Twelve Simple Ways to Generate More Blog Traffic
Imagine that you've taken the giant leap to start a blog to bring more brand awareness and exposure to your small business. You've taken all the necessary steps to build your blog platform and now comes the day when you make your very first blog post. You spend hours crafting a post that is educational, inspirational and positions you as an expert in your field. You are as proud of this post as if it truly were your flesh and blood. And, most of all you can't wait to share it with the world. So, you hit "publish" and wait for your readers to react to your nuggets of wisdom. However, the waiting is an endless ordeal. Why aren't you generating any comments? Why aren't people emailing you thrilled that you have shared your expertise with them? It's called "lack of traffic" and if there's no traffic to your blog, no one will ever see it. So, how can you begin enticing readers to visit your blog? Here are twelve quick ways to generate a flow of non-stop blog traffic:
1. Create Great Content Obviously, this goes without saying. But, your content needs to educate, entertain, inspire or provide a solution to your readers' problems. You want to try to accomplish at least one of these tasks with every blog post.
2. Keep Your Posts Short We are living in an age where short attention spans are the norm. Keep your posts under 500 words so that you don't lose your ADD readers.
3. Get Your Blog Indexed in Technorati This is the big daddy of all blog catalogs. Make sure that you go through the very simple process of submitting your blog RSS feed to Technorati.
4. Submit Your Blog Feed to Other Top Blog Catalogs Blog catalogs and RSS feed catalogs are where readers go to find blogs to read. You want to make sure that your blog is there. To make the process even easier, you can use a service such as SubmitINMe to manually post to the catalogs for you.
5. Entice Your Readers to Subscribe to Your Blog Give your readers a free goodie (such as a downloadable ebook, whitepaper, audio class, etc.) if they subscribe to your blog.
6. Let Your Social Networks Know About New Postsbr> Whenever you post to your blog, Tweet it out to your followers, update your LinkedIn status and let your Facebook friends and fans know about it. If it's a good post, they will pass it on to their community as well.
7. Get Involved in the Blog Community Blogging is a social activity. Read other blogs, comment on other blogs and refer to other blogs within your blog posts.
8. Comment Back When your readers make comments on your blog, make sure that you comment back to them. You want to encourage a natural back and forth dialogue between you and your readers.
9. Participate in a Blog Carnival A blog carnival is a blog event that it is dedicated to a particular top
ic and is published either weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of an article that contains links to other blog posts on that particular topic. Blog carnivals can be a wonderful way to produce awareness around your blog. Read the rules and regulations of the blog carnival and get involved.
10. Offér to Write a Blog Post for a High-Traffic Blog Research various blogs within your particular industry. Read the blogs, comment on the blogs and interact with the blogger. Once you've established a relationship, send them an email politely letting them know that you would be willing to be a guest blogger for them at any time in the future. Include a link to your blog so that they can check out the quality of your work.
11. Use Your Blog Posts in Your Ezine Instead of writing a brand new article for your weekly ezine, send out the first few paragraphs of one of your past blog posts. Then include a link for the reader to continue reading the post on your blog.
12. Include Your Blog URL in Your Email Signature Develop an email signature that you use whenever you send an email. Of course, your email signature should include a link to your blog. Once you implement these twelve strategies, you'll certainly notice a spike in traffic and begin generating comments and interaction from hundreds (even thousands) of readers in your particular industry.
By Jessica Swanson
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