10 Traffic Generating Tips for Your Blog

They say if you’ve got something to say then say it. But wait, you’ve got no one to share it with! Sucks to be you, huh? Well not anymore as we’ve collated 10 top tips to improve your traffic generation and get the appreciation you deserve. It wouldn’t be right to not mention that there’s a great post by Rand Fishkin of Seomoz that covers a host of strategies and ideas about increasing blog traffic, so please give that a read as well.

Seems rather simplistic, but it is basic human nature to return acts of perceived kindness. Imagine you have a blog and someone comments on it a few times and thanks you for your work, you’re probably going to check out their blog and add it to your aggregator, right? So instead of spending all your days furiously writing posts, spend some time appreciating other peoples work and they’ll appreciate yours. And who knows, it may even inspire your own work!

People don’t want to spend their time reading garbage, so try not to create it. It seems a little harsh, but the reality is that people only read two types of posts – entertaining ones and/or informative ones. No one wants to spend their precious time reading the driest post in the world... one simple solution is to have fun blogging; write about things that make you smile, laugh and cry with frustration. Convey your personality and emotions through a variety of blogs and you’ll never fail to provide valuable material that will naturally get picked up and gain more traffic.

Communities are the corner stone of civilisation, so why should it be any different online? Why don’t you find some like-minded communities that are relevant to your audience – that way you can network with all the right minds by either asking them to guest blog on your articles, promote your work or name drop you on other platforms. Stuck for ideas where to start? Check out sites like blogcatalog for some initial discovery.

Making your blog SEO friendly will mean it can be crawled, indexed and naturally found on the search engines with ease. To ensure you have an SEO friendly site please refer to Fishkin’s post as that has great beginner resources that you can work through.

If you’ve got it, make it work for you! Sure you looked cool when you boasted about having a Google+ account, but why don’t you actually use it for sometime more purposeful. Grab all your social media accounts and start pushing your posts through them to expand your horizons. Look out for sites like Digg and Buzzfeed as they can provide some serious traffic if the content is right! Our only word of caution is don’t post from spammy looking social profiles (incomplete info, no picture etc), or push one blog post through mediums that could have a lot of overlap in terms of followers i.e. twitter and Facebook (that’s a sure way to piss people off).

As you’ll have read from our other copywriting post, it’s really important to spend a considerable amount of time thinking about your headline. Try to write the most enticing title you can whilst also having the SEO consideration in the back of your mind, so it’s down to some creativity to bring out the killer title. As we previously mentioned, you have to have decent content otherwise a strong headline is useless!

Have you got a business card? What about an email account (please don’t say no)? Well then what are you waiting for – get your blog inserted on the back of business cards, email signatures and anything else that you think will get distributed. It’s an easy way to naturally promote your blog without thinking about it; however we do think answering the phone with the name of your blog is maybe a step too far!

Put down that magic 8 ball you got for Christmas! We’re simply talking about trying to keep up-to- date with the most recent events that could be big in your market as legal issues, product launches or market changes! With good SEO, content and a strong headline you could easily find yourself on the first page for some valuable search terms!

PPC can drive short term traffic with minimal cost (if done correctly). Firstly, think about what you want a visitor to do (spend x amount of time on the site or repost Y articles) and then set this up as a conversion goal. This way you can work to a rigid cost per conversion target and ensure you’re driving really relevant traffic to your site. What about free? Well, there are always hundreds of Adword coupons out there? If you can’t find any coupons, why not ask a PPC agency if you can have a few spare coupons and you’ll write a guest post for them – they may even give you some free PPC optimisation!

What’s the point in gaining all this traffic and never seeing them again? In theory your content should be so great visitors remember your site. But who are we kidding here; people can’t even remember the day of the week so help them out! Give them the opportunity to subscribe via an RSS feed (Feedburner) or email subscription so they remember you’re alive and kicking. 

So there it is, our top 10 tips for improving traffic to your site – what did you think? Do you have any additional tips and tricks to share with others? As we mentioned, check out Rand Fiskin’s 21 tips for generating traffic to your site for more ideas.