10 Blog Traffic Tips to Boost the Reader Rate of Your Blog
Every blogger’s has a special day — the day they first launch a new blog. At the begining, unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog otherwise your blog will have only one very loyal reader, that is you. You may start to receive a few hits after you told your sister, friends, and best friend etc about your new blog, from time being, that’s about as far as you can go.
If you are a new blogger and want to improve the rate of your blog’s reader, following are the top 10 techniques you can use. These are the tips specifically for new bloggers — people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.
10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.
9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new.
You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important that you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction, you still need to keep the fresh content coming. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.
8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging, you should serious about what you call your blog. In order for others to easily spread the word about your blog, you need an easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (the offline world), so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass your URL on. Try and get a dot com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than the long ones.
7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles, your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.
Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name and title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.
6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry — it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.
This is a good technique because leave comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, and it also does something very important — it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you, and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.
5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers who are already following your work, you can simply pose a question in a blog post to encourage comments, and do remember to always respond to comments to keep the conversation going.
4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. It summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. Blog carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. It is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. The idea of a blog carnival is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week.
3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest, this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and it only takes five minutes to get your blog listed on the stie. Just go to blog top sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1–10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!
2. Submit your articles to ContentCrooner. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have — your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to ContentCrooner. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.
How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.
1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers, however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them, even you do everything and bring in readers, but they won’t stay long, or come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers to your blog.
About the Author
