10 Tips to Increase Blog Traffic

[lishiguang]

Traffic is the soul to any online business, including the recent trend, the blogs. If you imagine it this way:

You have a business in a mall. Customers find information about your business through coupons. Customers come to the mall and go into your business. They look around and decide if they should purchase or not.

The concept is the same with any online business.

You have a website. Visitors (traffic) find information about your website through advertisements. Visitors search on search engines, find your website and click to your website. They look around and decide if they should purchase or not.

If you compare two together:



Online Business vs. Offline Business

Traffic = Customers

Online Ads = Coupons

Search Engines = Mall

Website = Storefront



No traffic to a website is the same as no customers coming into the mall.

No traffic / No Customers = No Sales in both cases.

Blog-driven websites are becoming more and more popular. If you have a blog, pay attention to the tips below: (not in particular order)

1. Choosing the right platform, domain, and internal tagging (categories)

CMS (short for Content Management System) is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fasion. A Blog is a CMS application. The right blog software can make a huge difference. If you use blogger or wordpress templates, make sure they are designed with search engine optimized in mind.

Domain should be carefully thought through before going for it. A domain is not just an URL. A domain represents your brand! It should be unique and easy for people to mention to each other. Don't make it too hard to pronounce. Ideally a domain should have the most important keyword about your business in it, and it should be no longer than 20 characters. You should also always aim for dotcom domains first, simply because "dotcom" is more well known compared to dotnet, dotorg...etc.

Proper internal tagging is very important for both search engines and users. Internal tagging enables search engines to better crawl the various content within your website. Internal tagging also allows users to navigate your website a lot easier, as they can just choose and display certain categories of their interest.

2. Write Title Tags and Content with both Search Engine and Visitors in mind
Search Engine is all about relevancy.

The more targeted keywords you have in your content the higher you will rank in search engine results for these targeted keywords. Title tags and content should have your targeted keywords in them. The more the better, but avoid spamming. This is why you should also write with visitors in mind. If you mention too much of the same words, it's actually quite annoying. Write with honesty and provide quality content to the best of your ability.

3. Proper bolding and underlying

Your writing has to please your readers. Don't make your font too small to read. Use proper bolding and underlying to help readers read more efficiently.

4. Use more than just Text

This is self-explanatory. You will see popular blogs or websites make good use of graphics, audios, and videos, just to remove the boredom of plain text.

5. Pay attention to your site stats and focus on topics that's popular and needs attention

If you pay attention to the traffic logs of your site, you will be able to tell which posts and topics that your audiences like the best. If you find posts and topics that draw the most traffic, they are probably what people are looking for. If you focus on these topics you will be fulfilling people's needs, thus, increasing your readership and building your authority in these topics. Of course if would be even better if these topics lie around your targeted keywords.

6. Invite Guest Bloggers / Posts

It's a good practice to invite guest bloggers to post on your blogs. This will improve the variety of the content on your site. Of course, these guest posts should be relevant to your site.

7. Implement Search Feature

I can't tell you how important the search box feature is to a website, especially for blogs with hundreds of archived posts. These archived posts may still be valuable to your visitors. By implementing a search feature on your website you are connecting related content with respect to your visitors' demands / needs.

8. Participate in Social Media, Forums, Blogs and Article Directories

Most social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, can allow you to automatically update content to your profile with your blog's RSS / Atom feeds. These Social Media, if used properly, can bring you tremendous amount of traffic.

Participating in forums and blogs related to your niche will help building up your authority and your voice in your niche. Not only that, you will also get backlinks to your website if you have your website URL in your signature. Also, a lot of people on these forums and blogs will click on your signature URL out of curiosity. Same effects can be achieved with submitting articles to article directories.

9. Include Keywords in your Links

A lot of people only include their direct website URLs in their links. This is a simple mistake that most people make which dramatically reduces the quality of their backlinks. As previously mentioned, search engines are all about relevancy. The quality of a backlink depends on the relevancy between the linking text of the backlink, the title and the content of the website. If your website is about travel (targeted keyword), make sure the keyword "travel" is mentioned in the linking text.

10. Building your Brand

Your brand is like the purpose of your blog. Your readers share the same purpose as you and their loyalty are built based on their level of comfort with your brand. Sticking to your brand is very important as you will be consistently building up your authority and voice within your brand, your community. Your readers follow your brand, and you want loyal, quality, and focused readers.

You can, of course, diversify your website but it takes a lot more work and dedication to build up authority in multiple areas. It also takes a lot of work from the search engine optimization point of view since the relevancy of all the content on your website dramatically changes.

If you already have a solid readers to your existing brand, introducing a completely new subject can be off putting for them.

[boywonder]

May I make a suggestion?

I use adbrite to advertise on my blog and it has been going....slow. (about 1 penny per day)

I recently signed up on a PTC site and bought 1000 hits to try it out (it was only $0.50) I was so impressed (I got a couple of comments and my daily income increased fro $0.01 to $0.12)

That's why I use EarnEasyCash, less than $0.50 for 1000 hits! I talked to the owner recently and he is very nice and responds quickly to my questions.

In fact, if send him an email after you sign up, he will give you 1000 credits for free! Just tell him that boywonder told you about it. I have noticed that quite a few blogs use his advertising (since it is so cheap and effective)...over 80 different sites.

Here is the Link, I didn't add any referral link to this since I hope you will be kind enough to tell him I sent you.
EarnEasyCash : Welcome To EarnEasyCash!

[IronBlogger]

Some nice tips here. I like the way you compared online buisness to offline buisness and it's true that you should bit title tags that are relevent but also exciting to people as well. You shouldn't just write for the search engines, you should write for both parties.

I think that if you keep at it eventually SEO will increase over time, as long as you keep the basics going.

I think one tip you left out of here is that patience is a virtue. Sometimes it just takes time for you to increase the traffic to your blog.

[brandmantra]

the way you've clarified the online and offline business is quite good.
I want to add this-
try to be the first blogger to provide latest news and updates to your visitors within your niche.

[blogenhancingtips]

There are definitely ways to get traffic easily. But I think it is easy to increase search engine hits also. Many people overlook the long-term traffic you should get from search engines. You should definitely try out some easy search engine optimization and it doesn't matter even if you know anything about it.

[macaroon]

I haven't tried twitter before. As for facebook, it change a lot since there is a pop-up window that would remind the member that he/she is posting too much in the communities. Thanks for the new information. Perhaps right now, number eight on the list is applicable to me. Have a nice day!

[lishiguang]

Originally Posted by IronBlogger

I think one tip you left out of here is that patience is a virtue. Sometimes it just takes time for you to increase the traffic to your blog.

Patience is, indeed, required to see the traffic grow exponentially in time.
Patience is more like a characteristic that is required for anyone to succeed. At least that's what I believe

P.S. There's a lot more characteristics such as passion, persistence, preparation...etc. that an entrepreneur needs to have.

[Dan484]

Thanks for the great tips and discussion. This was very helpful.

[cfyves]

Great post.

I've been planning a project for some time and I've been mulling over a few aspects....

1. How exactly I want to build it (or build a mod for an existing CMS)
2. How to promote the project online to it's target audience...

I've been thinking alot about SEO...

lishiguang, your description of the online business is very good.

[lishiguang]

Originally Posted by cfyves

lishiguang, your description of the online business is very good.

Thanks! Good luck on your projects