7 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your blog

Blogs have become one of the most fascinating and popular platforms upon which individuals may sell their wares, offer advice or simply journal about their daily lives.

But what is the point of having a blog if no one is going to read it?

There are many reasons why you’d would want to increase the traffic to your blog . It could be for monetary reasons, to gain more public exposure or to show off your skills. Bloggers want to see their sites develop, evolve and grow.

So, how can you get more visitors to your blog?

Here are 7 easy ways to increase traffic to your blog.

1. Optimize Your Content

The initial structuring of a blog should evolve around designing it to attract maximum traffic. Pages on your blog can be optimized to attract readers and potential consumers. This can be done by organizing content by putting it into categories that will enable readers to find what they are looking for quickly and easily.

This includes sub-titles, bullet points and lists.

Search engines pick up on themes of related content, so include keywords and keyword phrases. If you work a little on your blog’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in this kind of way, you’re likely to get more search engine traffic.

2. Define Your Audience

The most important question a blogger can themselves is, Who is going to read my blog? Focus your content on what your blog is based on. Then carefully consider your target audience and address that audience directly. If you write what they want to read it’s quite likely that they’ll recommend your content to their peers.

You might already have a good idea of who reads your blog through a quick look at your followers on Twitter, for example. But to get a better insight you could sign up to Alexa.com or Quantcast.com to see in depth information such as the gender or browsing location of your blog’s visitors.

3. Ensure The Blog Works Properly

Regardless of how many readers hit on a blog, if the blog is not working, as it should, visitors will not stay, and in most cases, will not return. It can be frustrating and off putting for readers to visit your site and discover that the page refuses to load.

One way to find a reliable web host is via a free service offered by WhoIsHostingThis.com. Find a high performance web host that load your web pages fast and you’ll be on your way to impressing visitors by having a consistently visible site.

It’s worth keeping in mind that Google will penalize your website or blog in its search rankings or blog if it takes longer than two seconds to load.

4. Advertise! Advertise! Advertise!

It always helps to get the word out about your blog, and the best way to do that is to advertise. There are two main types of advertising; paid and free.

Free Advertising

There are ways to advertise your blog without paying to do so. For instance, word of mouth through social media. Obviously there are monetary benefits to doing this. If you don’t already have one, get a profile set up on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ – these are all free.

Getting involved in various groups that specialize in the topic that is being addressed on your blog is a great way to get free advertising. If you share other people’s posts through a few quick clicks on Twitter your own content may well be shared in turn.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising can be costly. There are 3 key types of paid digital advertising

Search engine advertising (such as Google Adwords)
Advertising on Social Media with Facebook ads
Banner advertising on other websites or blogs

Perhaps one of the easiest forms of paid advertising in the blogosphere is sponsoring or buying an advert placement on another blog. Seek adverts on sites that you see as having similar readers to your own – but ideally more traffic. That way, you’ll be specifically targeting potential readers for your own blog. They are more likely to click through to your blog, love it and follow you.

5. Submit the Blog to Search Engines

All of the major search engines have dedicated link sites that allow users to submit URLs to their engines. There are also directories that you can submit your site to. This can be done manually, or services can be hired to do the submissions for you. The results do not happen overnight.

Sometimes, it can take weeks for the blog to show up. But it is a good way to get the search engines to crawl it and pick it up in someoneís search results.

6. Use Tactics to Grab Your Readers Attention

When writing a blog entry, think of something that could be unique to your site and useful to your readers. Understandably, this can be tricky. But you could still write about something that other bloggers have already covered, but make your version exceptional and better than existing posts – perhaps take a different angle.

Develop a tone of writing particular to you and your blog. This will make your content memorable and personal. Also, make sure your posts are excellently researched to really impress your readers.

7. Keep Your Blog Fresh

Update your blog often.

Spend some quality time keeping your content fresh and interesting. Don’t let your design go stagnant either. It’ll need a re-vamp every now and then – an improved design can boost traffic. Create an inviting blog environment that is packed with eye-opening facts and information.

Think about the websites that you enjoy and model your own blogging formula after those.

Having a popular, successful blog takes patience, time and focus. It also takes hard work and determination. Some of it is luck too, but following easy pointers like these will help you on your way. Just be consistent and persistant – keep at it. Eventually, you will see the results that you want.

Guest author: Michelle Horton (Also sometimes called “Shell”)

Want to learn how to make your blog a success with social media marketing?

My book – “Blogging the Smart Way – How to Create and Market a Killer Blog with Social Media” – will show you how.

It is now available to download. I show you how to create and build a blog that rocks and grow tribes, fans and followers on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It also includes dozens of tips to create contagious content that begs to be shared and tempts people to link to your website and blog.

I also reveal the tactics I used to grow my Twitter followers to over 149,000.