16 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Blog
By Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff, Sat Dec 10th
You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy,useful information that your niche market would benefit from andenjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments andyour traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do? Likeany website you own, you must do some blog promotion to startdriving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in noparticular order of importance, that you can start doing now toget traffic moving to your blog.
1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and inviteeveryone in your network to subscribe: family, friends,colleagues, clients, associates. Http://www.bloglet.com
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularlyspidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial onhttp://www.biztipsblog.com) http://www.my.yahoo.com
3. Read and comment on other that are in your targetniche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post."Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog. 4.Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every timeyou publish. http://www.pingomatic.com 5. Submit your blog totraditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com
6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensivelist of directories is on this site:http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ Tip: Create a form totrack your submissions; this can take several hours when youfirst start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire aVA to do it for you. 7. Add a link to your blog in your emailsignature file. 8. Put a link to your blog on every page of yourwebsite. 9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have alink to your blog in every issue. 10. Include a link to yourblog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such asautoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers,etc. 11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochuresand flyers. 12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that peoplecan subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, orsome may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. Itis a document type that lists updates of websites or blogsavailable for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feedsmay show headlines only or both headlines and summaries. Tolearn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site:http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm 13. Post oftento keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer youto others in their networks; include links to other blogs,articles and websites in your posts 14. Use Trackback links whenyou quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack?Essentially what this does is send a message from one server toanother server letting it know you have posted a reference totheir post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is nowincluded on their site. 15. Write articles to post around theweb in article directories. Include a link to your blog in theauthor info box (See example in our signature below). 16. Make acommitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increaseyour traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Putit on your calendar as a task every day at the same time. Tip:Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many uniquevisitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You canget a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com
About the author:Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff ofCustomized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to createblogging classes and marketing services for independentprofessionals. Read and subscribe to their at http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.comand http://www.bizbooknuggets.com
