Increasing blog traffic is
To summarize the entire post in few words, I believe the major contenders in increasing blog traffic are your blog posts frequency (quality post with proper SEO) and posting timings. These few factors play the vital role in driving traffic to your blog.
And yea, consistency is a backbone too! So lets start with our exciting list of the top 20 ways by which we can boost our blog traffic.
1-Starting Off- Choosing Your Blog Platform
This can play a huge role in your blog's future performance and in determining your blogging success. Many top bloggers often use their own custom content managing systems. This means that they wont be using the popular blogging platforms like WordPress or Blogger and instead, they would make out their own blogging system, with posting tools, their own set layout of blog, their own custom commenting system etc.
This can be tricky for the beginners. So for this purpose, most recommend to use the popular content managing systems like WordPress, Blogger, Typed etc.
Just to know, there is nothing like perfect blogging platform. Its basically about fulfilling your needs. Some might be satisfied with Blogger and some with Typed/WordPress. So it depends. The posts below would better help you out in using one for yourself.
So find out which one suites you best and then move on.
2-Make Your Blog As a Sub domain Of Your Website
As blogs are getting popular due to the way they present information and their interactive nature, many websites (companies) opt in for making a blog for them self too. Notice how we have Facebook blog or Twitter blog.The whole point of the story is that in case we own a website already and we wish to proceed with having a blog too, then its a wise idea to get register your blog as a sub domain of your website. Why to start all over all with your blog?
Having a blog as a sub domain in (blog.yourwebsite.com) would help out your website in gaining more visitors in future (as blogs attract a lot of traffic due to their interactive nature and the way they are updated regularly, unlike a website).
The page rank of your website (the Google ranking authority), that you have already gained over the years would flow toward your newly build blog and make flourish faster as it would if it had a separate domain name. (www.yourblog.com)
Say if you are just starting out with a blog and you don't have a website history, then you obviously would start out with an independent blog domain.
3-Proper SEO For Your Blog And Every Individual Post
Posting with consistency over a long period of time would give you success, in terms of traffic, loyal readership and revenue. But that's not it. 1000s of posts with wrong search engine optimization (SEO) would not help at all.We want every post to go out in the competition and rock the world. For that, its a wise idea to choose proper title tags or your blog and post pages. The following two articles would help you out acheive this.
- How To Write Search Engine Friendly Blog Post Titles?
- Optimize Blog Post Titles Using H2 Tag - Increase Traffic
- 3 Reasons Why Your PageRank is not Increasing
To summarize the Title strategy, its a wise approach to make your blog post title appear in the following order: (post name | blog name) e.g ( How to make money online | Mybloggertricks ). Choose proper keywords, that are friendly to human eye and are not just for the search engines.
4-Show Yourself Authoritative Even If Your Are Newbie
This might feel odd but its just how many top bloggers started off. No one in the world is perfect when they first launched their blog. So say you blog about cricket. And as i mostly say, that one could never get blogging success if hes not passionate about the topic he writes on. So its the first test you have to put yourself in.
It doesn't mean that you spread out wrong information (as you are a newbie). Its just that learn along and present it wisely.
5-Participate In The Community (Forums, Blogs)
This can be helpful to some extent. But i also believe that many beginners get distracted with this strategy and loose focus on the posting frequency part (that is the basics). Consider a news paper company. Take NewYork Times just for an example.News paper is kind of a blog, that is updated regularly (on daily basis). If you would get a newspaper the next morning with old news, would you consider having it again? Even if we consider that the NewYork Times were busy in making relationships with other bloggers, newspapers and community to increase their scope.
The content is what people come to your blog. So do participate in blogs commenting systems (blogs of your choice, relevant to your niche) but schedule a time limit for it in your entire day plan. May be an hour or so. I personally don't do it on regular basis (to be honest. I try to focus on developing content for my blog).
To find blogs in your relevant niche, say you blog about dogs food, then search in Google like, Top dog foods. That would bring a lot of blogs up. Start following them and participate.
6-InBound And Out Bound Linking
Linking content is really important too. Though this might not directly increase your traffic, but this would indeed increase your page rank (as discussed before) and then would bring quality search engine traffic for sure.
It is always important to know How To Inter-link Pages Smartly To Flow The PR Juice To Ever Single Page!. See? You can make the link part of your sentence too. Its works the same. In this way, the page rank that your present post have gained would flow to these linked posts, resulting them to get higher ranked in search engines.
7-Increasing Post Frequency With Guest Bloggers
There is a limit to the number of posts that you can mange to write in a single day. May be 3-4 maximum. So why not to take help of other guest authors that would help you out in the process. This is the general idea. But to note, you wont be getting any guest bloggers in your early blogging days and no one would feel like posting and associating them selves with a newbie blog.So you have to do the initial hard work of posting regularly (or you can hire paid bloggers too) and then seek on guest bloggers.
8-Posting Timings
Hell important. Take on an example of this blog. There is nothing to hide guys. We feel like sharing our experience through these posts. :)So now days i normally publish posts around 11-12am. (which makes up 8-10am in US, from where most of the internet traffic lands on). This is the time where most of the people check on blogs (as per stats). I may visit mybloggertricks in my office once a day, and if there is no new content (even if the authors would post later in the day, i wont get to read it).
So its wise to publish out the article when most of the people tend to read it. So coming back to timings, when ever i get late in post, we tend to see a decrease in the Alexa rank! So posting on right timings would increase it dramatically.
9-Consider Using Ads When You Get Setup
Imagine a blog with no or less traffic is full of ads. What impression would that give? A clean blog with clear cut content gives out a more positive feel. That doesnt mean you should not monetize your blog, but i believe that as due to the low traffic, the Ads wont make you any considerable money, so why not to give a clean look to blog until you get some loyal traffic.That would be the time to introduce the Ads.
10-Always Talk Hot!
Many of the readers here at MBT shared their views that how we published a post on Christmas Gadgets. Christmas is near so why not to talk about it? Its hot. This is one of the strategies of flowing traffic towards your blog. There is nothing to hide. Thats how the world of blogging works.In fact this is what blogging is. What if a SEO blogger doesn't tell the top blogging techniques to their visitors? So if there is a particular dog disease out in the world, and you blog about dogs, do write about it.
11-Content Layout- Addition of Pictures/Media
Its a must. Find any relevant video to your content to if you could find one.
12-Learn With Your Analytics
Monitor your blog's top articles in terms on visitors, bounce rate, time spent etc and then try to improve those articles. Feature them in your feature post widget for your blog so that they get even more attention. Try to update the content, if there is any thing new to the post theme.Notice your top performing days which bring most of the traffic and try to utilize it. You may want to add an extra post on that top performing day.
13-URL SEO- Post link layout
Like in WordPress, you write the post url separately to the post title unlike in blogger. In blogger, you can add some additional code to your templates, to make the post titles as your post url. The best SEO url strategy is to make the url same as the post title, with keywords that you are targeting.14-Be polite, Humble Blogger
Your relationships with your readers is crucial. No one likes rude attitude. When a reader leaves out a comment, greet him in a great way that he would be feel honored to share his thoughts again. This would increase the interactivity of your blog and if you continue to do so consistently, you would find a great people ready to praise you all the time.15-Table of Contents Can Help
If you have a blog with tutorials, tips, then its a wise approach to have list of contents (sitemap) that would help navigation easy for the visitors. This can increase the number of page views dramatically. So like wise bounce rate would drop (that's what you want).16-Say All What You Got
Be natural and say it all. When the readers would know that you are straight about what you know and anything that you don't know, they would respect you. When you mention any thing that is still new for yourself, be positive and mention that you are still experimenting on that one.Every one is in the process of learning all the time.
17-Creating Curiosity And Fulfilling it
The ebook creation series that i have worked over the last couple of days has developed a curiosity among many of our friends here at MBT. Series of posts works pretty well for this purpose. Always mention what is coming next day so that readers would feel like waiting for it.18- Drive Referal Traffic-YouTube
YouTube has been really in, in terms of driving traffic to my blog. In fact my top performing article is backed by a YouTube video that brings in much of a traffic. You would have seen many top bloggers using YouTube videos to give an extra edge to their content.You can make a short video supporting your article and embed that into your post. Believe me that gives a great impression.
19- Build a Brand- Work On To Be Unique
Your blog looks and feel are very important in terms on developing a unique brand. Even if you use a template, work on to make it more personel so that it just belongs to you. Clean and clear design can impress the visitors and tend them to push the like buttons here and there. I often go for like buttons on blogs just by their first impression.It means a lot.
20- Post Frequency Final Note:
Many beginners dont get the post frequency part. They can never decide the right post frequency for their blogs. As here, i would recommend posting out 2 or more articles daily (they can be short around 400 words) and then stick to this for 6-8 months. The results would be self explainatory.So these are the top 20 tips that would lead you to drive traffic to your blogs may it be blogspot blogs or any other. The idea is universal. Again buddy, the power is in consistency. This is for the motivational purpose. If you don't stick to what you do, there is no use. So lets do it together and sketch our success with our own hands.
