Writing valuable content for your blog is very important and is the most important factor worth considering when trying to get traffic to your blog, you don’t expect people to come to an empty website and you also don’t want them to come to your website and then leave with a bad feeling due to lack of quality content.
When talking about quality content, I am not talking about copying content from article sites and blogs, I am talking about a kind of unique content that reflects you, the writer, because things like this makes your readers more inclined to stay which means more visitors.
Another really important thing people tend to forget is design and according to this post, I will classify it as valuable content.
I don’t think there is any point in writing a blog post when it will not be presentable. If you wrote a blog post and your readers came just to see some ugly and roughly sized fonts, they would not be moved to visit your site the more unlike a site which has a perfect design.
2. Build a List: I always smile whenever I send a mail to my list, just to check my stats the next day and to discover that day was a great traffic day for me.
If you are getting 1000 visitors a day, and you are building a list, if you get 50 people on your list everyday, at the end of 3 months you will be having over 4500 people on your list and if you send a mail about your blog post to your list, you will eventually end up getting around 1500 additionally visitors to your 1000 daily visitors (if 30 percent visited) making it 2500 visitors for that day.
The result of a small list might not be impressive but when my list started getting bigger, I began to see more impact and sending a mail will have brought tens of additional visitors to my blog in hours.
In order to get more subscribers, it is very important you give people incentives to join, a very good example in my case is my free ebook (7 keys to build a better website).
It is also very important to manage your list effectively and not to go on bombarding them with mails everyday, I wouldn’t like receiving a mail from the same person everyday only to be telling me about his business.
It is also important to make your list personal, I try to get people’s first name only other than full name because you will easily respond to your first name than your full name for example, I will be more inclined to read a mail with “Hi Onibalusi” than one with “Hi Onibalusi Bamidele”.
Some people suggest you should only ask for emails because the simpler the process the more the mails, I will tell you that this is not true, it all depends on what you have to offer and having a 100 sized responsive list is far better than having a 1000 sized non responsive list.
3. Blog Commenting: Blog commenting is also a great way to get traffic to your blog, it is even more effective because you will have the opportunity to build your brand.
Blog commenting also helps you build relationship with other bloggers.
When making comments, it is very important to make well thought out and engaging comments because this helps the owner of the blog easily notice you and from there you can even get what is more than traffic. A great example of one of my readers who does this is Nabeel, I have noticed him the first day he commented on my blog because he makes well thought-out comments and she also engages with the blogger and other commenters.
4. Guest Posting: I write a lot of guest posts anytime I catch the fire, I have written as much as five guest post in one day (aside my own blog posts), and I must tell you the results are really amazing, I have written a guest post that sent me 2000 visitors in one day (Yes, in one day).
Guest posting effectively depends on how you want to do it, for example, I have written over 160 guest posts altogether this year, but the problem was that almost all my guest posts were submitted to small blogs.
If you are guest posting to build a great brand for yourself and make yourself known, writing so many guest posts and then submitting them to small blogs might be effective but If you want traffic and subscribers, I will advice targeting the big blogs only (You should note that it takes time to get approved).
Guest posting also helps you gain more respected ad loyal readers and it is very important to maintain a high quality post standard on your blog and with your guest posts. You might be thinking it is not going to be on your blog but I must assure you that the more quality a guest post is, the more readers it will get for you.
Many people try to write guest posts for non related blogs but I must tell you this is not that effective, writing guest posts for related blogs will yield far more results than for non related blogs.
There are many ways to write your guest posts, you might decide to have a marathon, maybe one in which you will write mass articles maybe throughout a month or casually in which you write when it pleases you.
5. Article Marketing: This is very similar to guest posting, just that guest posting is more effective if properly done.
A great way to get the best from your articles is by using keywords effectively in your articles.
It is also very important to use reputable article directories, using a directory like ezinearticles will give you faster and better results than just any directory.
It is also very important to use your seo anchor text when linking back to your blog.
6. SEO: Many of us know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it deals with getting the best from search engine traffic.
SEO is a very important way to get free traffic that should not be overlooked, it might look tough if you are in a competitive niche but it gives you one of the best type of traffic because the visitors you will gain are highly targeted and ready to take action.
SEO consists of on-page factors, off-page factors and linking structure.
I would not be able to write about seo in this post because it is an entire topic on its own and I have already written about it in earlier posts, so here is a link to read about it: wordpress seo
7. Linking to Other Bloggers: This is not sure but sometimes do work. If you are linking to other bloggers regularly, you will get on their radar very soon and they will also be linking to you which will in turn lead to more traffic and recognition for you.
What many bloggers do is that they write a link love post in which they link to as many bloggers as they wish, many of them link to ten different blog posts.
I hardly do this because I don’t even use blog commenting to get traffic, I also don’t use this method to get traffic and I prefer to only comment on great articles I enjoy and only link to blog posts I enjoy (I rarely do link love posts because there is too much to post rather than link to other blogs just to get attention).
8. Update Your Blog Regularly: This is another great way to get traffic to your blog, I call it “hacking the search engines“. You will see a lot of technology blogs telling you they got 100,000 visitors in one month. How are they getting it? It is because they are writing a lot of blog posts everyday, some of them write more than 5 posts in one day so it makes the search engines quickly trust and place some respect on them which eventually leads to more traffic, another advantage is that it helps you rank for many long tail keywords.
9. Video Marketing: This method is very effective but rarely used and I am also guilty of not using it due to poor internet connection in Nigeria.
There are people who use this method alone to get traffic to their blog and they get tens of thousand of visitors every month.
when using video marketing, it is very important to properly optimize your videos by using the appropriate tags and keywords, this makes it very easy for people to find your video through search engines and within the video site.
It is also very important to link back to your blog and also try to mention it a number of times in your video.
Some good places to start are: Youtube, MetaCafe and Vimeo
10. Forums: This is one of the methods I hate most and I must not pretend or lie that I use it, I rarely do so but it is very effective, it has sent some people thousands of visitors every month and be quite effective if used properly.
Forum marketing requires using your time to help others by posting useful replies and threads that helps solve their problems rather than come across as a spammer. I have been banned on over 100 forums when I just started in the online world (I was a forum spammer then). The first day I started my website, I got 151 visitors to my website from forums only.
The key to getting quality traffic from forums is by writing attractive titles.
Threads with attractive titles tend to work out well on forums.
A good place to start is the DigitalPoint Forums.
11. Attractive Headlines: Writing attractive headlines can help you get lots of traffic to your blog in a short period of time because people tend to tweet and share posts with attractive titles and will begin to tweet and share even without reading the post.
12. Top Lists: Top lists really works out well and are one of the most successful posts, a good example was when I wrote my list of the most influential 16 year old bloggers, the post got lot of retweets, traffic and even shares. I started getting traffic from facebook, email and even Google.
You can use the following formats:
“Top 10 ways to ….”
“….. 101″
“21 ways to….”
“1000 ways to….” (I will probably come up with something of this nature
).13. Be Creative: There are many ways to be creative and some of them involves coming up with great ideas.
You can decide to launch a product that helps solves a particular problem, you can also come up with a product that complements another great product.
Some great examples of people doing this are: Blogussion (complements thesis wordpress theme) and Tweetmeme (complements twitter).
14. Be a Criminal: Pls Note: I am not in support of this and I have never done it but it works, except you are out there to build a bad name for yourself then I would advice you NEVER to try it.
Another great way to get lots of traffic to your blog is by being a criminal, I mean by writing libelous articles on your blog, maybe writing articles like “…. country got burned” or any article that revolves around lie and violence that will easily catch people’s attention.
15. Blog About Big Brands: Another great way to get traffic to your blog is by blogging about big and established brands.
Being the first to write a particular type of article about Google or Apple will definitely get you a great deal of traffic.
You must be careful when doing this though, and don’t try to write libelous articles about a brand but you can write hot news about a brand which will eventually lead to more traffic.
16. Contests: This is about being wise and contests can really go great. A good example of a blog that made it big through contest is FamousBloggers.
Getting enough traffic from contests is all about being creative and wise, you should also come up with a great prize.
A good example of a great contest is when you tell the contestants to create a video explaining what your site is all about and then upload it to some social media sites. This will give you more traction but you must note that the more the prize the more the contestants.
17. Press Releases: Another great way to get traffic to your blog is by writing press releases.
This might be a very effective technique if done properly, you should also have a great story because the more great and unique your story is the more the chance of it making the news which can leave you with hundreds of thousands of visitors that day.
Here is a list of 25 free press release websites
18. Social Networking: There is a great difference between social networking and social bookmarking.
Social networking is a process by which you effectively make use of social networking sites such as twitter and facebook to get more traffic to your site.
Being social is more to others than to you so you should be ready to help and promote others people’s work. You should also note that the more the friends you have the more traffic you can get.
19. Social Bookmarking: You can also make effective use of social bookmarking sites like digg and stumbleupon to get more traffic to your blog.
Social bookmarking sites like this have made lots of nobody the talk of the town, if you have a good plan and your articles reach the front page of digg several times, it can eventually lead to lots of subscribers and loyal readers.
20. Blog Carnivals: This is another great way to get traffic especially to your new blog, it can also help you get a lot of links to your blog.
Blog carnivals are sites in which you submit your blog posts for other bloggers to see, if they like your post they will in turn write about it on their blogs which will lead to more traffic for you.
A great place to start is BlogCarnivals.Com
21. AdSwaps: This might only be applicable to those with a mailing list but it is very effective.
You can begin to do AdSwaps when you have a list of over 500 subscribers.
This works in the form that you contact another person with the same list size as you, you will send a mail to your list about his offer and he will also send a mail to his list about yours, the result is more subscribers.
This method is very effective in the sense that some people use it to add hundreds of subscribers to their list every single day.
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