10 Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Blog.

If I had been given a pound for every time someone has asked me to how to drive more traffic to their blog, I would be a very rich man. I’ve been working with a few of my friends blogs for the last couple of months, optimizing pages and trying to drive a few more visitors their way, with highly successful results. For both of their blogs I used exactly the same method – a ten point strategy which has seen their blog traffic go up from 100 to a 1000 hits a day!
Below is the top 10 list – Try to implement this strategy to your blog and watch your traffic explode!

1. You’re a human being – so be one!

Have charisma! This is one of the characteristics that I think a lot of bloggers seem to forget. Try to speak to your readers as it if it was a one on one conversation – if this works offline, it’s bound to work online, right? Try to keep this in the forefront of your mind when you’re posting, blogger’s will notice this and it will feel like a more personal interaction. Try to be humorous if you can, but always remember not to cross the line because it could lose you valuable fans.

2. Host your blog on your own domain.

Hosting a blog on your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. Even though search engines won’t punish you for hosting on prime sites like blogspot or wordpress, they won’t set you apart from other millions that do. A well written blog on your own domain name can attract good search rankings, links and a whole lot more publicity. This also gives your blog it’s very own individuality and brand name that will be more memorable for readers and prospective readers alike.

3. Write descriptive titles to your posts.

Sound obvious doesn’t it? But what most bloggers seem to forget is that their writing post titles to two audiences and not one. First being your readers or for people who have a subscription to your feed and second being the search engines. Remember you want the search engines to send you more traffic, so being as descriptive as possible, keeping the titles punchy and on-topic should bode well for both. A good way to test out your title tag is to write your post and title first, then head over to overture and run a search on different variations of your title.

4. Ping your posts.

Every time you write a post you want people to know that you’ve updated your site. The best way to do this is to ping your feed. There are tons of sites on the web that allow you let people know you’ve updated, a good place to start is Technorati. Head over to the site, enter your url and hit ping, it couldn’t be easier. This puts your feed in front of the eyes of thousands of readers, if you do this on every single post you write, the exposure and publicity you receive will amount in a great deal of fresh traffic and new subscribers. I personally ping my blogs from BlogFlux, they ping your feed to 20 of the top feed directories in minutes, for FREE!

5. Participate in your niche’s community

If you search google for your niche’s category you’ll no doubt be able to find active forums, blogs and online communities. Participating in these can be a great way to generate traffic to your blog. A good way of doing this is by performing a search in your chosen search engine and sort results by link popularity. Leave related posts and comments with a backlink to your blog and this will drive a considerable amount of targeted visitors and increase link popularity to your site at the same time.

6. Intelligent linking.

When writing posts it’s useful to link to other online sources. The key is to be intelligent when doing so. You don’t have to link to every site that you mention, if you feel that it’s relevant and readers need to be informed then place a link. For instance if you were to write an article about an unheard of website then place a link, however, if you’re post is about a site like for instance I wouldn’t bother, as people are fully aware of the company and know how to get there by a click of a button. There is also an etiquette that needs to be adhered to at all times. If you’re talking about a post on another blog make sure to give them a link back to the original source. This will also favour you if you are ever to propose any partnership activity in the future.

7. Cover hot topics.

No matter what your niche there are always hot topics and questions that need to be answered. A great way of finding new topics is to search Yahoo answers for questions related to a particular niche. Obviously there will be a lot of questions that have been answered already; the key is to find the questions that have little or no answers at all. Once you’ve chosen your topic to cover try and take a different spin on it than other bloggers, this way you’ll be projecting your personal opinion and keeping readers interested at the same time. Try to spend plenty of time researching your topic and when you write your post you will have the perfect page that attracts new visitors, subscribers and quality links from other content rich websites.

8. Invite guest bloggers

A great way to grow the value of your blog is to invite guest bloggers to write posts on your niche. Obviously don’t invite any Tom, Dick or Harry off the web but focus on well known personalities who have a knowledgeable area of expertise on your current topic. When inviting guest to write on your blog make sure they agree to have their work proofread by you before they go active on the site.

9. Integrate Google Analytics

Integrating Google Analytics to your blog could be quite possibly one of the best moves you could make. A large majority of bloggers make the common mistake of thinking that Google Analytics is simply for checking your websites hits. This is true to some extent, but a good way of getting the most out of Googles index tool is by checking which posts are getting the most hits and interest from your visitors and also which search engines they are being directed from. You can take this information on and use it by improving your strategies when writing your next post. Feedburner’s statistics tool is also a great way of judging your readers interests and RSS post popularity.

10. Add pictures to your posts

Put yourself in the readers’ shoes. If you turned up at a blog that contained nothing but line after line of text you’d most likely get bored of reading and move on to the next blog. Not only would the posts get very boring and tedious staring at a page of blank text, post after post can get very confusing and difficult to read. Try and insert relative images to your posts, videos and other interactive elements to keep your readers interested.