16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

There are a lot of ways to attract people to visit your blog.  Patsi and I recently wrote an article outlining 16 ways to drive traffic to your blog.

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
© Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff

You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy.  Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering.  What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must 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 get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe:  family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.
Http://www.bloglet.com  We now recommend Feedblitz.com for setting up an email subscription on your blog.  Bloglet no longer exists. (updated 10/7/05)

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on BizTipsBlog) http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche.  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 time you publish.  http://www.pingomatic.com   We now recommend using pingoat.com for pinging more than 50 blog directories vs. ping-o-matic's 20 directories. (updated 10/7/05)

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: Submit Fire

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:  http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip:  Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you. (if you want to save 7 to 10 hours we can handle this for you for only $125 with our blog directory submission service)

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 every 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 means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.  To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site:  http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting 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 you quote or refer to other blog posts.  What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post.  The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories.  Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday.  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.  Of course, make sure what you have to say is relevant and valuable to your readers. Don't post for posting's sake.

Tip:  Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit.  You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

Note: Since this article was first written many, many more ways to drive traffic have come into play. Here's a more recent post about how we get more eyeballs on our blogs.

About the authors:  Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals.  You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.biztipsblog.com and http://www.writingontheweb.com

Comments

[Michael]

Thanks for the informative article! Could you elaborate on your #6 a bit further? It's unclear to me what you mean by creating a form to "track submissions." Submissions of your content to other web sites? And what is a VA?

[Denise Wakeman]

Thanks for the question, Michael. First, a VA is a Virtual Assistant, someone who does administrative work remotely vs. being in your office. Usually a lot less expensive as they are freelancers and you do not then have payroll taxes, etc.

Next, a form to track your submissions is just that. A way for you to keep track of each directory you've submitted your blog to. There are over 100 different directories and personally, I find that keeping a list means I don't duplicate my work. I also keep all my pertinent blog info on the tracking sheet so I don't have to constantly make it up or look it up. I simply copy and paste for each directory submission.

[letti]

what wonderful suggestions.. thanks.

[Joseph Santos-Lyons]

Thanks for these. I have had some trouble identifying the RSS for my typepad.com blog http://www.radicalhapa.tk/ and realize that ultimately I probably need to upgrade to the Pro package that gives me access to the HTML source doe. Lastly, in the bloglet.com service, is there a way to send an email invite to folks to subscribe? I can't put the subscribe box on my site (yet) without HTML access.

[Denise Wakeman]

Hi Joseph, thanks for your questions. To find your RSS feel URL on Typepad, right click on the link that says "Syndicate this site" on your blog. Select properties and there you will see the URL. So far, that's the only way I've found to discover the RSS URL on Typepad.

As for Bloglet, when you set up the subscribe form on Bloglet, you need to copy and paste the html into the notes section of a typelist you create for the form.

Both these items are covered in our Build A Better Blog System ebook which is being published soon.

Hope this helps, Denise

[John]

Thanks for the tips. Is there any way of having a site visitor meter without it actually showing on the site? Or am I missing something? Someone suggested to me that Blogger itself would tell you how many hits you've had, but I can't find this facility if, indeed, it exists.

[Denise Wakeman]

Thanks for the comments John. I'm not familiar with Blogger so I cannot help you there. With Site Meter, you can make the hit counter invisible if you pay a fee. With the free version, it's available for all to see.
Denise

[kohuether]

This is such a wonderful resource! I'm so glad I found this site and article. I'm new to blogging, and am looking for tips on how to drive more traffic to my site and get more ezine subscribers. Thanks to you, I have a lot of resources to learn with!

[DocStuey]

I am new to blogging and as such, was lucky to cross paths with savvy folks such as yourselves. I have a very important message to deliver, and thanks to information you've shared, getting exposure has been made infinately easier. Many Thanks, DocStuey.

[Connie]

Patsi and Denise,

This is the most awesome article!! Many, many thanks!!! This list of blog directories is enormous -- it's been printing for minutes! (It's 81 pages long. This was the best resource!)

I have a question -- I badly, badly, badly goofed!! Somehow, I didn't quite get how trackbacks are used...

So, I've got a bit of a dilemma on my hands. Whenever I've posted to other people's sites since launching June 7, I've been clicking on their permalinks. Is there any way I can go back and change the links so that the various sites will get contacted? Or is it too late?

Also, I'm afraid I don't understand. If, for instance, I link to your site using a trackback feature, how are you notified that I've done this?

Oh goodness, I'm embarrassed to tell you all the time I've wasted writing personally to people to let them know that I posted on my blog about them. Now what do I do?

Thanks so much for these great resources!
Your kindness and generosity will come back to you 10 fold, I believe. (Meaning good stuff's coming your way for being so nice!)

Gratefully,
Connie