Build Traffic to Your Blog: How to Generate and Increase Traffic?

This blog post is to simply guide my junior blogger friends who jumped into blogging out of enthusiasm but are now striving to keep their blog alive.

What is the secret to keep a blog alive? Traffic! Yep, that’s right. A blog without traffic and inactivity is like a graveyard. Building up a blog is like building a home. The whole blog cannot be made on a single day. You build it block by block, day by day, post by post. Many youngsters jump into blogging out of enthusiasm, write some blog posts, expect traffic to their blog automatically which never happens, the initial enthusiasm fails, and they leave it to die. If you build it and leave it, traffic won’t grow. You have to promote it. As you gradually build a blog over years along with some promotion, traffic too increases proportionately. So what are those promotion methods to build traffic to your blog?

Quality Content

This is the first and foremost aspect. Every other aspect described below to promote your blog gets relevance only when you have a strong content pool. Hence write in plain, simple English so that user level of any degree is able to read your post. If you are strong in writing quality content for human beings and not for search engines, you don’t have to worry about PageRank drop or fear about any Google Panda update. Your readers should be happy finding useful information when they leave your blog. Share your experiences, share your knowledge, share your views. Help your readers to clear a longstanding doubt or fulfill a longstanding need free of cost. That’s it. It will do the word-of-mouth propaganda for your blog, the best ever promotion in the world!

Search Engine Optimization

As I said above, your primary motive should be helping human beings. If you are on right track in that, you can easily tame the search engine bots with some search engine optimization and suck those people who search information on search engines for a solution to their problems; after all, search engines are here to not punish bloggers. Write an attractive title to reflect the essence of contents of the informative post you have written, along with a snapshot meta description. No need to repeatedly stuff in keywords. If your article is well received by the readers, search engines (read Google) get signal about the satisfaction through multiple sources like toolbars, click-throughs, page and ad impressions, browsers, and many other features provided to the web surfers by the search engines. That’s it, you are almost done on your attempt to drive traffic to your blog from search engines.

Social Networking Sites

Gone are the days of Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Del.icio.us. We networked with our childhood, school and college day friends on Facebook or even the new online friends on Twitter. These social networking sites are not only good for connecting with your friends but also are potential sources of traffic. There is nothing taboo in intriguing the crowd there to read your blog posts. dlvr.it helps retrieve the title and URL of an article and tweet it on to your account on Twitter as soon as you post an article on your blog. The Twitter App helps you feed your tweets on to your Facebook account.

Sites like ifttt.com and Hootsuite.com further help you to interconnect your social network accounts so that if you update one of your accounts, the message is spread across all your social network accounts. Take advantage of this and drive traffic from all of your accounts across all the networks you socialize.

Leave Comments On Other Blogs

You might have subscribed to your favorite blogs and might be reading it regularly on your RSS reader. If you take some pain to participate in the activities around a famous blog by probably leaving a first comment with your blog URL in the “website” slot, you can get a ton of traffic. Similarly take advantage of the blogs that have top commentators list on the sidebar or at the footer. By leaving comments on other blogs day by day, you are gradually building traffic to your blog step by step for over years to come.

Encourage Subscription

Once a surfer lands on your blog, offer subscription to your blog showing him the goodies of subscribing to your blog and the number of subscribers you already have. It can be a popup window or a thickbox with the subscription form containing either email or RSS subscription offer, though email is preferred because RSS is still catching up and many of the web surfers are still ignorant on what RSS is. By doing so, you are converting your current traffic into a list of loyal subscribers. By building a list of loyal subscribers, you are encouraging them to visit each time you make a post on your blog. Repeated blog traffic for free! Furthermore, by displaying a subscriber count running into a few thousands, you are also gaining the trust of every new visitor to your blog and encouraging them to become a silent follower of yours!

Guest Post On Other Blogs

You find an interesting blog with a very good subscriber count displayed on it. Now how to grab some of the subscribers of that blog? Just do a killer guest post on that blog with a byline containing link to your blog. Make sure your blog is already displaying killer contents before the crowd from that blog reaches your blog, because first impression is always the best impression. Small things like these do matter in blogging! Repeat this in multiple blogs and increase your blog traffic gradually.

Obtain Blogroll Links

Your friends or relatives may be blogging too. Find if they are maintaining a blogroll anywhere on the sidebar of their blog. If you have one such friend or relative who is having blogrolls on his blog, don’t shy away from requesting to add your link to his/her blogroll. Just a small request could generate traffic of substantial amount to your site!

Offer Freebies

Be generous. Give away any book or tool for free that you think would be useful to your readers. The news of a freebie available propagates at a fast pace by word of mouth like we had on this blog for our spell checker. Though many advised to make it as a paid service or to at least receive donations, I insisted to make it available for free because a satisfied user fetches ten more. Further, if a single user is gratified, you have that satisfaction of giving away, leave aside growing blog traffic. Trying to retain every user who downloaded your freebie reminding of the possible future versions could keep the traffic come back again and again! You gain more than what you give out, nobody would have told you about this secret of successful blogging!

Signature Line

Almost all the forums give you the option of inserting a link to your website in the profile page of your user ID. Never leave that slot empty. You might not have noticed how many of the forum members visit your profile page if you leave a contradictory thought. Similarly forums provide an opportunity to place a link at the bottom of each message that you leave. Never miss that opportunity to attract traffic to your blog from heavily crowded forums using this option.

Another avenue to get blog traffic would be your emails. You may be mailing your friends, relatives, and other contacts often. Place a link to your blog below the signature line to arouse curiosity among the recipients. Curiosity killed the cat!

Offline Promotion

All this time we have been talking about online promotion methods to improve traffic to your blog. How about promoting your blog offline? The probable places where you can display the URL of your blog include windshield of your car, business cards etc. May be you can spend a few bucks on promotional items like T-shirts, pens, stickers, travel bag, mouse pads, or even an ad insert in a daily! However, I won’t advocate such paid promotions to improve blog traffic for a beginner. Try to print the URL wherever possible without spending a buck with a killer slogan and/or logo and try to build a brand for your blog, thus gaining some traffic from offline promotion though the restriction for offline promotion is that the traffic would be mostly from local public only.

All these blog traffic tips should grow traffic to your blog gradually, step by step, day by day. Concentrate on all these traffic generation ideas except the second one, and you don’t have to worry about any search engine ditching you in your effort to increase blog traffic!