How TO: Boost your blog traffic
Want to increase the traffic to your blog and get more visitors? You’ve come to the right place. Read on and find out the fastest ways to improve the quality and drive traffic. Most beginners assume that once they start their blog they are done and all they have to do is sit down, relax and watch their traffic go up. Unfortunately they are wrong
Style and Design - be attractive
This is the start of any successful and even decent blog. In order to attract visitors and eventually regular readers you will need to start with the basics - the building blocks. Regardless of whether you have a custom solution or a hosted blog somewhere it is really important early on in the game to start with clean, organized, and well styled blog which is easy to read. This first step will improve the usability and will help boost your credibility as a content provider. To read more on usability visit Jacob Nielsen’s website. Furthermore you can use one of the thousands of ready templates available online or create your own.
Content - it’s all about what you have to offer
In order to best serve your visitors you need to provide the right content. One way is to target specific audience by providing specialized information. That will be your niche and most of your readers will be return visitors interested in that topic. Another approach will be to provide original content or opinions on something widely publicized. When providing content make sure you are not ‘borrowing’ somebody else’s thought and ideas. Here is a list of the 12 DOs and DON’Ts with regards to copyright.
Know your audience - the customer is king
In order to be a successful blogger you will need to possess qualities like dedication, passion and endurance. Remember that blogging is not a sprint but a marathon and only the fittest survive. Therefore getting familiar with your traffic is your responsibility. Start by using some of the available tools to obtain data and measure key statistics about the people visiting your blog. Who are your visitors? Where do they come from? How do they find your content? What do they read and how long? How many repeating visitors you have? Answering questions like these can be crucial to being successful. A simple example will be knowing how many people are subscribed to your RSS feeds. In order to obtain traffic data use one of the numerous tools like Google Analytics, Feed Burner or your web server stats (here is a tool for Apache)
Arm Yourself - use all the tools at your convenience
Use the tools that will help you improve your site and make it easily accessible. For a starter you can make your blog URLs more user and search engine friendly by using permalinks. This makes your pages easier to remember, bookmark, and find by search engine. Here is a short permalinks guide for WordPress. Another great think that you can use to your advantage is to provide RSS feeds of your blog. This can be done either independently or linked through Feed Burner for advanced capabilities and tracking purposes. For added value or “bonus points” so to say it will be nice to include podcasts and/or videos to your blog. And if you still have not had enough you can include to your blog the rest of the bells and whistles out there - featured article plugins, social bookmarking tools like links to del.icio.us, Digg etc. You can also take the initiative and post your blog on any of those sites and even more (BlogsOfTheDay, Technorati and others).
In Conclusion…
In conclusion I want to re-iterate by saying that i can’t possibly stress enough how important following the rules above is to your final success. As simple as those basic directions might seem they are very often ignored or followed wrong. Remember: create a welcoming blog, be original and creative, don’t steal other people’s content, get to know your audience, use all the tools that can possibly help you attract more readers. Make sure you keep the two-way communication with your readers by providing feedback to their comments and repsonding to emails. Feels free to add more to the topic by posting comments below. Happy Blogging!
