One of the greatest struggles that I had in blogging is gaining traffic from a less targeted niche. My blog is a religious blog and I really do not know if how many people are interested in discussing such things.
When my blog is already 3 months old, the traffic still ranges from 10 to 15 visitors a day, and most of those visitors came from my own clicks.

I thought my blog will never make it to top, and it will continue to have a small size audience especially that its niche is all about Christian living and religion to which I believe is not a popular niche.
But after a year of blogging in this niche, my blog is slowly coping up where most of my visitors came from raw searches over Google and Yahoo. And now, my blog is one of the top most Christian blogs in the Philippines (based on Topblogs.com).


What are the key factors in gaining raw search engine traffic? I will not be talking about SEO. I assume that most of you who are reading this post know exactly how to SEO your website. Rather, I will be talking about things that you need to develop in your inner being as a blogger.

1.    Perseverance – I think this is where most blogger fail. Blogging needs perseverance because traffic and page ranking takes time to gain. It is not an overnight process. It needs hard work.
Most bloggers surrender in writing after 2-3 months. But blogs usually gets a good recognition from the search engines (granted that you have good well optimized and written articles) only after the 3rd month unless you post well written articles every day. That is when your traffic starts to boom. That is when you start gaining subscribers and readers.

There is no blog guru that will say their blog is an “instant money making machine.” Though, it can really be done probably by highly talented internet marketers, but for regular bloggers, I doubt if get rich quick scheme is readily applicable in blogging.
But granted that you are a regular blogger who started from scratch, it would mean more perseverance on your part because creating a good reputation and credibility takes time.

2.    Delivering  genuine information – I am referring to good quality information, not driven by money, not driven by hypes. I must admit that once I fell on this mistake.
When my blog is still a few months old, I was very eager to make money online. And so I have been trying to market my products. Then I found out later that even those people who have been my friends are a little turned off to what I have been doing.

And so I decided to stop my existing marketing strategy. I switched to delivering high quality content. I started to help people in my niche solve their problems, and giving what they really need.
Now, people just subscribe to my blog. And guess what, I don’t even tell people to buy this or buy that anymore. By simply putting some related affiliate products within the posts, my visitors voluntarily buy because that is what they are looking. It is what they need.

But if you are for selling something, Ken Evoy made a good point on what he calls preselling.
Don’t sell but presell.  Tell your customers all about your product, present it in a way compelling, that they will never say no once you arrive at the time when you will ask them to buy.

3.    Following the advice of the “REAL” gurus – I hate to say this, but there are lots of money making gurus out there whose blogs where intended for all the hypes so to speak. I respect their choice, but I strongly believe that business blogging is for delivering information and not hypes.
So if you are a newbie, I strongly recommend that you only choose the gurus that deliver a good deal of information. You can always sense the real gurus, the real people who have the “know-how”.
As for me, I want to recognize those great guru bloggers who made a great impact in my blogging attitude.

I have seen some more “real deal” gurus like the staffs of Blogussion and the whole WordPress Community. But there are literally more hype-maker bloggers out there than good ones.
So I strongly suggest that you look for those real deal gurus. The three above are highly recommendable, which also compels me to make this article because I know that these people can really help.
4.    Be Optimistic – Optimism can do lots of things in one’s life. It can turn your world upside down.
I know that we have been living in a world full of negativity. The economy went down, cost of living grows higher, wars, famine, etc.
Behind all these things that are happening in our world, there lies hope. “We can still work it out” this is the usual response of optimistic people.
There are times that you will be discouraged with the flow of traffic and income on your blog. But be positive. This is the ingredient that will keep you moving.
Optimism brings you to a whole new level of “purpose-driven” blogging. That despite of the negative things happening, you will still continue doing and improving your blogging habits.
In the end, blogging is more than making money. It is more than expressing yourself. Blogging is helping people, it is relating to your readers and helping them solve their problems, and delivering to them what they need.
Becoming a Problogger starts in our inner being. Try to upgrade it, and your blogging habit as well as your blog income will also be upgraded naturally.
Vince is the owner of a religious blog www.thedisicplers.com and is currently working on his second blog that talks about blogging, www.bloggervince.blogspot.com.  He created his second blog to help his subscribers to start and continue blogging without a hype.