If you’re like 99% of bloggers, the main adversary in your quest to conquer the blogging world would be a lack of traffic. Getting traffic to your blog has always been considered a “difficult” process - but, it’s only difficult if you’re lacking the proper advice. Below, I’ll describe easy and sure-fire approaches that will send all sorts of new and constant traffic to your blog.
The most important way to get traffic to your new blog, is to work the Social Marketing aspect. And while this is the most important, it’s also the most time consuming. The first thing you need to do, once you’ve got at least 5-10 postings on your blog, is to submit your blog to many of the Blog Directories out in the Web. In reality, there are hundreds upon hundreds of Blog Directories on the web, and while you could submit your blog to all of them if you really wanted to, let’s just start with 10 of the more popular ones, which are:
Once you’ve submitted your blog to those directories, they will categorize you, and your blog will “ping” their servers every time you’ve created/updated a posting on your blog, which is a fancy way of saying “you’ve informed them that you’ve updated your blog”, which in simple terms…This does great things for your blog in terms of search engine optimization.
Once you’ve added your blog to the directories, the next important thing you need to do is submit your postings to the major Social Media Networking sites, such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, and more. While it’s not required that you add every posting that you post, I do recommend it – or at least the majority of your postings. If you think somebody would be interested in reading a particular posting – submit it. It’s only going to help you in the end. Now, I bet you’re wondering how many Social Media Networks do I need to submit my article to? Well – that’s up to you, as a blogger. The more you submit to, the more traffic you’ll see and more exposure you’ll get, but, it can be time consuming. So, if you don’t have the time to submit it to all of the Social Media Networks, pick the best ones, such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Google Bookmarks. Here is a list of other Media Networks that you might be interested in:
Now those two methods mentioned above are sure fire ways to get more traffic to your blog, but do remember, fresh and new content is needed for those methods to work. It can be a tedious, and an annoying process at first, but the end result will be well worth all of your troubles.
The next main way to get traffic onto your blog is to properly use search engines to your benefit. When you are creating postings on your blog, you will see areas within your posting form (a posting form is the form or template that allows you to post your articles) that will allow you to enter “keywords” and “keyword phrases”. What you will do in this situation is add in any keyword that you feel relates to your article. So, when somebody goes to a search engine and types in “shoes” or “brown shoes”, make sure you’ve added those keywords and keyword phrases if your posting is about shoes. It is important to stay on topic though. Don’t add in keywords about foods, if your posting is about shoes.
One last important way to generate traffic to your blog is to create a sitemap. Now, if you use Wordpress, there are automatic ways to do this. You can download a plugin that will do it for you, and make your life very easy. If you’re using another blogging platform, what you’ll need to do is go to Google’s Webmaster Tools and create a sitemap. This will allow search engines to properly dissect all of your keywords, meta tags, posting titles, etc, and break them down for better search engine results.
Now that you’ve got all of the blog directories and article submissions out of the way, it’s simply a matter of keeping fresh content on your blog, and becoming a social blogger. And what is a social blogger you ask? Well, it’s exactly what it sounds like – getting out there and mingling with other bloggers. Make connections with them – cross promote links – feature their sites on your site, and vice versa. Add them to your BlogRoll (friends links) and have them do the same. You can never have too much promotion…and don’t be afraid either. Other bloggers are just as excited to work with you, as you are with them. Do whatever you can to make friends with them – leave comments, e-mail them, etc.
Follow these steps, and your blog will be featuring heavy traffic numbers in a very short time. At first, it will be a lot of hard work, but once you start seeing the results, you’ll see that it was worth the effort.
