Yes, it sounds crazy. “Why WOULDN'T someone want more traffic to their websites?” At the risk of sounding like I'm nitpicking, let me explain:
Traffic is people coming to your website. If you have a website about Hollywood actors and you get a million hits a month, you have a lot of traffic. But here's the problem – that traffic comes to find something – let's say it's photos of the latest hottest actress in a bikini. They look at the photos and then what happens? They leave. Maybe, if you're lucky, they click on an ad before they go. But once they're gone, they're generally gone forever. This is traffic.
On the other hand, if you focus on getting READERS instead of traffic, here's what happens: Someone gets to your website to find more information on something. They read your post, like what they read and sign onto your mailing list. Now each time you write a new post, you can email them and send them back to your website. You can of course also promote targeted offers and products to them as well.
Now you have people who are engaged with you and your content. You have readers, viewers and listeners, depending on how you create your content. Most of all you have people who are getting to KNOW you and hopefully LIKE you and TRUST you.
1000 readers can be worth far, far more than 100,000 hits of traffic because now you are building a REAL business. So instead of focusing on traffic, focus on how to get more readers.
For example, if you're writing a blog, write a post once every week or two. That's right, just 2-4 posts per month. Then focus the rest of your time on promoting each post. Maybe you think, “Won't people get tired of hearing about the same post for a whole week or two?” Good question, but here's how it works: You've told your list and your immediate circle about your post – now you're reaching out in any and every direction to find new readers. You're not telling the same group of people about your post everyday, you're telling new people who otherwise wouldn't know about it if you weren't spending the majority of your time looking for readers.
Think about who you want as your readers, and then target those exact people for great results. For example, if you write a marketing blog, you might do an article on how personal trainers can market their business. Then you contact the leaders in the personal training niche and tell them you just wrote an article that you think their people would love. Don't be surprised if your article then goes viral throughout the personal training community.
If you want to know the best places to get your content featured, just look at what they've talked about before. For example, if you want to get your weight loss for men content featured on blogs targeted to men, simply find those male-oriented blogs that have talked about weight loss before. They're already sold on the idea of using weight loss for men content, now all they need to do is read your content, like it and recommend it to their readers.