By James Penn
Today I’m going to share one incredibly simple thing I
do that consistently generates me over 100 visitors per
day in three different ways. It also helps me build
backlinks which contribute to long term traffic growth.
It is the simplest and most effective discovery I’ve
made in the past year – and you can EASILY use this
strategy yourself to get more traffic and make
more money.
So what is this strategy?
(You’ll probably be a bit underwhelmed when I tell you!)
My free traffic strategy for generating 100+
visitors per day is…
ADD MORE IMAGES TO YOUR BLOG OR WEBSITE
Before you close the window and leave the blog, let me
reveal exactly what I’m doing and how putting more images
on my blog is generating me over 100 visitors per day.
How I’m Doing It
Using the example of my natural health and beauty blog,
every time I publish a new blog post, I include one high
quality image at the very top of the post that’s
relevant to the content.
For example: Top 3 Best Homemade Hydrating Face Masks
I find the image at iStockPhoto.com and I usually
download images that cost 1 or 2 credits which is
around $0.80 or $1.60.
I pick an image, download it and rename it from
something like iStock_74354975345XSmall.jpg to
something more relevant. For the photo above, I
renamed it to “hydrating-face-masks.jpg”.
Then, when creating a new blog post, I open
the Media Manager, upload the photo and set
the alternate text to “hydrating face masks”.
Essentially, the alternate text should be a
description of what the photo is. So if you
have a photo of a banana, set the alternate
text as “banana”.
That is ALL I do. It costs less than a dollar
per post, takes two minutes max, but generates
traffic using the three methods below.
1. Google Image Traffic
Sometimes, for reasons unknown, Google ranks
some of my images pretty high up for certain
keywords. It’s a bit of a lottery, but I
have at least ten images that generate
consistent traffic from Google Images.
For example, I have one image that ranks
for the search phrase “wheat” in Google Image search.
Here’s the traffic I’ve been getting for
it since November.
433 visits in total – and an average of over
5 visitors per day for that one keyword for
that one image.
A quick search in Google Images for “wheat”
shows that I’m in the second row of results,
as shown below.
If they click on that image, it will take
them to a blog post on my site. Admittedly, it
isn’t the highest quality of traffic with only a
1.23 page views per visit average, but would you
say no to an extra five visits per day completely
passively and for free?
Another image that has generated significant
traffic from Google images is this one of cocoa butter.
It has generated 270 visits since being published.
Back in October I was generating 20-30 visits per
day from Google Images for the keyword “banana”. That
image has stopped generating traffic now, but while
it lasted the keyword “banana” sent me just over
200 visits.
I have tens of keywords that have sent over 100
visits purely from Google Images.
Add some relevant images to your site, optimize
them for the search engines and hopefully Google
will send you some more free traffic, too.
2. Fellow Bloggers Borrowing My Images
This isn’t such a significant traffic source DIRECTLY,
but who knows how important this is for improving my
search engine ranking.
Often I find that other bloggers “borrow” images from
my site. They really aren’t supposed to, but MOST of
them link to my blog as the original photo credit
so I don’t mind.
I’ll often get a trickle of traffic from the link
they place to my blog, and it counts as a valuable
link back to my blog which gives a little search
engine boost.
3. Pinterest
I expect more and more of you are becoming aware
of Pinterest – a new social networking site where
users can “Pin” their favourite images to their
virtual “Boards”. The image gets posted to their
boards and their followers can see those images,
and if they click on them are taken to the
original site.
Having high quality images on your site increases
the chances that Pinterest users will “Pin” your
page to their board which can result in a nice
little traffic boost.
Plus, other users can “Repin” the image which
will then be exposed to their followers, who can
again “Repin” until your image spreads virally
throughout the site – and all the time the image
will still link back to the original source it
was pinned from.
I’ve just started using Pinterest myself for
my health and beauty blog for the last 10 days
or so. Take a look at my traffic stats so far…
It was about January 16th I set my account up,
which is just before the two massive spikes at
the end of the graph. I pinned a few of my things
(as well as interacting in the community and pinning
other stuff, too) and have had two 100+ traffic days
from Pinterest alone.
Before I even set up my account, I was generating
traffic in late September and early October simply
because someone stumbled across my site and Pinned
one or more of my images. That can’t happen unless
you have high quality images.
I think Pinterest is going to be BIG, so I’m going
to be back later this week (or early next week at
the latest) with a “Pinterest how to” so you can
start generating some traffic with Pinterest as well.
Make sure you are subscribed at the top right to
get updated when this Pinterest update is published.
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So I hope I’ve made my case for including high
quality images on your site. It’s made a huge
difference not only for traffic generation, but
for user experience, too.

