Do you know know how to effectively monetize your blog? Great – however, all this is useless without traffic! You need traffic and lots of it, so here are five practical ways of getting traffic to your blog.
1 Blog commenting for traffic
Leaving relevant comments on other people’s blogs with a link back to your site is a great way to get traffic. Firstly you need to find relevant blogs to comment on.
You need to seek out the active blogs in your niche – the ones that get lots of traffic, regularly post articles and are seen as an authoritative source in your niche. If the last post was made 6 months ago, then it’s probably best to look elsewhere!
Carefully consider how many comments each post is getting – if there are lots of comments, it’s a sure sign of an active blog. You can obviously find blogs using Google, but here are a couple of other ways:
- – BloggerForum (http://www.bloggerforum.com)
- – Technorati (http://www.technorati.com)
Once you’ve found some blogs, look for posts you can contribute to. Find topics that you can make an intelligent response to and then add to the discussion. This is the most important thing – using blog commenting to drive traffic is an excellent method. Yet, many people use it incorrectly by simply posting one-line comments such as ‘great post.’
This
a.) doesn’t do your credibility favours (and therefore, people are unlikely to check out your link) and
b.) it’s blatant spam. By using blog commenting to engage in the original post, you’ll come across as an interesting person and, most importantly, someone who has a valued opinion on the topic. This makes people perceive you as an expert.
Join in the discussions. Question the original post, or add some extra information.
I wouldn’t advise posting your link in the actual body of your comment. Instead, you need to enter your website address into the field provided when you make your comment. When people read it, if they click on your name, they will be taken to your blog. As an additional point, blog commenting is great for building backlinks.
2 Submitting Your Blog to Directories
There are hundreds of web directories to which you can submit your blog to, and the majority are free. Once again, submitting to directories will help you get traffic in two ways, as people will find you by looking through the directories, and you will also be creating backlinks to your blog, which will help your rank in the search engines.
It can be a painful process submitting to directories one by one, and you WILL need to submit your blogs to hundreds of them to impact your traffic. I am going to recommend a free directory submitter to you, which will save you a lot of time:
http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/
There is also paid directory submission software that is very reasonably priced.
3 Submitting RSS Feeds & Pinging
One of the great benefits of WordPress is that it automatically creates an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed for your blog. When a person subscribes to your RSS feed, the content comes to them. This means that the reader doesn’t have to go to the content.
Submitting your RSS feeds to a variety of places will help the search rankings. Once again, there are a variety of paid options to submit your RSS feed to various Feeders, or you can submit your RSS feed to the list found here:
http://www.rss-specifications.com/rsssubmission.htm
Many sites show all the recently published materials on the web. They scan blogs regularly to ascertain whether there is anything new on there. If you can, you should ping every blog post you create. There are some great free services like:
http://www.pingomatic.com
http://autopinger.com/
http://www.pingthatblog.com/
4 Social Bookmarking Every Post
Social bookmarking will get you traffic from the search engines, as well as the people who came across your blog from actively browsing the social bookmarking site.
Many people use social bookmarking sites like search engines as they are great for helping people find relevant content…
You can submit bookmarks to multiple sites at once using the free tools at http://www.onlywire.com and http://www.socialposter.com
Another good traffic tip here is to pay people a few cents to make your bookmarks more popular, for example adding extra Diggs through sites like http://www.shorttask.com and
https://www.mturk.com/.
5 Article Marketing
Article marketing is a popular traffic method when it comes to blogs. It makes sense, really, as you are creating some excellent content for your blog, and you can then use these blog posts as a basis to create quality articles. Articles are popular with search engines, website owners and internet marketers if they are well written and contain quality information.
So again, it’s a case of traffic from backlinks and people. The manual submission of articles is a long and tedious job, however here’s some free software to help:
http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com/
The secret to getting your article read (this also applies to your blog posts) is to have an attention-grabbing headline. Words like how to, discover, secret and important are good words to include in your headline.
Also, questions in headlines work well as they tickle curiosity into reading further, for example, ‘is it possible to…?, who else…?, or can you really…?’ Try producing numbered lists too. ‘The 5 Most Important Things To….’ Etc.
You can find more great templates for article titles here: http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/
Examples:
· How to Get 5000 Twitter Followers In 2 Weeks
· Who Else Wants A Great Squeeze Page Template
· Discover The Secrets to Making Your First $100 Online
The best way to make articles work for your blog is to create two-part articles. Write an article along the lines of ‘3 Top Tips for…’ and then in your resources box tell the reader that if they would like to continue reading your article they can visit your blog. You would then link to a blog post that contained more tips on the same subject. This is a great strategy.
