How to get traffic to my blog?

[isler45]

I have just added a blog to my site which does not really get any traffic yet? Whats the best way to promote a blog?

[Eswar]

Do some bookmarking and directory submissions. Try Angela's backlink packets to build back link to your blog. Try to build backlinks as much as possible.

Eswar

[Colin Evans]

Post regularly with content targeting long tail keywords related to your topic then go find other blogs in the same niche and leave useful comments on their posts (make sure you enter your blog URL in the comment form).

Then do a search for all posts by Andyhenry as he often gives traffic tips...

[ken_p]

do a lot of back linking.. thats the best way to start!!

[TLTheLiberator]

Don't forget the ping all your blog posts at places like pingler.com.

And the more you blog the more traffic you'll generate.

TL

[isler45]

Thanks for the answers. How often should you ping your site? Is it a one time thing or whenever you make posts?

[CashTactics]

Do a lot of social bookmarking. That AND join forums that are in your niche. Become a resident expert by routinely answering peoples questions. This is how you build a loyal following. When people see that you are all over the place answering and helping people then they will naturally be more curious about you. Make sure your blog is in your signature. You'll be sure to get plenty of hits that way. I have roughly 100 warrior forum visitors a day. I try and post about 5 posts in each niche forum that I know of....each day...

[TLTheLiberator]

Originally Posted by isler45

Thanks for the answers. How often should you ping your site? Is it a one time thing or whenever you make posts?

Every time you make a new post you can ping the RSS feed of the new post.

If you blog heavily in the first month of the blog, (3-5 time per week ) you'll only have to blog once or twice a week thereafter and the traffic will still flow.

- Make sure every blog post is keyword optimized in the title and the body of the post also.

TL

[sbucciarel]

Get an account at Onlywire ... it's free or $24/yr or ad free version. Install the Onlywire plugin on your blog. Onlywire Autosubmit - A Wordpress Plugin | Lionstarrs Linux Blog

Then, create posts that people will really want to read ... not just review or promotional stuff. After you create the social bookmarking accounts in Onlywire, your blog will automatically bookmark each post to the sites you selected.

Takes an hour maybe to create an account at all the social bookmarking sites, if you don't already have an account, but it's time well spent and then it's all completely automatic. You'll get backlinks and traffic.

[sbucciarel]

duplicate ... ooops

[Mgwolf]

I wasn't sure if anyone answered his question I was curous too, what does pinging your site do?

[sbucciarel]

Originally Posted by Mgwolf

I wasn't sure if anyone answered his question I was curous too, what does pinging your site do?

From Wikipedia

In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated.[1] An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more "ping servers," which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.

Open ping servers, like VeriSign's Weblogs.com, let other web services subscribe to a list of blogs that have recently pinged them. Blog search engines can provide fresh results very quickly by polling only the newly-updated blogs. Similarly, aggregators use results from ping servers to tell subscribers which items on their subscription lists have fresh material.

In addition to open ping servers, there are also proprietary ping servers that gather information only for their own applications. Most of the major blog search engines operate such ping servers.

Unlike open ping servers, proprietary servers with their own subscription applications have no incentive to share their received ping data directly with other servers, which may offer competing services. As these servers do not share their data, bloggers have to ping a large number of individual servers to receive the desired publicity. As a result, bloggers have turned to services such as Ping-o-matic, which pings multiple proprietary ping servers.

[Steve Faber]

1)Plan what you want your blog to be about before you begin it. Nobody wants to hear about your latest trip to the mailbox, although judging by the insane growth of Twitter, you'd never know that.

2) Keyword optimize your blog title. That's very important.

3) Set up your permalinks so that they contain your post title and category. Don't have it just give the post number or other inane info. This will help you with SEO.

4) Keyword optimize your categories.

5) When you first start your blog, post often. In the beginning you should strive for at least once per day, but preferably twice.

6) Make your posts compelling, with useful information, or at least interesting to read.

7) Social bookmark them, and include social bookmarking submit chicklets in your post templates so the submit chickletts show up at the bottom of every post. Don't forget to use Tip'd if your blog is in the financial or business space. They'll let you submit your own content, unlike some of the other SB sites that frown upon you making that a regular occurrence. Only SB individual posts, not the blog home page.

8)Keyword optimize post titles and post content. I use word tracker and Google keyword tool for this, but there are many others as well.

9) Submit to directories such as Technotrati, Blogcatalog, BlogTopSites, and others.

10) Burn a feed. I use feedburner, but you can use whatever you want. Only have the first 8 or 10 sentences appear in your feed. That will keep it from being used so much by splogs that just scrape the feed for their content. It will also make sure that peoepl actually go to your blog, instead of just reading the post on their feed reader.

10) Make sure you're set up to ping all the directories. You can do it manually or have your blog do it for you automatically. If you use a ping service like pingomatic (its free) it will ping all the requisite places for you. That will let everyone know your blog has been updated and get it crawled.

11) Add your blog to your My Yahoo page. That will get it indexed by Yahoo in minutes or sometimes hours after you post.

12) Submit your posts to blog carnivals. This isn't as powerful a strategy as it once was, but you can get great exposure and back links form this in certain categories.

13)Write articles and have those link to your blog. You can even re-purpose some of your posts, with a little spinning of course, to use as articles. That will get you more traffic and back links.

If you follow those 13 steps, you will get traffic, unless you are really doing something wrong.

Hope this helps

[mlongley]

Make sure that you have a good ping list set up, submit your blog feed to feedburner. Make sure to use a wp seo plugin so you can clean up the urls meta tags and descriptions. Then start posting content... Make sure your content is interesting, especially your titles. Then when you post your content, make sure to bookmark and build links to each post. You will notice that you will get traffic from search engines and some other places. Another thing that you can do is to go into forums like this one but for your niche. There you can interact with people, and those that you connect with, you can invite to your blog. You can also meet people in your niche on twitter/facebook and then when you do an update about something, they will see that in their feed and visit your blog. I personally like this strategy, because it allows you to get to know people and build relationships.