11 Steps to Explode Your Blog Traffic

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Blogging for a living can be hard work, and to be honest it gets very frustrating when we don’t obtain the traffic we need to keep the blog thriving. You see, simply working hard can’t always guarantee that you will receive the traffic you want, while on the other hand, not working at it is a sure fire way to never receive traffic at all. For us bloggers that work too hard at this game, here are 11 successful techniques to help you get all the traffic you need.

#1 Be outstanding. There is a good reason this is first in line. Being outstanding to begin with will ensure that everything else becomes easy, as it will make a lasting impression on your readers, and interest will increase.

Be remarkable by:

- Content is king. Inform your readers of every detail, give your viewers exactly what they want and speak to them in a way they almost understand. – The entertaining. Do whatever is needed to keep your readers glued to the page. Make them laugh and cry with you. – Connect with your readers. Speak to them as if you know them personally. Address their worries, concerns and well-being. – Controversy. Being infamous can also have its benefits, even ending in good publicity. Not everyone has to agree with your opinions for you to become well-known.

This may be seen as a “build it and they will come” attitude, which is usually advised against in internet marketing, which may be true in some respects. Of course, this doesn’t mean giving up manual traffic building, but the more “out there” or a controversial your blog is, the higher the chance is that your efforts become noticed.

# 2 The Power of RSS. It may be obvious to some, but there are thousands of blogs out there that haven’t even considered using an RSS feed. If you’re not sure what RSS means, it stands for really simple syndication – allowing users to subscribe to your blogs “feed”, which alerts them to every new post you make without them having to constantly visit the blog. Unless your viewer audience is overly tech savvy, and consider RSS to be yesterday’s news – I’d suggest giving the option to your readers that enables them to subscribe to your RSS feed, letting them view updates through their feed reader or e-mail accounts. Services are available to help the process like feedburner.com.

#3 Ping Your Blog. Be sure to choose the option to ping relevant services. Most blogging platforms or scripts will allow this easily via your control panel. Using a ping service will notify various search engines and other sites that you have updated your blog.

#4 Comment on Other Blogs: Comment on other blogs in related field to your own. The option of linking back to your own blog is usually available. Make sure you are respectful! I would pay the conditions set by the blog owner, be courteous by offering real information instead of a big advertisement for your own blog. Without this kind of diplomacy, your comments will probably be deleted by admin.

5. Add trackbacks: You can get an automatic link back to your own posts by using trackbacks. If you’ve written a post and provided a link to a post on another blog, a link to your own post will appear in the comments section on the other blog. If you are doing trackbacks between two WordPress blogs, simply linking to someone else’s post will automatically set up the trackback. As mentioned in point 4, be polite! A simple summary of somebody else’s post or other garbled nonsense just to get a back link is not following proper blogging etiquette.

6. Keep up-to-date with your e-mail list: Your list can be the foundation to the success of your blog. Keep your list updated with relevant posts and helpful information that they may enjoy. Those on your list will appreciate the contact.

7. Distribute more content: Don’t limit all of your content just to your blog. Distribute your content in other ways, like article marketing videos, podcasting, posting content on other people’s sites and blogs etc. Keep pumping that content out to drive more visitors to your pages.

#8 Affiliate links: If you have your own in-house affiliate program, and you have enabled the affiliates to link to any page, ask them to link to your blog posts. I personally use a system called QuickSale.com, which is a 1shoppingcart solution. This enables affiliates to link to any blog post they prefer.

Traffic from your affiliates are cookied, so any purchases made on the day or at a later date will be attributed to the affiliates, and commission will be sent. Conversions on blog posts aren’t going to be as good as the sales page, but it gives your affiliates the chance to provide great content to their readers, and benefit from any purchases made.

9. Social Networks: You can use various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) to drive traffic to a blog. People you connect with socially are likely to be interested in what you have to say on your blog. Make sure you follow proper etiquette and use your common sense. Also, don’t overdo it and get lost in your social networks all dayyou’ve got WORK and other important things to do. Plus, if you are remarkable, those who use social networks will be doing the work for you and talking about you.

#10 Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is different to social networks. Social bookmarking is a little like bookmarking your favorite websites in your browser, except the list will be published for everybody else to see, including the search engines. Some people bookmark their own sites, but do understand that the networks do not like this and may ban your account for “self promotion”, so be sure to read the rules. Another technique is to pay others or work in a cooperative scheme. But again, if you are remarkable enough, your site will be book marked thoroughly by the internet public.

11. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): I’ve chosen to put SEO at the end of the list, even though I know a lot of people would disagree. If you’re trying to find first-time visitors or people who are just browsing, SEO is fine, but if you want the faithful visitors who continuously return, try not to concentrate too much on optimization.

The trouble with trying to optimize every single page on your blog is the time it takes to do so, and the fact that you could be using that time for being remarkable. Remember that content should be readable rather than just written for the search engine’s, and keyword rich with the same phrase repeated throughout. If you’re savvy enough however, you could combine the two by optimizing your existing pages, but don’t make this a priority over your (remarkable) content.