 posts and each has some sort of value, then I have provided my readers 1,000 reasons to read about what I do and return. I try to add value daily. I still think I have a lot of work ahead of me to provide “great content” –But, someday, I’ll get there.

#10 - Exchange Reviews: This was a bit harder than I thought, but for the instances that I have done it, the traffic has been good. I wish I could do it more often. I think as more and more readers descend on the Rich Sage, I will have the benefit of getting linked and being able to review more and more properties.

#11 - Work on Viral Content: I keep trying to get a post that will “go viral”. I keep trying. I think I am a funny guy, but often writing jokes or being funny in writing is not that easy. But, I will keep trying. Here is the last post where I tried to get the attention of readers with some humor. I should point out that a viral page should not be your goal, but if you are making a 1,000 posts, I am sure it’s a bit of fun to make around 5% of those as humorous as you can. Well, I try to add some ‘color’ daily!

Keep in mind that a lot of the above processes are managed by WordPress. Apart from that, the key to building a reader base and growing online is to be consistent. You’ll see that true success online eventually is the result of some real-world, tried and true concepts that are mostly imminating from your own character, as opposed to some “digital luck” or vast, specialized knowledge.

Success & Carpe Diem, Rich Sage