20 Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic
Thanks JohnCow for this well explained article! Have you recently created a blog, or are you perhaps considering it? The first thing that you need to realize before you begin is that you won’t be able to drive traffic to your blog overnight. Instead, the process of attracting readership is a little drawn out and involves several different factors, including how you blog and what you’re blogging about. Where your blog is hosted and how well you optimize the website for search engine results. Here’s a list of quick tips that can help you increase the traffic that your blog needs. This list is by no means exhaustive, and there are many other steps to try in addition to what you see here. Consider this a mere jumping off point.
1. When writing blog entries, use lists whenever possible. Lists are a great way to break up the content and they are much easier for readers to process.
2. When you are writing blog entries, try to stick to information that needs to be read right away and stay on topic as much as possible.
3. When writing blog entries, strive to become an expert in your pasture so that all of the information that you post is relevant, news worthy and worth reading.
4. Try to break the news whenever possible!
5. Try to be timeless. Don’t write posts that will become outdated eventually. Instead, try to write entries which will still be worth reading years from now.
6. Share your expertise with other people in the same field as you, so that readers will come to recognize you as an expert and to depend on you for the right information.
7. Write posts that are long and definitive.
8. Try to post eye candy, like polls, meters, pictures and other media which attracts views.
9. Reply to comments and e-mails so that your readers know you are listening, paying attention and that you care about their feedback.
10. Encourage all of your readers to subscribe to an RSS feed so that they may stay up to date with your blog.
11. Allow comments, because they will help your blog become a virtual water cooler that will be fed with lengthy and sometimes controversial conversations by many readers. Participate in these conversations and appreciate the increase in readership that follows.
12. Point to useful resources. The more little-known they are, the more helpful it will be to recommend them.
13. Write about the things that readers want to know about, like gadgets, Google and Web 2.0. Make your blog personal, but not too personal. Make sure that readers want to know about your bad hair day before you post about it.
14. Write about blogging, so that readers will be inspired to create their own blogs. If you inspire them, they will more than likely link back to you. Their readers will quickly become your readers. (moo-haha)
15. Post on weekdays more than weekends, because you will attract more readers this way. If you can, post every single day because the more you post, the more people you will attract to your blog.
16. Write about many different topics while still remaining at least somewhat relevant to your industry. The more you talk about, the less likely your readers are to become bored with your blog.
17. Be patient, because attracting new readership is not something which can happen in a single day. Include yourself in the network as much as you can be talking about and linking to other blogs, articles, web sites and content, then wait patiently for them to do the same for you.
18. Write in proper English. Nobody wants to read a blog with spelling or grammar errors, so edit yourself ruthlessly until the quality of your blog is up to par with the industry experts.
19. Don’t be boring. Ranting endlessly about a topic is only effective if people want to read about it. Make sure that you are blogging in an interesting way.
20. Above all else, write about topics that people actually want to read. Better yet, write about topics that people will be interested in sharing. One of the biggest features of the blog community is that a good post will be passed on, talked about and even blogged about. So blog about interesting things that are worth talking about.
