In the past, the most effective way to get the attention of journalists was though press releases. Nowadays, however, you can connect with them directly on social media.

While they're found on all such sites, they seem to be most accessible on Twitter. (They love Linkedin as well, but they're on there more to connect with peers and potential employers rather than the general population.) So anyone with a website should make a point of using Twitter to seek out journos in their niche -- preferably ones from their own country -- and build rapport with them.

Journalists are always on the lookout for knowledgeable and interesting people who can supply them with compelling content. And if you've gotten on their radar by tweeting and impressed them with your expertise, there's a good chance they'll ask to interview you at some stage. If you can get them to mention your website when they do so it will help you enormously, even if you don't get a backlink from it.

Speaking of backlinks: Remember also that many journos maintain blogs hosted on their employers' sites. Getting a backlink from a highly ranked, frequently indexed website like News Ltd. or Fairfax is very powerful. It's like getting a .edu link.

So keep an eye out for these blogging journos. Engage with them on Twitter and comment thoughtfully on their blogs. From time to time you can send them links to your own blog posts that they might find interesting. Sometimes they'll like your blog post enough to quote it, along with a link. But even if you haven't blogged about something yourself and merely point them to something interesting, they will often include a "hat-tip" link to you as a mark of appreciation.

I know this works from several years experience of writing political blogs. Over that time I have received many links back to various blog posts from big name bloggers such as Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair. They've helped enormously with traffic and SEO. (While both of these particular blogging journos aren't actually on Twitter, plenty more are. And it's clearly the easiest way to connect with them.)

Over the last several years I've built numerous websites and blogs. I've sometimes regretted doing this because they've taken a lot of my time. Only a few of them have made any money, although that certainly wasn't the main reason for building them. They were mainly just to teach others about my passions, record what I was learning, learn about SEO, and just basically have fun.

On occasions I've worried that this was a waste of time and effort. But ultimately I think that building multiple sites has been worth it. This is because websites are akin to investments. And as any good financial advisor will tell you, you should have several of them running (I think they call it "diversifying your portfolio").

Basically, if you build multiple websites, you'll find that some bear traffic fruit while others do not. You can then concentrate on those ones that are working. In the meantime, you can figure out why the others aren't doing so well and then solve the problem at your leisure.

You learn a lot about SEO doing things this way, too. For example, I have one blog that's in the online marketing field (a blog about blogging, mainly). Being in such a saturated niche it took ages to get even a few hits per day from the search engines. One of my political blogs, on the other hand, was much easier to draw traffic to. That's because the subject wasn't nearly as competitive, and I was targeting very specific, often topical keywords.

Having gained those insights, I can then apply them to the online marketing blog. For example, I can write more posts that are quite specific and topical -- less evergreen -- to increase the number of people arriving via search engines.

If I hadn't built multiple sites and instead focused entirely on that marketing blog, I may well have built up the traffic slowly. But I wouldn't have had the comparison to reflect upon, and therefore wouldn't have realized that there were other approaches available to me.