A Blog is a stepping stone for many newbie internet marketers. It is easy to set up than a regular website. Blog platforms like Blogger and WordPress provide a mechanism for instant publication without spending a dime. Google’s Blogger platform goes even one step further by proving a monetization means through their AdSense platform. All you need spend is your time to write contents. All barriers to publishing your contents are gone. However, many people find their blogs sitting alone in the vastness of the Web. Nobody is coming to read what they have published in their blogs. The concerns about “how to drive traffic” ultimately lead to frustration and abandonment.
But before you give up your blogging and call it a day, you must understand that there are a few tips that you can easily implement to drive traffic to a blog. Try these tips for a month or so before you quit. I can assure you that you’ll get a few hundred visitors a day easily if you follow the tips outlined in this blog post.
I know you cannot afford a big budget like a corporate blogger. So, paid traffic through a pay-per-click campaign is ruled out. Also, banner advertisement in the top blogs related to your niche is out of reality because the top bloggers are demanding insane amount of money to display a tiny banner that may or may not get any real visitors. Why shouldn’t they? A lot of financially challenged people are paying them big bucks.
However, you don’t have to do so. I searched the blogospehere to find the best article on driving traffic to your blog for free. I was also looking for information that is easy to implement. Tips that does not require you to be a tech wizard. I’m happy to report that I have found such an article at performancing.com. Performancing.com provides effective tips and tricks to bloggers to succeed. If you’re not a subscriber of their RSS feed, I urge you do so immediately. With any further delay, I’m producing their excellent tips to drive traffic to your blog below.
- Write content and publish consistently. It’s easy to come up with a plan, even create an editorial calendar. It’s much harder to actually stick to a consistent schedule. This is a common area of difficulty for bloggers, but important to master. Let’s just say that search engines and readers both love consistency of frequency. Unless you’re running a news site, you don’t necessarily have to publish tons of content daily.
- Tweak your content to searches. You don’t want to cater entirely to site visitors’ searches, but do focus on search keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche. If visitors are reaching your site via a particular search but the “bounce” (leaving) rate is high, then they probably didn’t find the content they were seeking. Mine your site metrics for the most popular search terms for the recent past, then see if you can write content to match, while staying within your site’s niche.
- Build up your posting frequency. Start small, build up your content as time, resources or budget permits. Additional content will bring additional readers, especially if you’re leveraging your social media channels.
- Build your social networks. There are a variety of social networks, including social bookmarking sites (Stumbleupon, Delicious), social voting sites (Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller), Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, other blogs, forums, media sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare) and so on. Don’t forget to factor in the time it takes to build your social networks, so work at it daily if possible. Of course, having these networks is useless unless you leverage them to promote your content.
- Promote content on at least two social media sites. There are a variety of ways to promote your content, including the social media sites mentioned above, as well as a variety of non-social profile pages that are free for use. These methods differ in the amount of Web traffic they each bring, though collectively they can make a tremendous difference to your site. You don’t have to use all of these methods, especially when you’re starting out. Bloggers differ on what they feel is most important, but if you have to pick just two to start with, a few of my blogging colleagues have variously suggested the following pairs as being “most” effective, in their experience:
- Stumbleupon and Digg.
- Stumbeupon and Twitter.
- Twitter and Facebook.
- Twitter and Digg.
Personally, I’d pick Twitter and Facebook, but it really depends on your content and your social networks. Promoting content successfully online really is about who you know and whether they’ll share your content. If you can get them to do it regularly, even better. Your Facebook Wall or a Fan Page serve as great reminders. Just don’t overdo it, and learn to balance promotion and social network building tasks when you’re not writing.
- Deep link to your older content. For each new post that you write, you should try to link to at least two older posts in your own site’s archives. If your post is sufficiently long, you can link to more than two. Remember to link with appropriate keywords in the anchor text. The cynic might say that this is a cheap way to get more page views for your site, but linking to your own existing content from each new post serves multiple purposes
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- Keep readers on your site. Yes, that gets you more page views, but is there really anything wrong with that if you’re giving readers what they want, possibly in your archives?
- Expose older content to readers who might have missed it.
- Build authority for your site for the keywords and variations used in link anchor text (more on this in a later post). From a search engine perspective, keep in mind that they all want relevant links to give to search users. If your site happens to have relevant links, why not emphasize that by deep linking? This potentially helps to reduce the waiting time it takes to rank in search engines.
- Throw a whammy at site scrapers who grab your content. They might steal your content but having a link to your own posts means you’ll at least know who did it and be able to take action, if desired.
- Use target=”_blank” in your hyperlinks. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry for now. If you do know, then use it for any links that go outside of your sites. This way, the main browser window/ tab stays on your site, hopefully keeping readers there longer and potentially building traffic.
Original article 7 Tips For Bootstrapping Your Traffic
Memorize these seven tips to drive traffic to your blog. Or better yet, create a mnemonic to remember the tips. If you’re busy to read the tips above, just remember the 7 points below:
- Consistency
- Search
- Frequency
- Social network
- Promote
- Deep Link
- Use target attribute
Image credit: rich jorgemejia
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
You forgot to mention adding pictures of seductive women in bathing suits, no matter the pics don’t match the topics of the posts!
Forgive me for asking, but what’s the relevance of the picture you posted on this article? And if you’re such an expert in blogging, why is your page rank a mere 1 out of 10?
mvs´s last blog ..“The World in Our Hands” – Cornelages, A Paper-Cut Collage Exhibition by Cornelis Hoek
It shows poise and grace. That is what your content should be. Everybody started out with 1. If you think the tips are not good or does not work, you can ignore them. Chill out buddy.