Here are 10 tips to help you get more traffic to your blog
If you want a successful blog that will make you money you need to follow tried and tested steps.
Don’t invite anyone to your blog until you have at least five information packed articles
You need a bank of solid tutorial style articles that teach your visitors how to do something. Your articles need to provide a solution to a problem, be at least 600 words long and be full of practical tips or advice. This article is a good example. It’s very practical and it’s shows you how to start your blog the right way if you want a growing number of readers.
There is always going to be someone starting a blog who needs to know how to start getting visitors. This article has long term appeal and offers good advice. The more how to articles you have on your blog, the better.
When you’re just starting your blog you need to post at least one article a day
Don’t worry, you won’t need to add a new post every day forever, you just need to make sure you do this when your blog is new. Not every post has to be 600+ words. Once you have your first 5 informational articles that solve a problem, you can post shorter article style posts or announcements or news snippets or links to valuable free reources.
You just need to keep on providing great information so that your readers have a good reason to subscribe and revisit your site. When people see that you update your content regularly, they’re more likely to add your site to their favourites or subscribe to your blog feed because they know you will have something new and worthwhile. If you want your blog to stand out from the crowd, you also need to add at least one longer article each week.
Once you’ve built a solid content base and proved that you’re in this for the long haul, you can slow down to 3 or 4 posts a week if posting every day is a struggle. You still need to add fresh content but your readers will be forgiving if you don’t post every day. The first few months are critical to your blog’s success so it’s important to aim for daily posting when you start out.
Use a keyword rich domain name
If you’re serious about making money from your blog, choose your domain name carefully. It helps if the domain name is easy to remember and spell. Aim to get a domain name that has your keywords in it and choose a .com. If you can’t find the right name with your keywords in it, just go for memorable and easy to spell, but do choose the .com version or you could end up losing visitors to another site.
Start leaving comments on other people’s blogs
Once you have at least 10 posts and more posts lined up, it’s time to introduce your blog. One way of getting an influx of readers is to comment on other people’s blogs. Choose blogs in a related niche because their readers are more likely to be interested in you articles.
To find relevant blogs just do a search in Google. Type in your keyword followed by blog and click through on the search results until you find blogs where you can comment.
Most blogs let you leave your name which is linked to your blog. If you make a useful comment that adds something of value to the post then people are more likely to click on your name and find their way to your blog. If you make leaving comments on blogs a part of your daily routine, and always have something valuable to say, then people are more likely to want to see what else you have to offer and click through to your blog.
Leave Trackbacks and link to other blogs in your blog posts
When you write a new article on your blog and refer to another blogger’s article in your post, you can leave a trackback to their entry. This leaves a short summary of your post on their blog entry. It’s a way of your blog telling another blog that you wrote an article that mentions them. Trackbacks are like comments.
A trackback leaves a link back to your blog. This serves two purposes. Readers can follow the link back to your site and it gets the attention of another blogger. Whenever I get a trackback, I always go to read the post to see what they’ve written about me. If I like the blog, I start to monitor what they’re doing. And I sometimes link to them if they have something relevant for my readers. Trackbacks are yet another way of getting more readers.
Actively encourage comments on your blog
One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.
Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival
A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host so the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.
To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.
Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com.
To be honest, this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit your blog. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so that you can rank, then you just sit back and watch the traffic come in.
You will probably only get 1-10 readers a day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. Every little helps!
Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com
This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you simply leverage existing content – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.
You benefit through your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box, which is like a signature file, where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website or blog. Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.
Write more pillar articles
Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers, however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them, even if you do everything above, you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back.
Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.
I hope you enjoyed this list of traffic tips. They are techniques that I’m putting into place myself for my blogs, they are working for me. However it’s not a comprehensive list, there are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience, and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.
This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.
I have been working through Blog Mastermind with Yaro Starak since December. He is a great guy with a big following and a successful blog and he is good at teaching people how to make money with their blog.
He uses video and audio to demonstrate how to create a niche blog that will make you money. I’ve been impressed with his step-by-step instructions and helpful forum.
Yaro is about to re-open his Blog Mastermind programme, so if you’ve been waiting, you’ll be pleased to know that you can join us.
I’m already doing a lot of what Yaro teaches and I’m making money from my blog. Are you?
If you haven’t already done it, I highly recommend that you download Yaro’s, Blog Profits Blueprint. It’s a very good guide and it’s free.
You can read more about the program here:
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