This afternoon, I was in the happy company of my friend, sipping hot masala tea, brainstorming ideas to draw traffic to the blog I write -- Interview Mantra.

He casually suggested me to post interview experiences of people who cleared interviews with IIMs - top business schools in India., which could attract a lot of MBA aspirants to my blog. The main aim of any blog is to bring traffic to it, so why not post such interesting tips related to the niche of my blog.

This discussion eventually brought out the question, "How to draw huge traffic to my website?"

"Running a blog is like running a lemon juice shop at your home," I said to my friend as I continued, "Only your family members know that you give lemon juice for free. How would a person residing two streets away from your house know about your juice center and why should he come to your shop? There are millions of juice shops that offer lemon juice for free too."

"Why not advertise about your juice center in the paper?" asked my friend.

"Advertising would help me get few people, they will see the ad, come to my shop, take a cup of juice and go away," I answered. "How would I retain that customer? And how to get more people apart from the ones that read the advertisement, get influenced and take action to come to my shop?", I reverse questioned him. "Obviously, I want to harness the power of word of mouth. I want each of the customers who come to my shop once to tell others about my shop, influence them and visit my shop themself again."

So this is the challenge at hand -- How to use the power of word of mouth?

The simplest solution is "Give away gold for free."

Think about it, if I start giving away gold literally to every one who came to my shop along with the free glass of lemon water, that person would go out and tell to all of his friends, colleagues, relatives and neighbours and to every stranger that he meets on the road that there's a stupid guy giving away gold for free. That person who received gold from me would become my shop's ambassador and would continue to influence everyone possible. And whoever listens to him, would first evaluate his advertisement and then decides to try my shop out. Once he confirms that I'm giving away gold for free. He would greedily collect all the gold I give, and head towards his home telling everyone on the way about the free gold. So, this person who happens to be a new seed planted becomes a self-appointed brand ambassador for my shop.

Now, coming back to the actual context of a blog and traffic. To the original question -- "How to draw heavy traffic to my blog?". I should give away articles which are worth the value of Gold. Yes, literally.

Then, it shall not be a surprise when my blog becomes a blog with page rank 6. As of now, it's page rank is 3.