Top 10 Blog Traffic Tips
Categories: Blog Marketing, Featured
Written By: BloggerSavvy
(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5) Loading ...In an earlier post, Scott Mahler of Datex Media commented asking about the newest strategies of increasing blog traffic. While there are some new aspects, I think for many of us, it’s important to first “hammer home” some of the best tips blog owners can use to help ensure traffic growth. This blog post invites your comments! What’s new in blog marketing? What works for you? Let us know below.
The #1 strategy to garnering more traffic to your blog is:
“Write good quality, in-demand content“. (Remember you are writing too people, not at them).
And of course some of the activities I successfully use are:
- Use social networking tools such as: StumbleUpon. Run an advertising campaign via StumbleUpon. Use twitter. Ensure you provide tweets of value and customize your twitter page to match the branding of your blog. Never complain needlessly on twitter (do you want to spend your day with a whining sour-puss?) Invite people to follow you on twitter. You may find my earlier post “Common Blog Traffic Sources?” to be of interest – Hint… Google is NOT my biggest traffic source .
- Include information about your blog in the signature of every email you send (including the URL).
- Use subscription systems on your blog. Plugins such as Comment Approved Notifier and Subscribe2 can help you accomplish this. More useful plugins can be found in the post “25 Most Beneficial Wordpress Plugins“.
- Enhance your update services. When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the site update services you configured. Here is a robust list of 145 Update Services for Blogs.
- Use your blog information and URL in forum signatures.
- Comment on other blogs. However, don’t comment just for the sake of obtaining a link, doing so is often very obvious, instead, provide valuable feedback, thoughts and ideas.
- eMail readers and thank them for visiting.
- Post new, quality content regularly. Doing so keeps readers interested and momentum going. Additionally, ensure you provide valuable links to external resources as well as those within your blog.
- Trust your readers. Often it is very annoying (and a bit of a turn off) to wait for comment approval every single time, when they participate (comment) on your blog. Instead, it may be better to “lift the embargo” for those who have provided valuable comments before. If a comment from those individuals is inappropriate, you can always edit or remove it later.
- Use lists on your blog. Lists are attractive as they are scannable, easy to use and link to; and easy to add to later.
I’ve been following a fair bit of the happenings in the blogsphere (and for me some of them are new). Of note is the changing landscape where word of mouth seems to be successful whereas viral marketing appears to be waning.
Most importantly, we’d like to know what some of the new strategies are, that you use or recommend. How do you approach them? What do you do or recommend? What’s your perspective in new blog promotion strategies? Comment below. Also, for a bit of link love, comments added to this post will have the no-follow tag removed as I move them into the post with your credit. So… don’t be shy.
December 27th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Hey BloggerSavvy,
Thanks for the mention, and thanks for the info. I use most of these, and I too get most of my traffic from social networking/media. Of course, my blog is only a couple of months old, so I assume my search engine traffic will eventually grow. I think I mentioned before that I use Wordpress.com, so I can’t utulize the plugins, but I’ve been told that a lot of them are basically built in to the wordpress.com system. I will be eager to hear what other people add to the conversation, as i’m always on the look out for new ways to market my business/blog.
December 28th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
@Scott Mahler – Why don’t you install your own version of Wordpress? That way you can get the plugins. They are not built in (as someone told me), that’s why they are plugins, you add the ones you want later (if you host your own site based on Wordpress). Hosting your own install may also provide you with the freedom to further customize the code. After all who do you want to promote and profit with more traffic, you or wordpress.com?
You might find Jim Connolly’s blog “Jim’s Marketing Blog where he advises against using wordpress.com (http://jimsmarketingblog.com/2.....-blogging/). Quoted from his blog:
“…You cannot link from as you wish
You cannot market advertise or promote your services on or even insert adwords
You cannot customize fully
You cannot advertise other people’s products or services on
You cannot add commercially useful plugins…”
Give the rest of his post (link above) a read to get the full story.
December 30th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
You will do better with focusing on the tried-and-true methods, particularly organic. Don’t get me wrong, nothing wrong with trying new things, but the most successful methods (to getting traffic) are those that have stood the test of time, and are most popular as a result.
Granted, tools like twitter, friendster, etc. are good. But more importantly is the need to actually grab attention. I mean that growing traffic is simply engaging your visitors, consider going beyond that! To do this effectively, you should make your blog something that helps people “discover” things! (You look like you are on the way to that).
People are wired to discover things, Digg, Flickr, Twitter and so on do this well (but lately the crap that is appearing on Digg’s front page…) and that is why they have been so successful – It’s fun to visit their sites and find new things. So in reality, if your blog is engaging the discovery of new ideas, associations, thoughts, etc. that’s what will build your traffic – That is the new way you should be looking for. Information is everywhere now, the trick is to enable the discovery of it in an engaging fashion.
I am an old timer who’s been watching your blog since you launched it (I don’t have a blog right now). If you want a bit more understanding of my (long) comment, please do email me.
January 3rd, 2009 at 3:08 pm
@Peter W. – Thanks for the great input! Are you planning on launching a new blog? I think you’re right about the “discovery” thing. It seems to make sense to me. I know that I use Digg, Twitter, etc. to find new resources, services, products, etc. as well as learn new things, so I’ll bet the majority of people are like that too.