Blog Tips pt 3 – Building Traffic to your Blog

Jul-2007

Part 3 – Building traffic to your blog

Getting traffic to any websites, blogs included, is difficult and requires dedication and hard work. Competition for eyeballs is fierce and to get traffic you need to take every opportunity to optimise you blog and provide a good user experience. Here is a list of the tactics which I am employing to build content.

Write Quality Content

It seems obvious but having quality content will encourage people to visit your website and read what you have to say. Other bloggers will read your content and link to it from their blogs. Furthermore, the more content you have on your site, the more content there will be for search engines to include in their search results.

Pings

When you write a new article, it is possible to have your blog software ‘ping’ blog search engines such as Technorati, to have them index the new conent. This increases the changes of your new content appearing in search results directories and Search engines.

Submiting your blog to blog and search engine and website directories will help increase your search engine rankings and build traffic through click throughs.

Here is a list of blogs directories and search engines to ping

Social bookmarking

Users are increasingly using social bookmarkting sites such as Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon to record their bookmarks, search for recommendations and share new sites with their friends. Submit all your blog post to the most popular social bookmarking sites and place easy submission buttons on each post (see below). I have used the wordpress plugin Sociable to do this.

Commenting and Trackbacks

If you are blogger, it is important to become involved with the blogging community. Commenting on other peoples blogs and leaving trackbacks will encourage click thoughs to your site and also make other bloggers aware of your existance.

Another good way of becoming involved in the community is to join a service like MyBlogLog.

Offline marketing

Include your blog URL on all your communications, e.g.

Business card
eMail signature
Letterheads

Link Exchange

Talk to blogs in your space and suggest a link exchange. Not only will this help your readers understand more about the subject matter, but it will also help with your search engine ranking, and create traffic.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engines, such as Google, have the potential to create a huge amount of traffic to your blog.

I have written a brief guide to search engine optimisation.