You have set up your blog and have started posting concise and useful information that your niche market would benefit and enjoy. Days go by, you keep posting, but no one comments and your traffic stats barely register. What do you do for a living?
Just like any website you own, you need to do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to drive traffic to your blog.
1. Set up an email subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so that Yahoo’s search engine regularly crawls your site.
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post”. Write smart and useful comments with a link to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you post.
5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines.
6. Submit your blog to blog directories.
Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start, so schedule an hour a day to send or hire a VA to do it for you.
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.
9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in each issue.
10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence, such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures, and flyers.
12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, or some may take it to mean Really Simple Syndication. It is a type of document that lists website or blog updates available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) can be read using aggregators (newsreaders). RSS feeds can show just headlines or both headlines and summaries.
13. Post frequently to keep enticing your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts
14. Use Trackback links when quoting or referencing other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting them know that you have posted a reference to your post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on your site.
15. Write articles to publish on the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (see example in our signature below).
16. Commit to blogging every day. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.
Tip: Use a hit counter to keep track of your visitor statistics: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average visit duration.