Like any business, your blogging journey is best travelled when you have company.
Whether you are blogging for fun or blogging for money, you want to have more visitors to your blog. Like me, you’ve probably tried to read up on different ways to get traffic. You’ve probably experimented with a few and found some methods that have worked.
Here are methods that I’ve used to bring traffic to my site:
1. Search Engine Optimization
The reality is that search engine optimization will take time. Likely you will not see the fruits of your labor in this area for a few months unless you are in a very low competition niche. So why do I list this first?
I list this first, because this is one of the first steps one should take when they start their site. Search Engine Optimization does start with the coding and writing of the content on your site. It starts with picking your niche. You do research and pick an interesting niche with low competition.
Secondly, when you write your content, it’s easier to start optimized than to have to go back some time in the future and rewrite your old posts.
You won’t see the results of Search Engine Optimization immediately, but starting with SEO in mind will pay off dividends in the months to come.
2. Submit Your Site to the Major Search Engines
It’s surprising to me how often I see others forget to mention this advice when they are talking about generating traffic. You can submit your site manually to google, bing and yahoo. This way your site is indexed faster. In some cases, it will only be a matter of hours for your site to show up. Whereas if you wait for it to happen organically, it can take weeks or months. Here are a few links where you can submit your url directly:
3. Article Marketing
Now that you’ve researched the right niche and have submitted your site to the search engines, it’s time to start establishing your site’s reputation.
Write some articles about your niche of choice and submit them to some article directories. Make sure you include the author bio information with a link to your site.
This is not only good for building backlinks, but people who read your articles will begin visiting your site.
I would suggest submitting your articles to some authority article directories such as ezine.
At the same time, you may want to use a service such as the free traffic system to submit your articles to other blogs for publishing.
5. Submit You Blog Articles to Social Media and Social Bookmarking Sites
Social media is an excellent way to drive traffic to your site. Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon are the largest contributors of my traffic.
You can either manually send out your updates with a link back to your blog, or use a plugin to automate the process. If you can’t find a good plugin for the purpose, you can use a third party service such as twitterfeed to route your rss feeds to various social media outlets.
6. Ping Your Blog
Pinging your blog, is simply sending out notifications to search engines and directory sites whenever you update your blog. There are several services that you can use to automate the process of pinging such as Pingler, pingomatic, and pingoat.
7. Advertising on other blogs
You can use either paid advertising or a free ad exchange network like entrecard. The concepts are basically the same. An advertisement for your blog is placed on another person’s website. Clicking on the ad will bring a visitor to your site. Adwords will require you to pay for each click to your site, whereas advertising exchange requires you to place a widget on your site to advertise other people’s blogs.
I use entrecard for this kind of advertising to some success. Entrecard ranks right behind social media in bringing traffic to Riches Corner. Also, I like this system because it allows me to advertise on other websites for free.
8. Blog Commenting
I would say that blog commenting probably brings some of the most targeted visitors to my blog. The reason is that the visitor that arrives at my blog has read my comment and has gotten a good sense of what kind of content my blog will supply.
Secondly, I use a service called comment luv, which allows me to leave a comment along with a link to my latest blog article on comment luv enabled blogs. This way, others can see the title of my article, and arrives at my blog with the idea in mind to read that article.
9. Yahoo Answers
I used Yahoo Answers to great success when I initially started Riches Corner. This system is quite time consuming as you have to answer a number of questions left by others. After you answer a certain amount of questions, your status becomes elevated to level 2 and you are able to leave a link back to the authority for the answer. At that point, you can focus your answers to questions that relate directly to your niche.
After you leave a few answers with your link, you will notice that Yahoo propagates your answers throughout their site, and you will see a large increase in your incoming links. When my backlinks went live on Yahoo Answers, my incoming links jumped by about 3,000. I also started to see an influx of visitors coming from Yahoo sites.
This is a very time consuming method in the beginning, but once your links go live on Yahoo, you’ll be glad you took the time to answer all those questions.
10. Set up a Job Board on Your Blog
In the last 30 days, my job board brought over 600 visitors to Riches Corner:
This accounts for almost a third of the total traffic on the site. Many of these visitors clicked through and searched for various freelance projects and return to look for more projects in the future.
A job board is just another way to provide valuable, constantly updating content for your visitors. I get a great amount of new and returning traffic to Riches Corner from my job board.
I use the Donanza Job Board on Riches Corner.
11. Advertise on Craigslist
If you are providing a service, you can advertise on Craigslist as a business for free. Generally, I would recommend advertising a particular product or service. For instance, if you are offering SEO Consultation, freelance writing, website development services, you can write an advertisement specific to the service that you are providing.
In my case, I have advertised my job board on Craigslist as an employment type service and have received visitors to my job board straight from craigslist. While it’s not absolutely necessary, it may also help if your services are localized.
12. Guest Posting
There are two ways to create traffic through guest posting. The first is to guest post on other blogs. This will get your name out in front of others and help you build a reputation for yourself. This is particularly useful if you are able to guest post on some of the more popular blogs.
The second way is to allow guest posting on your blog. When other authors post on your blog, their followers may come to your site to read their content. Recently, I had a guest post from Ashley, that received over 200 views over the course of a week. People that read that post, voted for it on blogengage, retweeted the post out to their twitter followers and shared it with their friends on other social media sites.
Sometimes, it just helps to get posts from a different perspective.
13. Send updates out to your list
It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out and only have a couple of people on your list. When someone signs up for your list, they are actively telling you that they are interested in your content. Simply sending out a monthly update to your list and telling them of some of your recent posts will generate great returning traffic.
14. Write Great Content
This goes without saying. Writing good content is a must if you want readers to return to your blog and read your content. Not only that, but it’s good for the search engines crawling your site and finding the longtail keywords.
What kind of content brings traffic? I find good tutorials, list posts, and even posts highlighting content on other blogs tend to get the most views. The generic theory posts tend to get less traffic.
Have you found a great traffic generating method that I didn’t mention here? Leave me a comment and we can discuss different ways to get more traffic.
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Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.
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I'd like to thank you for this usefull topic. your topics are truly inspiring..
i work for nonprofit organizations in Turkey, and write a blog also about socialmedia.
we're waiting for more :)
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