Get Your Blog Noticed: 7 ways to Increase Traffic

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Tags: Blogging Tips, techniques, Increase Blog Traffic

This post is for fellow-bloggers! Have you been trying to get people to read your blog? Trying to increase your rankings? There are several methods of promoting blogs. You can do a search and find most of them. But here's an article I really thought was special: it's called How to get noticed in the blogosphere and I've excerpted the ten critical points below:

Small list of what you should do to get your blog noticed:-

1. Try to get fame for others, the more you give the more you get.
2. Search engine optimize well.
3. Comment on others blogs, create a conversation.
4. Provide RSS feeds for your blog.
5. Be an expert of your field and provide quality content.
6. Get yourself listed in major directories.
7. Pick up products and provide first hand user experience.
8. People do not talk about you if you are a part of the crowd. You need to be innovative and creative.
9. Get yourself noticed by the A-list Bloggers(I’ll soon tell you how)
10. Add a viral effect to your blog, be contagious.
11. Try Viral Marketing and Linkbaiting
12. Use Social Network Sites to your benefit, without depending on them.

And, what about those "A-List" Bloggers?

Some bloggers are under impression that linking A-Listers might get them in notice and a link back. A-List Bloggers get 100 people linking to them on daily basis, which makes it practically impossible for them to go through each and every post which is written about them.

Seomoz recently posted 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic, but I don't think some of the 21 apply. I've re-numbered, re-ordered and skimmed down the list to a cool seven!

1 - Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).

I personally believe "comments" are very important on any blog. Don't worry if you don't have any! Less than 2% of your daily readership will bother leaving a comment, unless you're like LaShawn Barber, where the comments page takes on the look and feel of a discussion forum! Don't worry about spam or nonsense comments either! If they're really bad you can always delete them! Make it as easy as possible for any reader to leave a comment at any time!

2 - Tag Your Content
Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. The tags should be right on your post, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon

3 - Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind: Readers & Search Engines
First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.

4 - Invite Guest Bloggers
This is something that has worked very well for me! I've had guest-posts from some very top-notch bloggers! Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowedging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.

5 - Go Beyond Text in Your Posts
Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occassional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bulllet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestable block of content.

6 - Pay Attention to Your Analytics
Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc).

7 - Only One Post in Twenty Can Be Linkbait
Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post. The following statement comes from one of the 21 that I deleted: "Nothing kills the potential linkbait "bump" faster than a blog whose content doesn't update for 48 hours after they've received a huge influx of visitors." I disagree. Most incoming traffic to a particular post will NOT bother coming back to your "base." In other words, if someone has googled in to joeblow.com/BritneySpearsEatsSpinach, you can bet they won't be putting plain old joeblow.com in the browser address bar any time soon!

If those 7 are just not enough for you, Seth Godin has posted no less than 56 ways to get traffic to your blog. If all else fails, go for it! Do the 56! But I think your chances of doing well in the blogosphere are much better with "the Seven."

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