By Alice Seba
Professional blogging is not as easy as it sounds. It can be a bit of a vicious circle as a blog cannot thrive without traffic, so we have to put forth a lot of effort in an attempt to obtain it - however simply working hard is no guarantee that you will receive traffic in the first place. To help with this matter, below are eleven tried and tested techniques that will ensure you get as much traffic that you need to your blog.
1. Make your blog remarkable: There is a good reason this is first in the queue, that is because being remarkable can make all the other concerns fall into line. Everything else on a blog could be missing, but with this at its core it could still be a success.
So how on earth do you make yourself remarkable?
Delight and indulge - Stimulate your readers minds, give them some brain food to get their minds working. Build rapport - understand your readers personalities, address their worries and concerns. Be outlandish - sometimes controversy can also bring good publicity, even if not everyone agrees with what you're saying. Enlighten your readers - Be honest with your readers and tell them exactly what they want to hear, in a way they would appreciate.
This may be seen as a "build it and they will come" attitude, which is usually advised against in internet marketing, which may be true in some respects. Of course, this doesn't mean giving up manual traffic building, but the more "out there" or a controversial your blog is, the higher the chance is that your efforts become noticed.
# 2 The Power of RSS. It may be obvious to some, but there are thousands of blogs out there that haven't even considered using an RSS feed. If you're not sure what RSS means, it stands for really simple syndication - allowing users to subscribe to your blogs "feed", which alerts them to every new post you make without them having to constantly visit the blog. Unless your viewer audience is overly tech savvy, and consider RSS to be yesterday's news - I'd suggest giving the option to your readers that enables them to subscribe to your RSS feed, letting them view updates through their feed reader or e-mail accounts. Services are available to help the process like feedburner.com.
#3 Ping Your Blog. Be sure to choose the option to ping relevant services. Most blogging platforms or scripts will allow this easily via your control panel. Using a ping service will notify various search engines and other sites that you have updated your blog.
4. Make Comments: Make useful comments on busy blogs related to your blog's subject. Usually, you can link back to your site when you make a comment on another blog. BE RESPECTFUL!: Only use the space provided for your linkdon't write ads or fancy signatures AND make sure your comment is relevant and useful to other readers.
5. Do Trackbacks: Many blogs allow you to make commentary about their posts on your own blog. When you link to their particular blog post, a link to your own blog post appears in the comments area on their blog. For trackbacks between WordPress blogs, all you need to do is link to a blog post and it's automatically set up. BE RESPECTFUL: If you're going to trackback, have something useful to say. Just summarizing and linking to someone's post does NOT add to the discussion.
6. Keep Your Email List Up-to-Date: You probably already know that your mailing list is a valuable asset. Use this asset to the fullest by sending them to your blog to read the posts you think they will find helpful, enjoy, etc.
7. Distribute Content: A great way to get people read more of your content is by getting content out there to more people. You can distribute articles, post videos, guest post on other blogsjust get some good stuff out there and lead people back to read your blog.
#8 Affiliate links: If you have your own in-house affiliate program, and you have enabled the affiliates to link to any page, ask them to link to your blog posts. I personally use a system called QuickSale.com, which is a 1shoppingcart solution. This enables affiliates to link to any blog post they prefer.
Traffic from your affiliates are cookied, so any purchases made on the day or at a later date will be attributed to the affiliates, and commission will be sent. Conversions on blog posts aren't going to be as good as the sales page, but it gives your affiliates the chance to provide great content to their readers, and benefit from any purchases made.
9. Social Networks: You can use various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) to drive traffic to a blog. People you connect with socially are likely to be interested in what you have to say on your blog. Make sure you follow proper etiquette and use your common sense. Also, don't overdo it and get lost in your social networks all dayyou've got WORK and other important things to do. Plus, if you are remarkable, those who use social networks will be doing the work for you and talking about you.
10. Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking includes sites like Digg, del.icio.us and Stumble Upon, where you can share links to a variety of content. Some people self-bookmark, but realize this could put your account in jeopardy, so read all the rules first. Others choose to work with others in helping each other bookmark. Being remarkable also encourages people to spread the word on your behalf.
11. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): I put this one last, where I know a lot of people tend to put it first. If your goal is repeat visitors who become faithful fans, put SEO on the backburner and SEO your other content pages where you are looking for first-time or drive-by visitors.
The reason why SEO Shouldn't be such a priority, is the fact that good content needs to come first. Spending hours optimizing each page on your blog may turn out to be a misuse of your time. Text that has been optimized for the search engines and certain key words tends to be less readable and repetitive. If you are skilled enough however, you could combine SEO with outstanding content, and get the best of both worlds. Just try not to create everything solely for the search engines.
About the Author:
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