16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

By Denise Wake­man

(Photo Cour­tesy Nrbelex)

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 an email sub­scrip­tion form on your blog and invite every­one in your net­work to sub­scribe: fam­ily, friends, col­leagues, clients, associates.

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets reg­u­larly spi­dered by the Yahoo search engine.

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.

5. Sub­mit your blog to tra­di­tional search engines.

6. Sub­mit your blog to blog directories.

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.

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.

And now I would like to invite you to claim your free instant access to my 5-part video course to learn more about how to get the best out of your blog. Visit http://masterbusinessblogging.com

From Denise Wake­man, Founder of The Blog Squad and Online Mar­ket­ing Advisor.

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