How To Increase Your Blog Traffic? – has been written to give a list of some of the steps that you can take to boost your daily or monthly visitor count. Visitors or Traffic is the “LIFE LINE” of all blogs or websites alike because basically nobody writes a blog or starts a website just for himself to see and read but rather we all have the deep wish that our blogs or websites get thousands or in fact millions of visits per month.
Also those of you (including me) who have the sacred intention of making money from their blogs or sites – traffic becomes the prime target to reach because all monetizing aspects has a direct proportionality relation with the traffic volume – More Traffic = More Money (Simple!). This is because blogs or websites mainly earn their revenue from displaying advertisements (CPC, CPA Text Links or Banners etc) and Affiliate sales etc so more the traffic to a site more will be the possibility for click throughs, impressions or sales so more revenue to be earned.
Here is a list of 25 Practical Tips, Ways or Measures that you can implement or follow to boost your blog traffic :-
1. Unique Informative Posts – “Content is King” is very rightly said because visitors (new and returning) come to your blog mainly looking for some information and not just to waste their spare time on your blog so if you give them the material that they are searching for then naturally they will be satisfied and find the good reason to return to your blog again and again. Give them valuable content that will help them and they will turn into valuable returning visitors. So do your research and gather information and then sit down to write good informative posts on topics that a person may be looking for. Write in a free flowing manner as if you are talking to the visitor one to one. Write in details and give examples wherever possible to make the posts interesting and comprehensible. Include links to resources that will help your visitors. Write in a convincing manner. Never ever try to manipulate or give information that you are not sure about because that will just make your visitors turn away from your blog.
2. Posting Frequency – Try to be consistent in your posting frequency that is if you are making three or two or even one post per week then maintain it. Bloggers talk about posting regularly or even twice or thrice daily but you must attempt it only when you are sure you can maintain it. Yes, a blog by nature is expected to be updated frequently with fresh content but you must do it to the point that you can maintain. Moreover according to me the quality matters much more than the quantity – what’s the use of posting some crap regularly just for the shake of posting when nobody will enjoy reading it. I have seen bloggers posting regularly or even three times daily but most of their postings are just bs with no real information or purpose and even out of topic – this is naturally to happen because writing a good post takes time and energy. So rather concentrate on writing good and well researched informative posts that will add value to your blog. Try to write at-least one post per week. I personally write three to four posts a week – you can try this too and never mind if you miss sometimes because that is part and parcel of this game. Enjoy blogging rather than succumb to the pressure of writing posts as this will help you in producing good posts.
3. On-Page Optimization – You must follow on-page optimization techniques when writing blog posts so that search engines can find your post to be relevant for specific keyword phrases and display your posts in the results. Do keyword research to select and target one long tail keyword phrase with each post and try to optimize your post by including the keywords from the phrase in the post title, body, alt tags, title tags, file names and anchor texts etc. Use of alt and title tags with your images will help your blog receive visitors through the Image Search options of search engines. Read my post – Image Optimization Techniques. Bold, italicize or underline the keywords once or maximum twice in the body. This will make your post relevant for that long term keyword phrase in the eyes of the search engines thus ranking well in search engine result pages. Just think if you have 100 such well optimized posts and each post gives you 10 unique visitors per day on an average that is 1000 new visitors per day. There are many such long tail keywords present in each niche that can get your posts land in the first page of SERPs with just on-page optimization. In fact I too have some posts which ranks well in SERPs with just on-page optimization like my posts on Hubpages, Ehow, Craigslist, Blogging Platform, Choosing a Niche and many more. You can read my post – How to optimize blog posts for search engines? to get more in sight into on-page optimization methods. Of course off-page optimization is also important as I have discussed in the next point.
4. Off-Page Optimization – Off-page optimization is the most important thing that comes into play if you want to rank well for competitive niches or keywords. If you want to rank well for keywords in competitive niches then on-page optimization will not be sufficient but you will need to take up off-page optimization. Off-page optimization means to build backlinks from both your internal pages as well as from pages of external sites. More the page rank of the pages linking to you more higher will be the quality of links. But only quality is not sufficient you need quantity too. Moreover if the links are made with your chosen keyword phrase (and its combinations) as anchor text then more relevant will they be. But you will not always be able to control the external links as those depends upon the site owner (but there are ways in which you can get links with relevant anchor texts even from external sites which I will discuss in some other posts). Links from within the content surrounded by relevant words and made up of relevant anchor text are the most worthy. So try to gain as many optimized backlinks as possible as this will make your pages rank higher in SERPs thereby getting free and regular search engine traffic for your blog or site.
5. Social Bookmarking – Social Bookmarki
ng sites are the new destinations for getting traffic. Millions of people are using social bookmarking sites today to find information regarding a particular topic or news etc. Social bookmarking takes time but if you want to get your share of traffic from these sites then you need to try to take out some time to bookmark atleast those posts that you think are worth getting attention. You can also use a bookmarking software that will significantly reduce the time needed. There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites with a few new ones being added to the list every year but it is not necessary to bookmark your pages in all the bookmarking sites, rather you can choose the most popular and traffic infested ones like Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, Delicious.com, Reddit.com, Sphinn.com, Furl.net, Spurl.net and a few more.
6. Guest Posts – Offer to write guest posts in blogs in your niche. But as there are thousands of blogs in each niche so you need to do a search (you can use Google’s Blogsearch) to find out blogs that get a significant amount of traffic. Normally if you have something unique to offer in your guest blog post then your offer is never rejected. Guest blog posts feature in the front page of the blog so if your post is well written and informative then there are chances that the visitor may click your link and visit your blog. Moreover your post will stay in that blog for ever to fetch you more traffic in future. You also get some one way backlinks to your blog from your guest post.
7. Blogroll – Add some links to other good blogs in your niche in your Blogroll and approach those blogs to reciprocate by adding your link in their Blogroll. If your blog is relevant then you do get links from them in their blogroll. You will find it tough to convince high traffic blogs to add your link in their blogroll so approach ones with moderate traffic. When you have gained some authority in your niche then you can go for the high traffic ones. Visitors coming to those blogs have the possibility of clicking your link in their blogroll and visiting your blog. If your blog is worthy then then will return again and again.
8. Blog Commenting – Provide a comment form and respond to comments left by visitors in a positive way, answer their questions and queries, call them for action by asking them to express their views and etc so that a relation is formed between you and the visitors. When you build up a relation you get a long term visitor. Also comment in blogs of your niche and also in related niches or other niches. Give meaningful and relevant comments and never forget to leave your blog’s URL in the comments so that any other visitor to that blog who may find your comment interesting may visit your blog by clicking on your blog link. This visitor may also turn into a returning visitor if he finds your blog informative and useful.
9. Forums – Participate in forums actively. Give to the point and relevant answers to posted questions, participate in discussions and also start new unique threads. Your Forum posts will have your links in your signature and worthy participation will in all possibility draw some visitors to your blog overtime as the posts are permanent.
10. Article Marketing – Write good informative articles and post them in high traffic article directories like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, ArticleBase.com and ArticleCity.com etc. This way of getting traffic is though a old way but still now effective because popular article directories are the frequent visiting places of webmasters, bloggers and also newcomers – infact there are many article directories that receive millions of visits per day. Do not forget to include a link to your blog in the resource box so that a visitor can reach your blog. Article marketing is a time consuming affair if you want to post in multiple article sites so you can use an Article Submitting software to automate the process and save your precious time. You can also use an Article Spinner to get unique versions of your written article to post in multiple article directories to avoid the duplicate content issue.
11. Question And Answer Sites – Participate in question and answer sites like Yahoo Answers and WebAnswers etc to ask questions or give relevant helpful answers to establish your expertise. Do include a link to your blog. You can get some visitors overtime from the links included in the relevant and helpful answers.
12. Widgets – Include MyBlogLog or Google Friend Connect widgets in your blog so that whenever you visit a blog having these widgets then your picture will appear in the widget and the owner of the blog or some visitor visiting that blog may want to check who you are and thus visit your blog by clicking your picture.
13. Groups – Participate in Yahoo or Google groups and send relevant and interesting messages to the group members inviting them to visit your blog to find something important that may be of interest to them. Say for example if I send a message I will invite them saying that “if they are interested to know and learn how to make money blogging and affiliate marketing without spending a dime they may visit my blog”. You can always tell a small enticing lie to lure them to visit your blog. Be innovative and try to guess what members of a particular group may be looking for and if need be write a post accordingly and then invite them.
14. RSS and Email – Set up a RSS feed with Feedburner (for free) and provide the option of subscribing to your blog updates both by RSS and Email (both types of options are available from Feedburner). This will let you remain connected to your visitors and turn them into loyal readers too. Consider giving full feed instead of partial feed.
15. Links and Trackbacks – Link to relevant posts on other blogs in your blog posts and ask for a courtesy linkback OR use trackbacks to automatically add a link to your post from the post on the other blog to which you have linked. This can occasionally give you a visitor or two (after all each visitor counts).
16. Blog Directories and Blog Search Engines – Submit your blog to blog directories and blog search engines like Technorati and Blogcatalog etc. Tag your posts with the keywords you have optimized your posts for. This is necessary because blog search engines display results by finding blogs based on these tags. Don’t forget this step as millions of people use these blog search engines like Technorati to find blogs on their topics of interest.
17. Hubs and Lens – Make a few Hubs at Hubpages.com and a few Lens at Squidoo.com containing links to your blog. These sites get millions of visitors each day and they have the system of linking to posts on similar topics at the bottom of each page. This way you can get visitors to your Hubs or Lens and also to your blog finally. You can also try Ehow.com and other mini blogging sites.
18. Textlinks and Banners – You can buy Text links and Banner ads from high traffic blogs in your niche and connected niches. This also sends good amount of traffic to your blog.
19. CPC – Set up CPC campaign with Google AdWords for relevant keywords – though expensive but a very effective way to get quality targeted traffic to your blog. You can also use StumbleUpon.com to set up CPC campaign on their site – a very low cost CPC alternative but can send good amount of traffic.
20. Press Releases – Submit well written and smart press releases to press release sites like Free-Press-Release.com to get some traffic to your blog. Do not forget to include your blog link in the press release.
21. Blog Carnival – Use BlogCarnival.com to submit your posts to relevant blog carnivals at different sites. Though submitting posts to blog carnivals have become less effective because the blog carnivals are not promoted to that level that they should be but if you go on submitting some of your posts each week then you will start getting traffic overtime slowly as your posts spread over more domains. You can also organize a blog carnival on your blog on a particular topic or two occasionally to get some visitors.
22. Sponsored Reviews – Buy sponsored reviews from relevant, connected and high traffic sites to get a burst of traffic on the day the sponsored review is posted and after that some visitors each day because the post is there to stay. Though can be a very expensive affair to buy reviews from really high traffic sites so look to your pocket before jumping in. You can also try sites with average traffic instead. You can buy sponsored reviews from broker sites like PayPerPost.com, ReviewMe.com, SponsoredReview.com, BlogToProfit.com etc. You can exchange reviews with relevant blogs (this will not strain your pocket!).
23. Ebooks – Write informative ebooks on topics of interest in your niche including your blog link and post links often in the content. Distribute the ebooks for free through ebook directories, your blog, forums etc. This process is quiet effective to get long term viral traffic to your blog.
24. Videos – Make videos and upload them on YouTube, GoogleVideo, MetaCafe and other video sites watermarking them with your blog link or including your blog link in your profile or the text. You can get long term visitors and give a boost to your traffic volume.
25. Free Classifieds – Post ads in free classified sites. Can get you a handful of traffic to your blog for sure. You can also try low cost classifieds like USFreeAds.com and etc. Visit my post List Of Free Classifieds1 and List of free classifieds 2.
These are the most effective ways of bringing or increasing traffic to your blog. Note that though this post has been written with blogs in mind but most of these ways also apply for increasing traffic to a website. Some of the ways that I have mentioned can bring you hoards of traffic and some a few but try to apply as many ways as possible because each visitor counts in this highly competitive Internet world. try to get as much visitor as possible and stress upon ways to make them permanent visitors as more the traffic volume you get per month more will be your chance to make or earn money online. If you have any more effective way of increasing traffic that you would like to include in this list then please leave a comment and I will surely consider including it in my list with a linkback to you (also, do consider linking back to me).
Happy Traffic Hunting! Get traffic, traffic and more and more traffic…….
