16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do? Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog. 1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates. Http://www.bloglet.com 2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com) http://www.my.yahoo.com 3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog. 4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish. http://www.pingomatic.com 5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com 6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you. 7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file. 8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website. 9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue. 10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc. 11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers. 12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries. To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm 13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts 14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site. 15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below). 16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time. Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com

How To Make Your Blog Work For You

If your blog is business oriented, you must always consider SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Yes - the ugly three word phrase. But these tips are easy - no coding needed. No scratching your head over php or html. It's simply about choosing the theme layout that will help your SEO efforts. It's easy but almost no one knows about it or thinks about it. Do you know that Search Engines don't always read every word on your page? That's right - they don't. The header tags and the upper left hand corner of the page might be all that is checked. What if your sidebar is in the upper left hand corner? The content in your sidebar doesn't change frequently so the Search Engines will think there is nothing new and move on. One of the main advantages of a blog is that it is frequently updated so it is Search Engine friendly. What's a blogger to do? Simple - choose a two-column theme with the sidebar on the right! What are 'header tags'? Header tags are simply the title of the post. Behind the scenes, your theme encloses your title in header tags. That's what makes the font bigger and makes it look like a title. Why is the title important? Search engines also look at what's inside your header tags. Since each post creates a new page it's easy for the search engines to locate the header tags. So - think about the title of every post. Make it keyword rich for the search engines but make it grab your reader too. With a little thought and planning you can make your blog really work for you. Cathy Perkins is an author and WordPress guru who lives in the beautiful foothills of North Carolina. Please visit the WordPressGuru site and sign up for the WordPress Guru newsletter at http://www.wordpressguru.com