16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your
Blog
You've got your blog set up and
you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would
benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and
your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?
Like
any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic
to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you
can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.
1. Set up a Bloglet
subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe:
family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.
Http://www.bloglet.com
2.
Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo
search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)
http://www.my.yahoo.com
3.
Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things
like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link
to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every
time you publish. http://www.pingomatic.com
5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com
6.
Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories
is on this site: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
Tip:
Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you
first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for
you.
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
8. Put
a link to your blog on every page of your website.
9. If you publish a newsletter,
make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.
10. Include a link
to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder
sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.
11. Print your blog
URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.
12. Make sure you have
an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to.
The acronym RSS means Rich Site
Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is
a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication.
These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news
readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries. To
learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm
13.
Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others
in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your
posts
14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts.
What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server
to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The
beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.
15. Write
articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your
blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).
16. Make
a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic
as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task
every day at the same time.
Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor
stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit.
You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com
Source: Free
Articles from ArticlesFactory.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Denise
Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter
Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for
independent professionals. Read and subscribe to their blogs at
http://www.biztipsblog.com,
http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com
