Blogs have become a world-wide phenomenon that has, literally, been turned into an art form. With programs like Blogger and Wordpress, setting up your own blog is super easy, but getting traffic to it can be a little more difficult. However, there are a few things that you can do to get visitors to your blog.
Articles:
Since a blog revolves around content, it’s always a good idea to balance your more personal posts with informative articles. For example, if you have a personal blog focused on your weight lost journey, compose an article about the health benefits of living a healthier lifestyle, then post it on your blog and allow others to reprint it (with your resource box and link of course) to gain incoming links. Another bonus of articles is that they can work to bring you organic traffic and win you higher ratings in the search engines.
Fresh Content:
One of the most important things you can do to keep a steady flow of traffic going to your blog, is to update it on a regular basis. Ideally, it’s best if you update your blog at least 2 or 3 times a week, and even better if you can do it daily. There are a couple of advantages to this; one is that you will gain a following of readers who will continually return to your blog, and two is that you will be feeding the search engines, thus, maintaining your ranking.
Building Relationships:
Relationship building is a promotional method all its own, the simple reason being, is that by establishing yourself as an expert in the eyes of your readers, you will win their trust. The trust of your readers is a powerful tool, one that should not be taken advantage of. Your visitors go to you in search of answers to their questions, and they value your opinion and recommendations, which means that they are more likely to click your affiliate links and buy from you rather than the competition.
Blog Pinging:
This method can be used whenever you update your blog, and should become a part of your blogging routine. There are multiple ping directories. All you have to do is visit their website, type in the name of your blog and the URL, then hit ping. The purpose of pinging is that every time you do this, the directory will ping all of the blog directories in its listing to let them know that your blog has been updated.
Feed Burner:
By installing a simple, and free, piece of HTML code onto your blog, your readers can subscribe and have new blog posts emailed to them. This is a great notification system, and will let your readers know that they can go to your blog to read new entries.
Blog Roll:
This is a very easy option to use, and is already built into Wordpress. You simply add the URL’s you want, publish them to your site, and they will then show up under the heading “Blog Roll” on the side of your blog. The way to make this work for traffic is to treat it like a link exchange. Simply contact other blog owners and let them know that you have added their blog to your blog roll, and ask for a link in return.
Blog promotion can be done in the same way that you would advertise your website, and the free options are just as good, if not better, than paid. However, if you want to see results you will need to promote your blog on a regular basis, and understand that it will take time and effort to establish it.
