A lot people seem to think you can just put up a blog and start posting and traffic will flood in without any marketing whatsoever. Unfortunately, this is rarely ever the case.

You don’t need to have some big-shot budget and spend money on traffic, however. As long as you’re setting your blog up for success right from the beginning (or at least implementing a good SEO plan at some point) you won’t need to spend any money on marketing to get traffic.

For most blogs, the bulk of their traffic does come from SEO, at least at first. Sure, you may have incoming links and word of mouth marketing at some point, but in the beginning, you’ll be relying on good old Google and other search engines for traffic.

Don’t be tempted to think you can use the built-in SEO features of your blog, because they aren’t enough! If they were, everyone would be getting plenty of search engine traffic to their blogs, and clearly that isn’t the case.

A lot has changed in SEO in recent years, so it’s time to jump on board and ride the wave of the next generation in blog SEO.

Let’s get started!