6 Ways To Build Traffic To Your Blog
It is hard out there for new bloggers. If you have just started your own blog, or any website for that matter, you no doubt realize how hard it is to get it off the ground. Search engine traffic is the lifeblood for any blog and without it you just have a website among millions not making you a dime. How can you accomplish that so that one day you can actually make money or create fame with your blog. Here are six things you can do to increase your blog traffic.
Create More Content
Google eats up content. They cannot get enough of it and when they know you produce it they keep coming back for more. Check the last time your website was cached and if it has been several weeks then you need to make posts more often. The crawlers come back to sites that regularly feature new articles.
Quite frankly, when you have an established blog you do not need to post as often. You can if you want to but on some of my older blogs with a lot of authority I only post once every month, at most. But when you first start out you want to post as often as you humanly can.
In addition to the crawlers coming back often you also end up ranking for more strings of keywords. As bloggers we call them “long tail keywords.” The more words you write the higher the probability that someone will find you but putting in some type of phrase that your blog is related to. If you need help in creating good content for you blog you can check out this post here about writing great blog content.
Comment on Other Popular Blogs
A friend of mine just started a blog about home decorating. She asked me some tips about increasing her blog traffic and I told her to go around other popular blogs about the same subject she was blogging about and comment on posts she found interesting. She did just that and one of the blogs liked her comment (which led to her website) so much she put her up on her blog roll. The website was a PR4. That very day she got over 200 hits just from that one blog. From that one comment she got a clean PR4 site wide link, which will help her search engine rankings in the future, and she gets daily traffic.
Comments are part of what make up the blogosphere. You have got to engage the community if you want to get anything back. I would recommend spending a whole day just going around to other blogs that related to you, reading what they have to say and commenting on the material. Make the comment insightful, useful and if possible funny.
If you need advice about how to write a good blog comment click here. Blog owners love to get good comments. It adds value to their website and if you give a link back to your website they might return the favor with a comment of their own or better a link back to your site.
Guest Post
This is by far my best tool for building search engine rankings, increasing traffic and getting my name out there. Many blog owners are starved for content and love to have quality posts submitted to them. Many have tabs or pages on their websites that show you how to submit guest posts to them. If they do not you can e-mail them and ask.
If you need some help you can read this article written by Oni Balusi about his most successful guest post experiences or this one by Michael Hyatt about his seven steps to writting great guest posts.
Please put some work into your posts. They are not going to accept substandard posts. Its common practice for you to be able to add one link back to your website, either within the article body or at the bottom in the author resource section, so please do not make a crap article that will benefit nobody but yourself. I have built entire blogs off guest postings and I really am convinced about their effectiveness. There could be no better link. It is on a related blog, in a related article and it’s an “in-text” link. You cannot get any better than that!
Make sure you vary up the anchor text, a lot, and make it fit into the article without it sounding weird. Doing three of four quality guest posts on other blogs with high authority is one of the best ways you can build your daily traffic coming in from the search engine. Do at least one guest post every week and watch how your visitors skyrocket as your blog increases in the SERPs.
Submit to Niche Directories
Back in the day directories used to be a great way to achieve high rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN. That is the reason why thousands of them popped up out of nowhere. Those days are gone. Directories hold very little weight and should not be used as a primary link building or traffic building tool.
That being said it is worth it to submit to niche directories that are highly related to what you talk about on your blog. Spend some time looking for them. Alone these links will not do anything for you but if you are already doing other things right a few of them might tip you over the edge.
Look for the high quality ones. I ever prefer the ones you have to pay for. I do not mind at all paying a couple bucks for a link on a directory that is of good quality and related to my website. When you have to pay it also filters all the junk websites out that use automated systems to submit their blogs. You do not want your blog to be in the middle of a bunch of spam websites.
Here is a list of some other blog directories that you might want to submit your website to. One or two will help you alot but collectively they will give you some juice and possiblily a little traffic.
Do Not Install AdSense or Any Affiliate Adverting At First
Boy, this is a common mistake many bloggers make and I think it really hampers them in the beginning. We all want to make money. Whether we write for fun or just want to be a successful Internet marketer all of us want to make some type of monetary gain from our efforts.
Hold on there cowboy! There is a time for everything.
Putting affiliate advertising on your site will make it look spamy and cluttered too fast. What I am trying to say is that people are less likely to give you natural links, accept your guest post or approve your comments if they take a look at your site and it looks like a MFA site or crap blog. People want to link to quality material. If I go to a brand new blog (and I can tell when it was made by my WHOIS tool) with no PageRank and I see a bunch of large AdSense banners I get skeptical. If this blog gets banned and I link to it then it could hurt me in the future.
People want to link to blogs they feel people are passionate about and put affiliate advertising on them as an afterthought, not just for making money. Making your blog seem commercial too soon, before it has any real authority, will hurt its chances of getting some good exposure. When you are getting at least 100 visitors a day from Google and you have at least a PR of 1-2 then you can think about monetizing it.
Meta Title, Descriptions, Keywords and Meta Tags
Install All In One SEO Pack, or another equivalent onto your blog, and make sure you properly fill out the meta descriptions, keywords and add 1-3 tags for every post. It will take you an extra three minutes.
Meta descriptions tell the search engine what your posts or articles are talking about. They also give the visitors a blurb so that they are attracted to your website.
You would not believe how much traffic tags bring. I have heard that adding tags is not necessary or that they are pointless. That is a lie! I get tons of traffic just from my tags every single day.
Filling out all the meta information and doing it properly might give you another 15-25% boost in daily traffic.
These are six ways you can effectively build traffic to your blog. It will still take time to build your online presence but if you stay diligent it can be done. Once you have enough traffic coming in on a daily basis you can start to make money off your blog but using AdSense or some other type of affiliate advertising.
