10 Top Tips to Boosting Blog Traffic

I was going to post this on Friday and then realised that Friday is now Greek Myth Appreciation Month! (not a real appreciation month, just something I created) Wooo!



So the reason why you clicked the link to this post is to read "10 Top Tips to Boosting Blog Traffic" so I assume that you have a blog and if you do then leave your link in the comments below! If you don't I think that it's a must for all writers. (For more points on raising your writer profile click here -- 10 Top Tips to Raising Your Writer Profile)



These tips are in no particular order because you need to be doing ALL ten of these points.




1. Target an Audience!
This might seem pretty obvious but you need to know who your target audience is and you need to show this in the content. If your posts are all over the place with nothing in common with each other people will be less inclined to follow you. If you're a writer you might want to document your journey with an informative post about what you've learnt about the industry here and there. You NEED to aim it at a group of people, and you need to have something that interests them.




2. Use Your Social Ties!
Facebook and Twitter are used differently by different people, as a writer you might use them to document your word count and share with the rest of the world in hopes that they will encourage you to "keep up the good work" and a lot of people will. Another use is promotion! Promote your blog, sell your blog with your words and make people want to read THAT post you've just posted. (See above link on how to raise your writer profile)




3. Do Guest Posts!
Guest posts are a great way of getting to a new and broader audience, the audience of whoever blog that you're guest blogging for. You might want to exchange, so you provide them with a guest post and they will provide you with one.



A great website were you can meet new bloggers is http://myblogguest.com and there you can exchange blog posts and create new ties! Or you might just want to use Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.




4. Blog About Popular Topics!

By this, I mean that you should blog about the popular topics in your area. When Borders was closing down there were so many people blogging about it and trying to get their opinion out. It's also a great way of driving traffic to your blog. Another example would be when Amazon introduced KDP Select -- there were a lot of opinions on this, some good and some bad. I didn't get involved with this but I did read a lot of posts on the matter.



You need to be involved with the community, if you're not involved and you're just going about your own thing, then you'll never know about what's happening in the world. So stay informed and inform your readers.




5. Reference Your Own Posts!
You see what I did above, right at the top, I referenced two of my previous posts! There is also LinkWithin that is how I got those little thumbnails at the bottom of this post. (Scroll down and have a look, but don't forget to scroll back up and read the rest of the points.) It links to posts that are similar to the one you're posting.




6. Allow Email Subscriptions!


I think that all bloggers should have some tie with FeedBurner because it's one of the most useful sites on the internet that allows you to see how many people have clicked on your posts etc. and it's free! They also offer to email people every time a new blog posts goes up! My FeedBurner email subscription box is just below the Facebook page on the left.



Feedburner is easy to use. Just sign up and it will walk you through the rest. Have a play around with some of the widgets. It's fun.




7. Add Pictures!


I add pictures to my blog and a lot of people have said that the picture I have used originally attracted them to my blog. I get my images from Google and I don't ask for permission, which someone should slap my wrist for, but it is a lot of effort to go through and most of the time the picture has circulated the internet realm for so long that nobody knows who it belongs to.



There are picture hosting sites like Flikr that will allow you to embed photos to your blog post and that's so much easier to get a hold of the person who owns the photo. This also serves as a great way for them to get noticed. Also, with any picture you use, if you know who the artist/author/photographer is, you can always add a link to their profile within the image.




8. Use SEO!


SEO is an abreviation of 'Search Engine Optimization' and that is the process of improving the visibility of your blog in the search engines. These means that you need to use the titles of your blog and use key words! If you use titles that mean nothing then you're going to get nothing.




Another part of SEO is getting indexed by search engines and all that means is your page will come up in the list of searches. To be indexed you need to go to Google Webmaster and it will index your pages. It explains everything that it does. But have a play around with it and familiarise yourself.





9. Use Your Email!


Use an email signature! It might not drive much traffic to your blog but it will drive some. The more often you send emails the more people will click the links in your signature. An email signature is the end of an email. I have my blog, my Facebook page and my Twitter URLs all added to the end of my emails.



Some people who are advanced add images that are clickable, if you can do that I would advise it.




10. Interaction is Attraction!
Everyone loves comments. I follow a lot of blogs and you should follow a lot too! You should also read their posts and leave comments that interact with the post. Don't spam! If you spam then they might block you or unfollow you. When I do leave comments I also include my blog URL because I like to leave long comments that interact with the post etc. and that's what you should do as well!




Have any of these helped?

Do you have any that you'd like to add?


-Joseph




Comment. Follow. Share.