21 Tips to Increase Blog Traffic
If you are stuck and don’t know what to do next to increase your blog traffic, this list of hand-picked resources is going to come at the perfect time for you! If you are on track and growing your blog traffic, there’s still going to be some things below you haven’t read or done.
I’ve left out some tips. There are many more. Please feel free to share your favorites with fellow FTR readers below!
1. Commenting: The importance of commenting and engaging on other blogs in your niche cannot be overstated.
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2. MyBlogLog: Join MyBlogLog and then join communities.
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3. Blog Catalog: Join Blog Catalog and participate in threads.
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4. SEO for Bloggers: This is for search engine optimization. Your main keyword should be early in your title and then repeated somewhere within your first paragraph. First sentence preferred. Shorter titles generally are better than long ones.
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5. Feedburner: Convert your feed to Feedburner and make sure to use their badges to build your RSS subscriber base. Feedburner will give you good stats if you upgrade to Pro and will expose some good info on where to put your feed next.
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6. RSS Feed Syndication: Put your RSS feed on all the social profiles you own that allow it. Examples: Facebook, Mashable, TwitterFeed.com, and many others will allow your feed so when you post, you update on multiple sites, not just yours.
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7. Video: Create and syndicate video. Make sure to use good descriptions and titles with your main keywords on all video submissions. Use a syndication service like Traffic Geyser or TubeMogul.
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8. Podcasting: This opens up entirely new channels for you. You get a new RSS feed to promote and you get to insert yourself into Podcast-only directories to find new, targeted listeners who will end up on your blog and subscribed to your main feed.
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9. Trackbacks: Essential in building backlinks and participating in conversations around you. Use TrackBoost to do this properly or you will become lazy and stop doing this important tactic regularly.
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10. Social News: Make sure remind your fans to submit you to the important social news sites like Digg, Propeller, Yahoo Buzz and specialty news sites targeted to your niche (e.g. Sphinn) Use ShareThis and buttons on your posts provided by each of the big social news sites.
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11. Communities: Find communities at Ning.com centered around your niche and make friends, fill outyour profiles carefully and completely, and interact on those sites regularly to pull people to you.
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12. Prize Contests: Massive traffic and subscriber potential here.
Tactics and Resources:
- Blog Boost: Perfect example of a value-packed contest.
- ProBlogger’s excellent guide for running blog contests.
13. Writing contest: Different than above.
Tactics and Resources:
- How to run a writing project contest (example)
14. Linkbait: Learn what it is and how to write it.
Tactics and Resources:
- How to Linkbait (example)
- Andy Hagan’s (STILL) Ultimate Guide to Linkbait
- Problogger Linkbaiting Series
- Search Engine Journal on Linkbaiting
15. Twitter – Microblogging: Twitter rocks. Find out why and then start using it.
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16. Remote Blogging: Remote blogs on communities and blogging services help.
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17. Ning: Set up your own community attached to your site and encourage your people to join. They will invite hundreds, even thousands of others immediately giving you a huge boost, if you promote it properly.
Tactics and Resources:
- Ning.com
- Social Marketing Central (example)
18. Networking: Ask questions directly to other bigger bloggers in your niche and try developing relationships with them to get powerful links and mentions on their sites.
Tactics and Resources:
- Why No One Links to Your Best Posts (And What to Do About It) | Hint: Writing great content isn’t the final answer!
19. Guest posts: Through your networking you should be able to offer some bigger bloggers a guest post proposition. Guest posting piggy backs on their success and readership and can drive huge amounts of regular traffic.
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20. Bookmarking: Yeah it still has purpose. Here are the latest tips on social bookmarking.
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- Authority Black Book (to find out what’s worth doing and what’s a waste of time)
21. Consistency: Blog WELL every day. I don’t care how hard it is. The most successful blogs ALL post every day and post really good content on most days. This is blogging. Get used to it.
Tactics and Resources:
- Use Utility Poster and Video Utility Poster to make the job easier.
- Tips for Blog Traffic – How to Increase Traffic Levels
Bonus:
22. Join Social Power Linking: This is where you keep up to date on the latest social / blog marketing tactics. It’s clean, powerful, to-the-point information on a level that other courses and communities cannot touch.
Inspiration: 21 Ways to Increase Blog Traffic, SEOMoz.com
Got a good tip? Add to this list by following the advice in #1 above and commenting below!
Original post by Jack Humphrey