I sense frustration out there in the blogosphere. Some bloggers seem to magically attract traffic to their blogs while so many others struggle to see single-digit visitor counts for a day. What is the primary difference between them? Why do some people seem to get traffic while others don’t?

One of my readers, Darren Singleton, recently commented here on my post asking about the biggest challenges. He said:

It’s not as simple as build it and they will come. I’ve been posting 5/6 times a week minimum, yet without visitors, that content is being pretty much wasted.

This is a very common sentiment. As Darren correctly stated, you can’t just built it and they will come. Neither can you just write great content and people will magically discover it.

It would be easy to assign the luck factor to this situation. And perhaps luck plays a small role. However, I do not think luck has as much to do with it as some may think.

The X-Factor at play here lies in one word: MARKETING.

We live in a world which is information saturated. The average person is subjected to astronomical amounts of content per day. I’ve heard estimates that the average person sees a few thousand advertisements in various forms every single day. This is pure information overload and it causes the average person to have a noise filter which is very thick. Standing out in all this noise takes marketing. Pure and simple.

OK, so if I just left it at “marketing”, that probably wouldn’t help anybody. But, I wanted to make clear that the difference between people who get a lot of traffic and those who don’t is that those popular bloggers know how to market themselves. They know how to stand out in a crowd and hit some buttons which make people react.

But, let’s get a little more concrete here. There are two important factors here that were laid out in the Become a Blogger Roadmap report:

1. Multimedia Blogging
2. Social Media Distribution

Multimedia goes a long way to make your blog stand out. Using images in your posts is a good start. Doing audio recordings is also great. Even better would be online video. Do you think I started doing the daily “Flip Tips” on a whim? No, it was a very strategic decision on my part. This very blog is a demonstration of multimedia blogging. Not only do I engage in the usual written content, but I produce a LOT of video. Probably more than any other person in the problogging market.

Social Media distribution is the second factor. It is what puts you out in front of eyeballs. After all, if you want traffic, you’ve got to go out to where all the people hang out. Make sense? So, get your content everywhere. Put your personality everywhere. You can see from my map of blog outposts how I use all these social media sites to form a network that drives traffic to my site.

So, the X-Factor is simple from a far-away view. Yes, it takes time to do it and that’s why you will often find that the most successful bloggers work at it full time (or pretty close). Producing videos, being active on social media, writing blog posts – these things do take time.

I never said it would be easy.

There is no magic bullet to internet success. That said, it can be done by anybody. The only prerequisite is taking action.