How To Increase Traffic To Your Blog

Traffic is one of the most important parameters for your blog; the more people who find your blog, the people who will read your ideas. If you're ready and willing to have your blog admired in the online community, then try a few different methods of increasing blog traffic. You'll create better content in the end, and probably have dozens of new viewers each day.

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.

Search engines are a massive opportunity for traffic, yet many bloggers ignore this channel for a variety of reasons that usually have more to do with fear and misunderstanding than true problems. As I've written before, " SEO, when done right, should never interfere with great writing."

3. Use Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to Share Your Posts & Find New Connections

Twitter has 271 million active users every month. Facebook has over 1 billion active users. Google+ has over 300 million. LinkedIn is over 300 million. Together, these networks are attracting vast amounts of time and interest from Internet users around the world, and those that participate on these services fit into the "content distributors" description above, meaning they're likely to help spread the word about your blog.

4. Optimize Your Blog to be SEO Friendly

Search Engine Optimization is a must do thing and should be at the top of your priority as a blogger. Study what your competitors are doing to rank well on Search Engines, find out where they have their backlinks, implement their strategies and one thing more, out do what they’ve done and you would rank higher that they do. Search Engines generate a lot of free traffic once you can optimize your blog content.

5. 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.