Over 5,000,000 people searched for some kind of blog last month. Blogging is the latest and greatest and bloggers have the opportunity to reach a wide range audience. Blogs come in all subject niches and themes and there are tons of people searching for the current and freshly updated content that blogs provide but getting blog traffic can be as elusive as website traffic. Where do you get readers and subscribers that are so necessary to make your blog a success. Here are some some hands-on techniques.
6 Ways to Increase Blog Traffic
1. First and foremost you must write valuable and original content. The main difference between static websites and blogs is that blogs are frequently updated and that content is the life blood of blogs. Content is the number one way to attract and convert visitors into subscribers, or regular returning visitors. No matter the subject of your blog make sure your content is relevant, valuable and informative and the blog traffic will come.
Some great content ideas include, lists, how-to's, what is, guides, and tutorials. Keep them simple and easy to read. Write in simple English. Remember the Internet is all about instant gratification and people want information and they want it fast, write comprehensive posts but make them scanable and easy to read with paragraph breaks and bolded heads and sub headers.
2. Article marketing is a great way to get blog traffic. Write articles related to your blog topic and submit them to several article sites, like this one! In the resource box leave two links, one to the home page of your blog and another to your best posts. Interchange the links with each article you write. These backlinks are also good for SEO and getting higher search engine rankings for your blog for more blog traffic. Remember the better your article the more those readers will want to visit your blog and read more of what you've written.
3. Search Engine Optimization is one of the best ways to get blog traffic. Many times bloggers just title their posts at random, this is a big mistake. Keyword research should be done for each blog post title.
Use searched for keywords in the title and at about a 5% density through the post then you have SEO'd the post and so your blog will be all over the SERPS with individual posts for their corresponding keywords and this can bring tons of blog traffic from the search engines, especially Google. When researching the keywords choose those that have less competition, especially if your blog has a lower Page Rank. With lower competition you will have a better chance of ranking higher in the SERPS and get more blog traffic.
4. Use social sites to promote your blog. Social sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit, have huge memberships and traffic and posting your content to these sites can bring you tons of blog traffic. There are over 100 social sites and they are great for networking with other bloggers as well. Make sure to also have a widget at the end of each of your posts so your visitors can submit and vote on your content on these sites.
5. Blog Traffic with Pings. With blogs, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a blog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. This pinging mechanism is very important as it spreads an alert all over the net that you have updated your content with a new blog post. The more ping services you use the more attention and blog traffic you can get.
6. RSS submit sites are a fantastic source of blog traffic. Because blogs are dynamic with RSS feeds and are regularly updated with fresh content, RSS sites exist to promote such content to their own members.
Many of these RSS / Blog directories have lots of members, who use these sites to search for blogs and content and so they can bring you tons of blog traffic and especially well targeted traffic since most of these sites categorize the blog submissions by niche and topic and / or subject. Also, many of these sites automatically update on their sites as you post content, so your actual posts get exposure which can really boost blog traffic.