Trying to figure out how to increase traffic to your blog, can be mind boggling.
You know you write great posts, but visitors are few, and far between.
You have created a professional looking homepage, but what good is it, if no one visits?
Today’s Lesson
On a regular basis, check your blog statistics.
First of all, are your traffic counts increasing?
Your visitor counts should increase from month to month, however, depending on your niche, you may see an occasional dip.
Secondly, is your traffic coming from search engines, referrals or direct?
Look for the section that includes terminology such as “Connect to site from” (AWStats), or “Traffic Sources Overview” (Google Analytics).
Determine how you can increase traffic coming from all sources.
Today’s Assignment
Listed below, are several ways to increase traffic to your blog:
Probably, the most important, is to post on a regular basis. Try and stick to a consistent schedule. You must get your blog continuously crawled by the search engines.
To increase search engine traffic, use keywords and/or keyword density. Learn more about other methods of SEO (search engine optimization)
To increase referral traffic, start commenting on other blogs. This can be a daunting task in the beginning, but after practice, you will feel more comfortable sharing your opinion with others.
To increase direct traffic, remind readers to subscribe via your RSS feed. If you don’t have a RSS feed on your blog, add one.
If you have found other ways to increase traffic to your blog? Please feel free to share which method(s) work for you.
Thanks for the tips Barbara. I am ashamed to say that I don’t even know if my RSS feed works. I never even had a feedreader myself until last week! It makes it so much easier and quicker to visit other blogs when they’ve been updated.
I really struggle with the keyword thing though. I used particular keywords throughout my posts in the early days and really struggled to make them sound natural. Is there some knack to this, or an easier way of doing it?
Hi Catherine,
Asako and I had a discussion about RSS feeds awhile ago…we were both subscribing to them, but our in boxes got so full, we couldn’t keep up. That is one disadvantage of subscribing, but other than that, they are a great way to stay current with your favorite blogs.
Keywords can be tough. If you use them too much, your writing gets distorted, but if you don’t use them to some degree, your posts may get buried in cyberspace. As much as we “write for our audience”, and not for search engines, in order for a blog to be “found”, it’s almost imperative that we resort to some degree of keyword usage.
Try reading my post titled: How-to-use-keywords-or-keyword-phrases, and see if that helps at all. It’s based on what I have gathered from my research.
I’m not a huge fan of keyword density (imho – writing for people is better than writing for a algorithmic benefit in search engines).
However, I do completely agree with you on blog commenting as a way to increase visitors.
I wrote a similar post a few days ago: http://www.brenthodgson.com/internet-marketing/increasing-blog-visitor-traffic.php
I’d be interested to get your thoughts if you wanted to come by for a look.
Brent
Brent Hodgson’s last blog post..Traffic as an SEO Factor
I have been getting better traffic since I signed up with a bunch of blog registries, but I am still struggling to get people to comment. Any thoughts on how to encourage participation from my readers?
I have great content, and I update daily. I’ve only been actively blogging for a month, and so far, I’ve had over 5,000 viewers. But they come, read, and leave! LOL!
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Hi The Big Black News Blog author,
The best way I’ve found to encourage participation is to get out there and comment on blogs in the same niche or on blogs where you connect with the author. Some will come by and join in, others may not, but it’s a start.
The growth of this blog was extremely slow. I just took it one day at a time, got out there, and built my community one comment at a time.
Hang in there! Happy Blogging!