Driving traffic to a blog actually not as hard as you think. All you need to understand is:
- To find out where people are looking for blog posts or articles to read
- To know what type of headline and content teaser can attract people to visit your blog.
Of course, content is important. But you must understand that in order to let people know that your content is important, you need to take care the two things above, that evolve around one single focus:
Get your content to as many eyeballs as possible.
That being said, I found out from my experience that good blog traffic is mainly coming from blog posts, not from the homepage. “Good” means targeted and unique visitors (visitors retention is another issue…) Therefore, search engine result pages placement is very, very important, as having your blog posts in Google or Yahoo! first page is a massive organic traffic generator.
Here are some simple, logical and practical tips on how to drive traffic to your blog – Please note, I have tested these tips and succeed in increasing my blogs’ traffic:
- Whenever possible, create a list or how-to blog post. “List” blog post type, such as “10 Steps to increase your blog traffic” or “Top 5 blog traffic ideas” and “How-to” blog post type, such as “How to drive traffic to your blog” or “How to do SEO” are two of the most successful content type in driving traffic. Use them sparingly in between regular, newsy or opinionated, blog post to give more flavour for your blog.
- Social bookmarking is a must. This is what people are still overlook today – You have to bookmark your own content (You’ve got to like your blog post – If you didn’t, then how can you expect others to?) My strategy is to bookmark to about 5 social bookmarking sites, 4 to high-traffic sites, such as Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon and Delicious, and 1 to dofollow bookmarking site, such as Blinklist. Mix the use of those social bookmarking sites with hundreds of others to get your content to as many communities as possible.
- Blog commenting, forum posting, Yahoo answers.
- Create content in high traffic content directory. Wikipedia, Squidoo, Hubpages and Google Knols works well, and having your links in them will benefit your search engine rank greatly. Writing useful content in them, of course, is a requirement – Great content will drive thousands of page views that will lead to visitors clicking on your links.
- Get others to review or mention your blog or blog post. People use this mainly for link building purpose, but I see reviews as double-benefit. First, getting your blog or blog post reviewed by related, quality sites will jump your rank in search engine result pages. Second, well-written review will entice visitors of the blogs or sites reviewing you to visit your blog.
- Support your blog with useful, traffic-generating services. Having a web directory attached to your blog works wonder for me. If your blog is about pet, having a pet doctor directory will drive massive traffic to your blog. This is also true for other traffic-generating services, such as press release services, classified ads, forums, and other similar type of services.
- Last but not least, never forget your own on-site SEO. Implement best SEO practices on your blog, such as using keywords in blog post title, signing your blog post with keywords, tagging each blog post properly, etc. Those will definitely work well, but not on their own – You need to do the above tactics to mix and match.
Use these wisely, as no comment and posting are created equal – You shan’t spam with “check this out!” or “good blog post. Thanks!”-type of content. They are simply useless (maybe for backlinking purpose, they still hold value.) Provide valuable and smart opinion, and others will soon see that your comments or threads are useful and will try to find out who you are. This leads to another tip: Always leave some form of contact info, generally your website address.
I GUARANTEE the results of the above tips, if done correctly and regularly.
