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6 More Fabulous Ways To Increase Blog Traffic

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Your blog is up and running, and you have some readers. Great! You’ve used the tips we provided in our first post on this topic to ensure that your blog content is updated regularly, offers quality and variety and speaks to a carefully-selected audience. Your social media profiles are in place and you’re posting your updates on them too. It’s time to move on to the next stage of promoting your blog.

Promote Your Blog

• Use technology to help you promote the blog to potential visitors. This depends to a degree on the platform you use for your blog. If you use Google’s Blogger, you can set up the blog to send pings. Once you activate the setting, the blog will show up in lists of recently updated sites.

• Submit your url to blog directories, such as Technorati, Blogdex and Popdex, which are visited daily by people searching for blog content.

• Enable following on your blog, and make sure your visitors don’t have to register in order to post comments. Many Internet users prefer to remain anonymous and can’t be bothered to set up a profile just to leave a comment.

Link Building

There are several ways to promote your blog content through linking. Interlink between pages on your blog by mentioning previous posts and referring to issues discussed elsewhere, with a link to the relevant post. Create links with other sites by referencing content that may be useful to your readers, or information that supports the claims you make.  Called “linking out,” this makes other bloggers notice you, because users who set up alerts for site mentions will see your links. You can also take part in Q&A sites such as Answers.com, where you can create a profile and respond to questions that you might know the answer to, and – you guessed it – providing a link to one of your blog posts.

Publish a Book

Few things that you can do will give you the same credibility that becoming a published author can do. It isn’t as difficult as it sounds, either. You can self-publish an eBook in a matter of hours, get it into Amazon’s Kindle store and start promoting it. Choose a subject that fits your niche and get it ghostwritten if you don’t have time. Publish it using one of the many online eBook publishing software options, and voila – you’re an author. You can sell it for a dollar or less, if you choose. Book sales are not what you are after, it’s simply a vehicle for promoting your expertise, credibility, website and blog content.

Feeds and Alerts

Enable visitors to sign up for feeds from your blog. Both Blogger and Wordpress have Feedburner plugins that you can install on the blog, where readers can input an email address and get alerted when you publish new blog content. Check back regularly to see which posts readers are opening and which they aren’t; this will help you identify what works for future posts.

Networking

Networking online is just as important as the old brick and mortar version, if not more so. It’s also much easier, but equally time consuming because although you don’t have to physically be present, you need to spend time online. Spend at least 30 minutes a day commenting on other blogs in the same niche, linking to their blog content and building relationships with the bloggers using email or social media.

Analyze the Stats

Register for Google Analytics or another application and check the stats frequently. Keep a record of the progress month by month, comparing stats such as referring urls, the number of pages visited and the average time on the pages. This will tell you what’s working and what isn’t. For example, if most of your traffic is coming from search engines, it’s likely to be new visitors. This is good, but it also means you need to work to bring returning visitors back to the blog. You’ll also be able to see how much traffic comes from your social media efforts, and if it peaks or drops one month you should be able to identify the cause.

Whatever methods you use, consistency is key. Building a successful blog and online presence doesn’t happen overnight. It takes as much effort as it did for traditional business people to build relationships with potential customers, make contacts and get their products out there. And like the saying goes: the man who makes the calls gets the orders. Make the calls!