What If Google decides to drop all your rankings today, or Facebook shuts down your fan page, or If Twitter deletes your profile?

Would you want to be in a position to lose all your online income, reputation and business?

Of course, you’d like to control your blog and your online business yourself, and don’t want to let Google, Facebook or Twitter control it. Right?

To wrest the control of your blog from those sites, you’ve to develop your own traffic stream to your blog.

Now don’t get me wrong. By building your own traffic stream, I’m not saying you should ignore sources like Google, Facebook, and Twitter completely. Those are the best sites to drive traffic to your blog.

What you need to do is siphon traffic from those sources to your blog, capture their names and emails, and create your own traffic stream.

This is also top class advice for you If you’re stuck of working for search engines, optimizing your posts, and building backlinks, etc. It can be an alternative traffic source for you.

Building your own traffic source

Now before you get into building your own traffic source, I would like to tell you one thing that one of the most important things that are needed to make money blogging is TRUST (other than traffic of course).

It’s the trust you gain and the relationship you build with your visitors that will help you make money with your blog, so you need to learn ho to gain the trust of your readers at first.

Trust, relationship, and honesty will go a long way in making people love your blog and make them loyal to you.

And trust of your visitors cannot be gained in just one or two visits to your blog. Therefore It is extremely important that you do your best capture the names and email addresses of as many visitors of your blog as possible.

To get their names and emails, starting a blog and an email list is very important, and It’s the most important thing that you should focus on as a blogger.

An email list is a group of people who have subscribed to your blog, It builds loyal readers and loyal readers are the ones that will help you grow your blog.

So, ones your visitors enter their details to your blog, they’ll get into your email list and that’s where you’ll begin the process building relationship and trust with them.

Instead of waiting for traffic, If you have an email list of 100+ subscribers only you can hit send and get a lot of attention to your new blog posts.

How to build an email list

If you’re new to email marketing, you need to find a good email marketing software first, I recommend Sendy, Aweber or MailChimp. These three services let you put forms on your blog easily, and comes with auto follow-ups to deliver eBooks and newsletters.

Getting started with building your first email list won’t take too long. Building my first form and putting it on my blog didn’t take more than an hour, I started collecting email subscribers.

If you’re completely new to email marketing and need help in designing forms, putting it on your blog and increasing subscribers, etc, I suggest you read my friend Greg’s email marketing 101 post.

How to convince readers to subscribe and grow your traffic stream

Firstly you need to learn how to convince readers to subscribe and making them love your blog.

No one wants to give their email to a sketchy source. In order to really get subscribers, you need to know how to add value to their life, you have to offer them something that would be enough to make them love your blog.

Here are the four possible ways to increase email subscribers.

• Create multiple forms and put on different pages of your blog:

No one will want to give their email to you the first time they visit your blog, so you need to put the opt-in form to different and most popular pages of your blog and show them oftentimes to encourage them to subscribe.

• Create a landing page:

One of the best way to let people know about your email list (traffic source) is to write a new page for its highlights, the benefits of subscribing to your blog. Write about the free stuff If you’re offering to your subscribers and about other goodies they can expect from you in your landing page.

• Offer an eBook:

A killer eBook on a helpful topic will bring a lot of email subscribers to you. I’ve got great feedback and hundreds of subscribers when I launched my first ever eBook launch which is still FREE at the moment, but It won’t be forever.

• Show social proof:

If you’ve already got a decent subscribers to count already, show the numbers to your readers or If you’ve featured on a top blog or website, let your readers know about it because If readers know that you’re good enough at what you do and you can serve their need, they’ll be more likely to subscribe to your blog.

Check out the about page of my blog to get an idea.

What now? Get the traffic source in action

Now, If you got a steady flow of subscribers, you need to set your autoresponder with some killer content. This content can be blog posts, eBooks, podcasts or videos that you think your subscribers will love.

Get your subscribers involved. Ask them to tweet, share or LIKE your posts, ask them to comment and ask their questions as this will help you build a strong relationship with them.

You need to make your subscribers feel that they know you not only because you send them quality emails, but because they interact with you on your blog, ask their question. Let them know you as a problem solver.

You have to make sure you’re honest with your subscribers. Be honest from the first email about what your intentions are. Focus on providing great content with incredible value to your subscribers.

Conclusion:

If you’re a blogger, you have to have a lot of traffic and visitors to make money from your blog! But you also have to make sure your blog has to be built on a foundation of trust and honesty. That’s what will help you grow your blog and make money online.

Good luck with your new traffic source, now tell me what’s up in the comments section.

Read More:

• How To Improve Your Writing Skills
• 20 SEO Tips for WordPress for Better Ranking
• Best & Cheapest Email Marketing Platforms for Your Business Growth
• How to Actually Convert First Time Visitors into Returning Readers
• 15 Tips to be a Successful Email Marketer [Tried & Tested]