Getting Early Steemit Traffic - Attracting visitors, building community, growing your audience

Growing your profile, your following, your steem, it comes down to getting noticed by the people who will connect with you.

And that's not easy.

A combination of things made me think of writing this today.

• First of all was the strange experience of seeing the phrase "content marketing" on Steemit (in an article by @kaylinart). Usually that is something I only see in my day job :)

• Then a guy was on Twitter saying he works so hard on his YouTube videos then some guy does something silly and gets 16k views.

• And then I was in a Facebook group where people were complaining about not making sales.

Familiar subjects, but all are missing a vital ingredient. Can you guess what it is?

OK, no prizes. They are missing traffic.

Call it audience, attention, visibility, they need to attract people to see what they offer.

Note, I didn't say "drive traffic". There is a difference between attraction and driving attention. Let's talk about attraction.

Without awareness, you don't exist

The missing piece from my article the other day about making money online was you can't really monetize if people don't know you exist. They won't magically read your content because it is good, it's not field of dreams (build it and they will come), which is why so many people get frustrated and give up.

You have to do the work ...

Attracting

1. First you need to work out WHO you want to attract.
2. Then work out WHY. What do they need to see and do?
3. Finally, work out WHERE you can reach them.

Why all that?

Consider Facebook advertising. You need to choose the audience, how you will measure success, and your criteria, even though you are on Facebook, you won't have success (or money!) trying to reach everyone, even if everyone would be conducive to your message.

Here on Steemit we have keywords rather than groups. Those are the niches. What do you need to write about to reach the people you could connect with?

Free traffic?

Free traffic is hard and slow.

• Someone with a big audience mentions you or introduces you.

• Search engine traffic

• Platform visibility

• Lots of smaller referrals

Here on Steemit us new folks have a catch-22 in that nobody knows us, so nobody is going to make the big referrals, nobody is going to give the big upvotes to increase platform visibility, you don't have the profile for search traffic, so all you can really hope for is the last one.

What does that mean?

Make lots of friends, and be awesome

1:1 is where it starts. One person at a time, one conversation at a time, one connection.

All you can do is engage in conversations and make lots and lots of friends. Keep adding to the community, and work every day, consistently.

So may people seem to have a zero sum attitude - everything is a competition. Well, it's not really. If we cooperate everyone does better, that's what community is built upon :)

You might get noticed by someone who sees your value, it could happen. Otherwise, be patient.

Once you have traction

Once you are getting more than a handful of views, things change. You now have leverage. You have social proof.

You can send visitors to your social accounts, your own website, YouTube, your products. And vice versa.

Invite people from outside to check out your work here - this will also get Google to notice.

But you have to start at ground level.

Start by friending me :)