How to increase blog traffic with your blog post

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You have written your best blog post in months. You’ve spent hours, in fact days, writing and perfecting it. It’s a unique and very valuable blog post.

You are very proud of what you have written and now you want the whole world to see it.

You now want to increase blog traffic with your blog post.

Here are the top 15 proven ways to ensure your perfect blog post gets as much exposure as possible:

The first 7 ideas are tasks you should have set-up for your blog.

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Before you post your perfect blog post:

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1. Do some keyword research to find the best and most appropriate keywords to use within your post. I can thoroughly recommend Market Samurai. This tool is free to download and use for keyword research. Once you start using it, you will wonder how you got by without it.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Some of you who downloaded Market Samurai have stated the owners have asked you to purchase the product. If you only want to perform keyword research using Market Samurai you can ignore the requests to purchase. The free version of Market Samurai allows you to perform as much keyword research as you wish – you do NOT have to buy the full version. That may change in the future but for now that functionality is free.

Here’s a short video of me using the tool:

The tool I use for keyword research

Once you have found the best keyword phrases for your blog post, how should you use them for best effect?

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2. Install the WordPress plugin, All-in-on-seo

The “All-in-one-SEO” plugin is one of the most popular plugins to use because it helps bring traffic to your blog, for the rest of your blog posts life!

When you first install this plugin you change the settings for your blog. You add a relevant title, description and you add all your best keywords (6 – 8).

Here’s my short video of how I set up the All-in-one-SEO plugin:

How to use the All in one SEO WordPress plugin to your advantage

When this plugin is installed, you can also add ‘alternative’ titles and descriptions and tags when you publish your blog post.

For instance, the title of this blog post, “How to increase blog traffic with your blog post” included the keyword phrase “increase blog traffic”.

When I published this post, I gave the blog post an alternative title using the All-in-one-seo plugin. The alternative title, “How to get blog traffic with your blog post” and included a different keyword phrase, “get blog traffic”.

That way I am providing the search engines with 2 titles and 2 primary keyword phrases that help boost the blog posts rankings.

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3. Whenever you add a new post, WordPress will automatically use “Update Services”

Update Services are tools you can use to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a PING each time you create OR EDIT a post. People browsing the internet have more chance of seeing your post.

See I have put the words “OR EDIT” in capital letters and in bold. That’s because we DON’T want WordPress to send a PING each time you edit a post. That can come across as ‘spamming’.

We only want WordPress to ping when we create and publish the post.

To do this I install the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

By installing the FREE “MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer” plugin, when you create a new blog post, your blog will ping and notify all the ping services that the blog post has been created. This encourages search engines and different blog directories/services to index your updated blog properly. What it doesn’t do is notify them if you were to EDIT your blog post.

After installing and activating you have to register the plugin to make it work.

Click on the link under “settings”, called “MBP Ping Optimizer” and register like so:

Enter your name and email address and click on the ‘Register’ button.

You will receive an email that you will have to confirm. Once confirmed, the plugin is registered and working.

But we want to make some changes to this plugin, to make it even more effective.

Click on the link under settings, called “MBP Ping Optimizer” and you’ll see a screen like this:

Inside the box, it has the web domain, http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ (you may have more).

We are going to add more website domains to this list. Copy and paste the following into the list (ensuring you still keep http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) :

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.twingly.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.bloglines.com/ping

http://ping.feedburner.com/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://bblog.com/ping.php

Once you have added the complete list, click on “save settings”.

Now each time you create and publish a blog post, all those “update services” will be informed.

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4. RSS feeds are a great way to generate continuous traffic to your blog. By submitting your blogs RSS feeds to different online Feed Aggregators you create one-way inbound links, get each new blog post quickly indexed in the search engines, and create a steady stream of organic traffic.

Submit your blog RSS feed to some (if not all) of the following:

www.feedagg.com

www.rss2.com

www.feedage.com

www.rssmountain.com

www.myrss365.com

www.postrank.com

www.weblogalot.com

You can also add all your blog category feeds (click on your category link and then add /feed – by doing that you have your RSS category feed).

You don’t want to add all these RSS feeds in one day. Just submit your main blog feed to all the sites on one day, then a couple of days later add one of your category feeds, then a couple of days later, another category feed, etc.

You only have to submit your feeds once.

The good thing about the RSS Directories is that you can add your feeds from your twitter account, Facebook, Ezinearticles and numerous other sites. That way you are building a huge network all linking back to your blog.

You can submit all your feeds manually but if you want to speed up your submissions and save loads of time (like I do!) I can recommend this tool: RSS Submission.

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5. I like adding images to my posts and if you do, you should add the plugin SEO Friendly Images. SEO Friendly Images is a Wordpress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according to the options you set.

This helps with the search engine optimization of your blog post.

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6. Add a Social type plugin to allow your visitors to submit your post to the different social bookmarking sites.

The ones I recommend include:

TweetMeme Retweet Button.  See the green button at the top of this post which says ‘tweeted’ and a number. Click on it and you’ll see the number increase by one. Why? Because you have just ‘tweeted’ my blog post – thanks! Isn’t that simple? It’s a must have plugin.

Both plugins Sociable and Share This make it easy for visitors to “vote” for your posts.

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7. Add the plugin Twitter Tools. This plugin will automatically inform Twitter of the blog post you have just published.

So a little bit of work to be carried out BEFORE you post your blog.

Please note, apart from keyword research, all of the previous ideas only have to be completed once, NOT per blog post. Just install the plugins and submit your feeds and that’s it.

Then publish your blog ensuring you use the best keywords when creating it.

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Here’s the post publishing activity that generates even more traffic:

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8. Twitter

As per point 7 above, the plugin Twitter Tools will automatically inform Twitter of the blog post you have just published.

A couple of hours later, tweet about your blog post again. You could always use the alternative title you used when publishing your blog post with the All-in-one-SEO plugin.

You may wish to see these Top 10 Twitter Tools to increase your Twitter followers.

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9. Send an email and link to your customer email list. Tease them by telling them a little about the blog post and then provide a link to the rest on your actual blog.

If you don’t have a list, start building one NOW!

Provide a free giveaway. Make it unique and valuable to your visitors. Set-up an Aweber account and add the opt-in form on either the top left-hand or right hand side of your blog. Your free giveaway can be an e-book, a series of videos, podcasts. Just make it something you know your visitors would love to have and want.

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10. Social Bookmark your post at the major social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Propeller. Sign up with www.onlywire.com and you can social bookmark your post to numerous sites with one click of a button.

If you really want to get into Social Bookmarking, here’s another tool I use to spped things up: BookMarking Demon

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11. Ask a few friends to vote for your blog post. Join up with a group of friends who are willing to vote on each others blog posts at certain social bookmarking sites. If you do join such a group, don’t vote every post that comes your way and don’t ask every one of your posts to be voted. We are talking about your best posts and at a maximum of one vote per blog site per social bookmarking site per week.

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12. Go to the forums you are a member of and mention the post. I am NOT saying join forums and start mentioning your blog posts. These are forums where you are already a member. A forum where you already have a presence and are known.

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13. Submit your blog post to the relevant blog carnivals. Again, I use software to do this for me as it only takes a couple of minutes and I get 20+ backlinks to my blog plus some extra traffic from the carnivals themselves. I use this software: Blog Carnival Submitter

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14. Email your blogging buddies and let them know about your post. Depending upon your relationship with them, some may mention it on their blog.

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15. After about a week of the blog post being on your site, submit a version of the post to the major Ezine Directories like:

www.ezinearticles.com

www.amazines.com

www.isnare.com

www.searchwarp.com

www.goarticles.com

www.ideamarketers.com

www.articlebase.com

Doing all these activities will ensure you get great exposure for your proud blog post.

So what do you think? Do you use any of these tools with success? Do you have others to share? I’d like to hear from you. Just type in your comments below.

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