How to get Traffic for your Blog
There are a whole lot of different ways to get traffic to you blog, each of them requiring a different strategy in order to make them work. Additionally it depends on the nature of your blog and the visitors that you are seeking as to the which ways of getting traffic will work best for you.
Popular Ways of Driving Traffic
- Paid traffic
- SEO ( Free and Paid)
- Social Media
- Bookmarking
- Blogging Content
- Guest Blogging
- Forums
- Blog Carnivals
- eBooks
- Email Marketing
- Blog Comments
- YouTube
- Trackbacks
- Free Ads
- Directories
- Affiliate offers
Getting traffic to your blog is just a matter of creating links to your blog in places where suitable traffic congregates. For example, Google is nothing more than a list of links pointing to the sites that Google considers to be the most suitable for a particular search term. Google traffic resides mostly on the front page (the top 10) for each search term, with significant drop offs as soon as you move onto page two and three. If you want to harness that traffic you need to find ways to get your link onto the front page for search terms that will convert into customers for you.
Google Ranking Strategies
There are many ways that you can achieve this, using;
- SEO
- Paid Ads
- YouTube Videos
- Google Shopping
- Google Local
- Google News
- Google Blogs – Add your blog here
- Google Images
……as well as a few lesser known strategies including finding blogs that rank in the top ten and commenting on them, including a link back to your blog.
Another great strategy is to find sites that rank in the top ten that have Google Ads on them, you can then specify that you want your Ads to appear on that specific page. This is a way to target specific keywords for your Advertising campaign which will make your campaign very focused and financially efficient.
This ia a great method for gaining traffic from websites that already have the traffic that you want.
SEO Tips and Ideas
Expecting to rank in the top 10 of Google straight away for competitive search terms is a little over optimistic for a new or young blog. It is more realistic to target ‘longer tail’ search terms that are less competitive.
If you write 50 – 100 blog posts based around long tail search terms you will attract a steady volume of traffic from each post and collectively these posts will add up to drive a good number of new visitors to your blog.
It isn’t necessary to pay for SEO for your blog, as you can carry out everything you need to do yourself.
The first thing you should do is to you install SEO by Yoast on your WordPress blog so that you can easily amend the elements of your posts that will improve your page performance.
Yoast will let you easily check that each element of your blog posts are optimised as well as they can be.
If you want detailed instructions on how to install and use Yoast just follow the link above and all will be explained.
Once you have optimized your blog posts, you need to make them popular. This is the process of linking. We have a principle here at MPD that if you have one million links pointing to your site then you will have a never ending stream of traffic …… that’s why we called ourselves million pixel driver….. one million pixels linking to your blog will give you an incredibly authoritative blog that will wield a lot of power online.
Building those links is the part we will discuss next……
A link is just a clickable connection from a website through to yours. This might be an image, banner, logo, a text link or text advert.
Each link that you create will increase your exposure online and the better the locations of your links, the more traffic you will drive.
There are two fundamental types of traffic, targeted and non-targeted.
Non-Targeted traffic is the kind of traffic that you would get from say your Facebook page, where your links will be seen by members of the general public rather than people looking for your particular niche, products or services.
Targeted traffic is traffic that is actively looking for information related to your goods or services. So Google traffic is very targeted traffic, as would be traffic from a Facebook page dedicated to your niche topic.
Many people fail to understand the difference between quality and quantity traffic. It is far better to have 10 targeted people see your link and find your content than it is to have 100 random surfers visit your site.
The whole purpose of your blog is to convert visitors into paying customers so start off by attracting the right visitors in the first place.
Having established that you should be targeting people that are interested in your niche as visitors, the next step is to look at the various sources of that traffic, and then you can develop a plan to get your links in front of them.
If you have a budget available then there are many paid advertising options available to you over and above Google Adwords which is considered to be the default advertising platform these days. The downside to Google is that it is an expensive place to advertise, and there are many cheaper alternatives that will still position your Ads in front of targeted visitors, but for a lower cost.
Depending on the platform you choose, CPC (cost per click) charges can be as low as $0.01c each. We can advise you on the best platforms to use for your niche or product, so please CONTACT US to discuss your requirements.
In addition to basic paid advertising is ‘Re-targeting’ Ads. These are clever little Ads that follow previous visitors to your website as they visit other sites and display your banner to them…. reminding them that they should come back and make a purchase.
Many people don’t buy on their first visit, so you can either hope that they have bookmarked your site and will remember to come back, or you can help them to remember to find you!
Easy ways to get links to your blog
Let’s face it, we all want to find easy ways to do things, and linking can be a time consuming business if you let it.
Once you have added some content, you will be wanting people to find it, here is the best strategy for getting started.
- Write a new post
- Ping your post
- Share your Post on your Social Networks, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+
- Social Bookmark your post using Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc
- Find topic blog posts about a similar subject to your post by searching on Google, then leave comments on them including a link to your post. (Make comments good quality)
- Using the blogs you find above, (if both blogs are WordPress) link to their post from yours. This will automatically add a ‘Trackback’ link to their post (although they might need to approve it before it is live)
- Look for themed blogs that accept ‘Guest Posts‘ and write a new article to submit to them, including a link back of course.
At this point you may well be thinking that this all sounds like a lot of hard work, but if you split it up and carry out the actions in stages it is soon possible to get in a routine of writing, promoting, writing, promoting.
We will write a new post on a Monday, comment on 10 blogs on the Tuesday, as well as writing an submitting a couple of guest posts, then go back to writing a new post on the Wednesday.
As long as your blog is having posts added on a regular, consistent basis, then it will keep the attention of the blogosphere.
The promotion strategy above is a simple way to get started driving quality traffic to your site. As your blog develops you will make friends with fellow bloggers in your niche and work more in collaboration rather than as rivals.
If you start off by referring to other blog posts if they are high quality and useful then you will find that the process is reciprocated.
Related Posts
Guest Blogging
Free Facebook Traffic
Promote your Blog
Starting a Blog
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