You create a blog with one object in mind - getting more and more people to see your work. While creating a blog is easy, driving traffic to your blog is turning out to be an increasingly difficult proposition given the number of blogs the 'paint' the blogosphere today. In this article I will discuss some of the strategies you can employ to give your blog traffic a much needed boost.
1. Identify your audience and deliver to their needs
Begin by identifying your audience. Once you have identified your target audience, you need to find out what their information needs are. You do so by putting yourself in your audiences' shoes and thinking from their perspective. By identifying your audience's information needs, you put yourself in a better position to create 'content' that delivers to their information needs. Remember great content is like a magnet that attracts traffic.
2. Go Social
Social media is where your target audience most likely is. Use the power of social media to your best advantage by connecting, interacting, sharing and communicating with your target audience.
Tip: Encourage your readers to share your content on social media platforms by incorporating social sharing buttons within your blog post. By recommending your content to their friends on social platforms, you visitors could be bringing you more traffic.
Read my article on how you can use twitter to drive traffic to your blog
Read my article on how you can use twitter to drive traffic to your blog
3. SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the study and practice of techniques that enable blogs (and websites) to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs) for specific search terms more popularly known as keywords. In short SEO helps a blog/website gain more traffic by helping it achieve better search engine rankings. A little effort on SEO could see a huge increase in traffic to your blog.
Read my article on how you can achieve better search engine rankings with SEO
4. Subcription Options
By encouraging your readers to subscribe to your content (via feed or email) you are ensuring that they (your readers) stay updated everytime you publish a new article on your blog and thereby increasing your chances of them visiting your blog again.
You can offer subscriptions options (via feed, email or both) by 'burning' your blog at FeedBurner and incorporating visible buttons encouraging your visitors to sign up.
5. Guest Post on popular blog
Guest posting is a great way to announce your presence on the blogosphere and drive some quality traffic to your blog.
Guest posting has dual benefits. First you get a valuable backlink that helps your SEO efforts. Second and more importantly, you get to display your work before a much larger audience. If people are impressed by what you write they would surely be interested in knowing more about you and your work, and thus follow the link back to your blog.
6. Optimise images for image search
5. Guest Post on popular blog
Guest posting is a great way to announce your presence on the blogosphere and drive some quality traffic to your blog.
Guest posting has dual benefits. First you get a valuable backlink that helps your SEO efforts. Second and more importantly, you get to display your work before a much larger audience. If people are impressed by what you write they would surely be interested in knowing more about you and your work, and thus follow the link back to your blog.
6. Optimise images for image search
Optimize your images for 'image search' by 'naming' your images and using a Alt text to 'define' your images. This will make your images more visible in image search results and ensure more traffic for blog.
7. Embrace Analytics
Google Analytics is a great tool providing in-depth data on your visitor profile, the pages they visit, the time they spend on your site and a lot more. Use analytics to find out which of your pages receive the most traffic and which are the 'sources' from where most of your traffic originates. By using this data you can concentrate your attention on such 'topics' and/or 'traffic sources' which have worked for you in the past (and hence more likely to work for you again).
7. Embrace Analytics
Google Analytics is a great tool providing in-depth data on your visitor profile, the pages they visit, the time they spend on your site and a lot more. Use analytics to find out which of your pages receive the most traffic and which are the 'sources' from where most of your traffic originates. By using this data you can concentrate your attention on such 'topics' and/or 'traffic sources' which have worked for you in the past (and hence more likely to work for you again).