The following diagram represents a blog or website within the context of the Internet from a marketing perspective:

The top layer of this diagram represents the market or audience—all the people out there surfing the web. Note that this mass of people can be broken up into niches, represented by the boxes contained within the overall Market/Audience. A niche can be defined as a specific interest group. For example, some people want to learn about pottery, some enjoy astrophysics.

The diagram has been simplified to show how niche interest groups use search engines and social networks to find the content they are after. Of course, they might well go directly to their favorite forum or niche website without using a search engine, but a large proportion of all traffic goes through search engines and social networks, so this serves as a good model.

Note that different parts of this diagram are related by arrows. In this instance, an arrow represents traffic. Traffic is the term used to describe a flow of visitors. Some arrows are one way, indicating that traffic flows from one segment to the other. For example, the arrow between the search engines and your blog is denoted as one way, indicating that traffic comes from the search engines to your site, but not the other way. Two-way arrows mean that traffic, in general, passes either way.

By looking at the web of different arrows, you can see that your site or blog needs to integrate itself into the fabric of the Internet. In order to effectively market a blog, you need to make connections, share content, offer opinions, comment on other people's content, and so on. All of this helps to add links to and from other blogs, forums, social networks, and so on. This growing network of links is what starts traffic flowing through your site.

Like any system, there has to be a driving force that keeps the traffic flowing. Our cars need petrol to keep moving, plants need energy from the sun to keep growing, and so on. The fuel that drives traffic on the Internet is content. When I talk about "content", I mean anything and everything from the written word to a YouTube video, PPC ad, audio file, podcast, and just about anything and everything that humans can interact with in someway.

That is important! Content is what drives traffic.