There's no denying that Google traffic is excellent quality, and you should always be working to grow it. But it's great that social media is so massively popular now, and offers an excellent alternative for drawing visitors. Focusing on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus to increase traffic offers certain advantages over the "old fashioned" SEO methods.

They are immediate

As anyone with a website knows only too well, it can take a long while to rise up the search engine rankings for your chosen keywords. It's often a two steps forward, one step back process. You have to do many hours of keyword research, content writing, building backlinks and on-page tweaking. And even when you've done all that work things often don't pan out as you'd hoped.

It's hardly surprising it would be this way, of course. Your pages are being ranked by a giant computer, not a person. So it's really out of your control -- even though you can make educated guesses about how best to approach things.

If you get into social media, on the other hand, you can draw targeted traffic pretty much from day one or soon after. Sure, that takes some work, too. You have to find people, engage with them, share your own stuff. But it's certainly quicker than SEO.

They are human

At the risk of stating the obvious, sites like Google Plus, Twitter, and Facebook are social in the truest sense of the word. They are populated by countless real people who are genuinely trying to connect with each other and form communities.

And if you become part of these communities, they give you a sense of belonging. The interactions you have in them are often warm and friendly, much like those that occur in real life. They're just mediated by technology, that's all.

Of course SEO is not entirely devoid of humanity. You are still trying to connect with other real people by working out what they are searching for and how to appear in those searches. So you have to consider their wants and needs. However, you're not often actually engaging with real people. If you spend all your time on SEO you can easily wind up feeling alienated, as if you're floating in space.

They offer quality

I don't think there's much doubt that search engine traffic is still best for conversions. But traffic from social media is still very good quality.

The Twitter followers who are clicking on the blog links you share on the site, for example, are already highly targeted. The very fact that they're following you means they have some respect for you, and share your interests, after all. So the odds that they will become regular readers, and maybe even buy goods or services that you are promoting, are quite high.

You can further improve the odds of this happening by repeated engagement with them on Twitter itself. People buy from those they trust, after all. And the more they communicate with you, the more they trust you.

They help with SEO anyway

The final benefit that you get from using social media is an indirect one. Google now records the number of shares, likes and plus ones your pages accrue. The more of these you have, the more positively your site is perceived by the search engine. It then rises up the rankings, gaining more targeted traffic.

This isn't a massive effect, but it can accumulate to become quite substantial. It's just one more reason you should regularly engage in social media activity.

All the top blogging gurus stress how important passion is in blogging. Needless to say, this is good advice. If you're not genuinely enthusiastic about and interested in what you're writing about then it's unlikely you'll persevere with your blog long enough for it to become established and draw a loyal audience.

Expert or newbie

But it should be remembered that there are different types of passion. For example, perhaps you are already an expert in some field or other and you want to educate others about it. (Many tech-related blogs are like this. They often include a lot of diagrams and step by step guides.)

On the other hand, you might be a complete newbie in the field you love so much. So you use your blog as a way of collating all the good information you find about it. Ultimately it becomes a kind of online course you give yourself and that others can learn from as well.

Politics

Another common blogging passion is politics. You could be an activist and you want to change people's minds about something. You want to inspire them with your vision for a better world.

Or maybe you've had it with all the utopian activism. You just you want to debunk it relentlessly. And a blog is certainly an effective way to do that.

Maybe you are interested in politics, but you're more of a philosopher. Rather than getting het up about current issues you remain more detached and analytical. Standing back form the fray, you use your blog to explain political machinations without taking sides.

Entertainment

You could also be a bit of an entertainer; a comedian. The main point of your posts is simply to amuse people rather than inspire, convert or inform them. So you use political developments, news and current affairs items merely as fodder for jokes and wry observations.

Perhaps your blog is motivated by a combination of two or more of the aims listed here -- or by something else entirely. Whatever the nature of your passion, it's worth really thinking about it before you start your blog, or at least fairly early on in its life. If you can clarify this purpose and stick to it then your blog will have cohesion. Readers who find it will immediately know what it is about and trying to achieve. It will be more compelling and shareable as a result, and it will likely become established far sooner than if you didn't have such a clear purpose in mind.

When bloggers start out they are so often fixated on the sheer numbers of people visiting their blogs. You also see this with Twitter and Facebook users. They're constantly on the lookout for how to get more likes and fans.

Quality beats quantity

While it's nice to get more of something, you've got to remember that it's the quality that counts. Much better to get 100 readers who are genuinely interested in the content of your blog than thousands who are just bouncing straight off it. Quality, interested visitors are more likely to read your posts fully, respond to them in comments, and share them on social media. They're also more likely to buy something if you are promoting stuff on your blog.

This is one of the reasons you should stay away from traffic exchanges. They are all full of people just wanting to promote their own stuff. They're not interested in reading other people's blogs. While using them might get you on the radar of a few other bloggers who ultimately link to you at some stage, I don't think the time invested is worth it. 

Be unique and insightful

So how will you ensure that you have quality readers? Obviously, you should write quality stuff on your blog. It has to be unique content, meaning that it's not spun form other sources or plagiarized. But that doesn't that the concepts have to be completely unique. (There's nothing new under the sun, as they say. It just has to be written by a human, and be a never before used arrangement of words.)

That said, if you can find a new angle on something that's been covered a million times before, then that helps a lot. Blog readers always appreciate interesting insights into a subject. If you can consistently deliver these, they're sure to keep returning.

You'll make your blog even more distinctive if it has a unique voice as well. This might come from a humorous or ironic deliver, or the use of unusual and colorful analogies.

Be useful

Remember, too, that many readers come to blogs to blogs looking for answers to various problems. So you should give them that if you can. You can get a really good sense for what questions people are asking from Google's drop down suggestion box. Question and answer sites like Quora are worth browsing from time to time, too.

Be persuasive

Your blog also has to be persuasive. So write confidently. If you've got some research data to back up a point, then use that.

But loads of facts and figures from other sources aren't absolutely vital. Often authority comes from your own experience. So use personal stories to illustrate your points whenever possible. This is a great tactic to use because articles and blog posts will tend to flow naturally and quickly. And people often find them more compelling than data-laden pieces.

As I've mentioned, one way effective way to get more likes on your Facebook page is to comment on others. Common sense dictates that the older and more popular these pages are, the greater the number of people who will see your page's name when you engage with them, and therefore the greater the number of people who will ultimately like your page.

Like new FB pages

But I also think that liking, then commenting on, new pages with low numbers can be beneficial. This is because these page owners really appreciate the fact that you've actually contributed to their page. They're more likely to reciprocate by liking yours back, or commenting on it, or liking your posts. (At least that's what my own recent experience tells me.)

I also suspect that they're much more likely to continue to engage with your page, particularly if you do the same with theirs. (It's a bit like a couple of kids who make friends on the first day of school. It's a strong bonding experience.)

Comment on young blogs

This also holds for blog commenting. Of course you should comment on prominent, high traffic blogs, since they'll tend to bestow more clicks than the younger ones. Still, how many of those popular bloggers will have the time or the inclination to have a good look at your blog, let alone comment on it?

Certainly some of them will do this. But it won't be most or all of them. Unless you're consistently writing absolutely brilliant comments on their blogs, the big names are unlikely to check yours out.

New bloggers, however, being chuffed that you have responded, will almost always do this. They'll often come back to comment again and again, too.

Potential long-term benefits

Remember that even the big names had to start somewhere, too. So a certain percentage of the newbies that you connect with via mutual commenting will eventually become established bloggers in their own right. You might end up benefiting traffic and link wise at some stage way down the track.

For these reasons it's a good idea to engage with a mix of new blogs and Facebook pages as well as old and established ones. You'll get the best of both worlds then.

One thing that you read repeatedly on blogs about blogging is that writing lots of quality comments is a very effective way to build traffic and connections with other bloggers. This is certainly true.

A potential waste of time

However you can overdo them a bit. Blog comment threads almost constitute their own self-contained social network. So, it's easy to get lost in them and waste quite a bit of time, just as you might do on Facebook.

It's not such a problem occasionally but if you do this regularly it can really lower your productivity. Think about it. If you write five two hundred word comments in one sitting, that's a thousand words right there. If you'd spent that time on your blog instead you'd have two solid blog posts.

Remember to keep those comments

You can still build content for your blog while commenting on others, though. You do this just by cutting and pasting your comments into a file. You can return to this content some time later and rewrite it all substantially, expanding it into many substantial, comprehensive blog posts and articles.

You can't respond to all replies

Also, I wouldn't recommend being too conscientious about replying to all those who have responded to your comments because that can take a lot of time and energy. Sure, it's nice to respond to some of them, but I wouldn't lose sleep if you don't get to every last one. That's why I think it's best not to tick the little box that says "alert me when someone replies to my comment".