11 Ways To Increase Your Blog Traffic
By: Alice Seba
Many of us work so hard on our blogs and frankly, it kind of sucks if we don't get the traffic we want. And it's a catch-22you can't get the traffic without the work, but it's tough to justify all the work if you don't get the traffic. Well, here are 11 suggestions to get the traffic you want to your blog.
1 Be outstanding. There is a good reason this is first in line. Being outstanding to begin with will ensure that everything else becomes easy, as it will make a lasting impression on your readers, and interest will increase.
How to be outstanding:
Delight and indulge – Stimulate your readers minds, give them some brain food to get their minds working. Build rapport – understand your readers personalities, address their worries and concerns. Be outlandish – sometimes controversy can also bring good publicity, even if not everyone agrees with what you're saying. Enlighten your readers – Be honest with your readers and tell them exactly what they want to hear, in a way they would appreciate.
This may be seen as a “build it and they will come” attitude, which is usually advised against in internet marketing, which may be true in some respects. Of course, this doesn't mean giving up manual traffic building, but the more “out there” or a controversial your blog is, the higher the chance is that your efforts become noticed.
2 The Power of RSS. It may be obvious to some, but there are thousands of blogs out there that haven't even considered using an RSS feed. If you're not sure what RSS means, it stands for really simple syndication – allowing users to subscribe to your blogs “feed”, which alerts them to every new post you make without them having to constantly visit the blog. Unless your viewer audience is overly tech savvy, and consider RSS to be yesterday's news – I'd suggest giving the option to your readers that enables them to subscribe to your RSS feed, letting them view updates through their feed reader or e-mail accounts. Services are available to help the process like feedburner.com.
3 Ping Your Blog. Be sure to choose the option to ping relevant services. Most blogging platforms or scripts will allow this easily via your control panel. Using a ping service will notify various search engines and other sites that you have updated your blog.
Make Comments: Make useful comments on busy blogs related to your blog's subject. Usually, you can link back to your site when you make a comment on another blog. BE RESPECTFUL!: Only use the space provided for your linkdon't write ads or fancy signatures AND make sure your comment is relevant and useful to other readers.
Do Trackbacks: Many blogs allow you to make commentary about their posts on your own blog. When you link to their particular blog post, a link to your own blog post appears in the comments area on their blog. For trackbacks between WordPress blogs, all you need to do is link to a blog post and it's automatically set up. BE RESPECTFUL: If you're going to trackback, have something useful to say. Just summarizing and linking to someone's post does NOT add to the discussion.
Keep up-to-date with your e-mail list: Your list can be the foundation to the success of your blog. Keep your list updated with relevant posts and helpful information that they may enjoy. Those on your list will appreciate the contact.
Distribute more content: Don't limit all of your content just to your blog. Distribute your content in other ways, like article marketing videos, podcasting, posting content on other people's sites and blogs etc. Keep pumping that content out to drive more visitors to your pages.
8 Affiliate links: If you have your own in-house affiliate program, and you have enabled the affiliates to link to any page, ask them to link to your blog posts. I personally use a system called QuickSale.com, which is a 1shoppingcart solution. This enables affiliates to link to any blog post they prefer.
Traffic from your affiliates are cookied, so any purchases made on the day or at a later date will be attributed to the affiliates, and commission will be sent. Conversions on blog posts aren't going to be as good as the sales page, but it gives your affiliates the chance to provide great content to their readers, and benefit from any purchases made.
Social Networking: The big named social networks can be a nice boost for traffic, especially MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. If your readers are able to meet you and socialize with you, they will be more interested in the things you talk about your blog. Remember to be polite and to use net etiquette. Try not to get too stuck in when logged into these networks, as you may find time slips away (there's lots of other important work to get on with). Of course, if you are remarkable (or infamous), you would have created enough buzz for people to do their own talking on the social networks.
10 Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is different to social networks. Social bookmarking is a little like bookmarking your favorite websites in your browser, except the list will be published for everybody else to see, including the search engines. Some people bookmark their own sites, but do understand that the networks do not like this and may ban your account for “self promotion”, so be sure to read the rules. Another technique is to pay others or work in a cooperative scheme. But again, if you are remarkable enough, your site will be book marked thoroughly by the internet public.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): I put this one last, where I know a lot of people tend to put it first. If your goal is repeat visitors who become faithful fans, put SEO on the backburner and SEO your other content pages where you are looking for first-time or drive-by visitors.
The reason why SEO Shouldn't be such a priority, is the fact that good content needs to come first. Spending hours optimizing each page on your blog may turn out to be a misuse of your time. Text that has been optimized for the search engines and certain key words tends to be less readable and repetitive. If you are skilled enough however, you could combine SEO with outstanding content, and get the best of both worlds. Just try not to create everything solely for the search engines.
Author Resource:-> If you're looking to pull more profit out of your business blog, check out the IM Blogging Bootcamp. This 4-week intensive program designed to get you actively and effectively blogging to reach more of your prospects and convert more of them into lifelong customers.
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