Driving Traffic
16 +65 ways to drive traffic to your blog
We all want more traffic to our blog.
Here are a lot of ways to attract people to visit your blog.You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?
Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 25 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.
1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.
ttp://www.bloglet.com We now recommend Feedblitz.com for setting up an email subscription on your blog. It’s more reliable than Bloglet. (updated 10/7/07)
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on Next Level Biz Tips) http://www.my.yahoo.com
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish. http://www.pingomatic.com We are now recommending using pingoat.com for pinging more than 50 blog directories vs. ping-o-matic’s 20 directories. (updated 10/7/05)
5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: Submit Fire
6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you. (if you want to save 7 to 10 hours we can handle this for you for only $95 with our blog directory submission service)
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.
9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.
10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.
12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to.
The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries. To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm
13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts
14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.
15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).
16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time. Of course, make sure what you have to say is relevant and valuable to your readers. Don’t post for posting’s sake.
Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com
Here are 65 more tips. They may overlap as these were suggestions left on this website.
1. Write something great about your niche and email other bloggers to let them know – there’s a good chance they’ll link to you
2. Have a signature link in forums that points to your site
3. Post links to your pages to social bookmarking sites.
4. Leave comments on other people’s blogs and link back to your site (tip: look in the digg upcoming section for blog posts about to get a lot of traffic).
5. Have the opposite opinion on everyone else on a popular topic, providing you can justify it. Everyone will get annoyed and link to you saying your wrong
6. Answer questions on Yahoo Answers - quote your website as the source.
7. Post in Yahoo and Google Groups with a link to your site in your signature
8. Make a 404 page that redirects to your homepage – no point losing visitors
9. Have an opt-in form – trade links with someone else who has an opt in form on your confirmation page
10. Review a product or company – if your review is positive email the company and ask to be featured in their press section. (this has worked really well for me)
11. Write articles and submit them to article directories
12. Write a Press Release and submit it to PRWeb (make sure it is newsworthy)
13. Use PayPerClick Traffic (e.g Adwords, MSN Adcenter, YSM)
14. Add an RSS subscribe button/link in a high profile spot on your site
15. Add a mailing list subscribe form in a high profile spot on your site
16. Add a bookmark this site link in a high profile spot on your site
17. Use a Tell A Friend Script on your site so people can email their friend about an article on your website.
18. Submit a blog to a blog directory
19. Submit you RSS feed to RSS feed directories
20. Mention your website in a post on Craigslist (don’t spam)
21. Optimize the titles of your pages for keywords people will search for
22. Buy links to your site
23. Buy reviews about your site on other people’s site
24. Buy banner space on other websites if you can get a good ROI
25. Send articles to ezine publishers with a link back to your website
26. Do a big viral push for a piece of link bait, post it in forums, social bookmarking sites like digg, email bloggers, and get a few people to vote for you on social bookmarking sites – this little push could start a viral chain reaction!
27. Have a link to your site on community sites like MySpace and FaceBook
28. Use a traffic trading system like BlogRush
29. Purchase misspellings of competitors domains and redirect your site (be careful of trademark infringement)
30. Create a freebie product to give away (ebook, software, whitepaper etc.)
31. Submit your site to the hundreds of free directories – use the viles-silencer list
32. Do a group feature where you get other website owners in your niche to participate – maybe asking them all an opinion on something.
33. Hold a competition for the Top 50 in your niche – 1 month later post the results and let everyone know who featured – watch them link back to say what there position was.
34. Pass out business cards when you go to industry events in your niche
35. If you have a product start an affiliate program and start approaching affiliates
36. Submit videos to video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe. Include a link in the description and within the actual video.
37. If you have a product send it to website owners to get reviewed.
38. Look at a big website within your niche and ask to write some guest posts for them
39. Create pages with links to your site on places like Squidoo and Hubpages
40. Place classified Ads on eBay with a link to your website
41. Use an autoresponder on your mailing list to keep people coming back to your site
42. Exchange links with a few related sites in your niche
43. Network! Email other site owners, phone them up, go to industry events and get yourself known. If they know your face they will likely talk about you on their site if you do something interesting.
44. Many forums have a place for you to advertise your site once – find them and do it.
45. Purchase advertising in other people’s mailing lists and newsletters
46. Create an Amazon profile and start submitting reviews
47. Create profiles on MySpace and start networking in groups that are interested in your site’s niche.
48. Conduct a survey and publish the results – make sure you let people know about it.
49. Get your hand on a load of PLR content for your niche. Add a commentary to the top, create a unique title, and post them all to your site – lots of new content and lots of new traffic.
50. Create a cartoon mascot for your site – then hold a competition for someone to create the best game for it – pay the winner a decent amount.
51. Make sure you have a memorable domain name that is short and catchy.
52. Use a well-searched for keyword within your domain name to help rank for that keyword.
53. If you sell a product ask someone else who sells a product to list your product with theirs, and you’ll do the same for them – split commissions on sales.
54. When you write a new article on your site – link to as many blogs as possible – they will likely see your site in their pingbacks, website stats, or Technorati. They will visit your site and possibly subscribe to it and link back at a later date.
55. Get your RSS feed syndicated to different sites like Zimbio and hubpages and Topix.
56. If your site is popular and has quality unique content then apply to get listed in Google’s News search.
57. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google (not great but might help)
58. Use your robots.txt file to stop Google indexing certain directories and pages on your blog (such as archives) to avoid duplicate content issues).
59. Create a couple of small 10 page sites related to your main site. Offer links on these smaller sites in return for links to your main site (this is triangular reciprocal linking).
60. Get yourself known as an expert and get featured in offline magazines, TV and radio stations.
61. Use an auto-translator service to translate your site into other languages – put it in a subdirectory and watch foreign traffic come in.
62. Make posts about sex (don’t have to post anything rude) – and watch the porn surfers find their way to your site through Google.
63. Post about celebrities current events if it relates to your niche – there’s always a lot of people looking up celebrity stuff.
64. Write good headlines/titles – good titles get more clicks.
65. Get some stickers with your domain name on. Go out and stick them on strangers and say “My Website Yeah, Check it out.”
