So you’ve created your blog and now you want to increase blog traffic. You want someone to start visiting and reading your marvellous writing because a blog without readers is pretty much useless.
If you’ve been blogging for a while and have been regularly posting, you most probably have a blog posting ‘plan’ or ‘arrangement’ you stick to.
Now do you have a traffic building plan?
If you have only been getting a trickle of viewers to your posts, you need to put a traffic building plan into action.
Building traffic is just as an important skill to bloggers as writing quality posts is. Many bloggers are terrific at creating content but don’t know a thing about building traffic.
Here is a quick guide to the five most popular (and most effective) traffic building techniques.
1. Become SOCIAL!
Social networking and blogging go hand in hand. Your blog posts can be distributed across social networking channels in many different ways. Sign up for Twitter and tweet about your posts as soon as they are added to your blog. You can use the Twitter Tools WordPress plugin that automatically tells Twitter (and your Twitter followers) of your latest post.
You can access my free Twitter video course by clicking here.
Update your Facebook status with a link to your new blog posts.
Submit your stories to Digg.com, Reddit.com and StumbleUpon.com.
Remember that in order for social networking to be effective, you need to participate with other people on your list. If you visit their links and respond to their updates, they’ll be likely to do the same for you.
2. Become SEEN!
Start following bloggers in your niche and their posts. Make sure to add insightful, value adding and interesting comments on their posts. Not only will the blog owner take notice and visit your blog, other commenters will visit your blog to get more of your great insight into the topic. Don’t spread yourself too thin with blog commenting, but make it a point to comment on a few related blogs each week.
Use a free tool like Comment Sniper that tells you, instantly when a blog post has been posted on your favourite blog. That way you can be the first to post and more individuals will see and read your posted comment.
3. Become SENT!
RSS feeds are a way to syndicate your blog’s content so that it is sent to many different people in their own blog readers or on their own sites. Most blogging systems have RSS feeds automatically included but you can add a lot more functionality to your feed by using a free service like FeedBurner.com. With FeedBurner you can add things like sharing the feed via e-mail so it will pull in new readers and encourage previous visitors to come back to the blog again.
4. Become SYNDICATED!
You may think that by being a blogger you can ignore article marketing. However, you can get a lot of traffic to your blog by tweaking some of your popular blog posts and adding them to article directories. You can post your popular posts as articles with a link back to your blog in many different article directories. Not only will you get a valuable backlink but your article may also be used by ezine owners which will bring you more traffic.
You can automatic your article marketing by using this tool: ArticleBot
5. Become a MASTER BACKLINKER
Speaking of backlinks, you should work to build backlinks to your blog through several different means. By creating backlinks to your blog, you’ll improve your blog’s ranking in search engine results. You can get lots of traffic from search engines if you are within the first group of search results for your keywords.
For further reading, read my posts on building backlinks here:
Improve page rank with this free backlink love from Google and Digg
How to improve page rank by having a link building campaign
These five ways to increase blog traffic can be used over and over again to help get free blog traffic and increase your readership.
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It\’s just too bad that it was Twitter that took off and not FriendFeed – much easier to \"socialize\" with threaded comments on FriendFeed rather than Twitter… with Twitter, it just feels like you\’re throwing stuff out there, I rarely experience any comments/questions from my twitter followers – I suppose it\’s either because my tweets sucks or because they don\’t see the need for hundreds/thousands of their own twitter followers to see a single comment about a link or whatever.
.-= Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..Getting Online Before Breakfast, Yes Please! =-.
Twitter: andrewrondeau
Klaus,
That’s a great point your made. I’ve been concentrating on building my Twitter followers. Now I have to learn how to make the number of followers I have ‘useful’ – i.e. visit my sites, buy from me, make comments…all that stuff we crave for!
Andrew
Great tips Andrew!!
Never knew about comment sniper, and I’m just getting ready to start some article marketing of my own. Thanks for sharing! Good stuff!
.-= Jack@Online Marketing Blog´s last blog ..Affiliate Marketing + Article Directory = Rejection? =-.
Twitter: andrewrondeau
Jack,
You are welcome. Comment Sniper – it’s a great little tool!
Andrew