Ways to Generate Traffic to your Blog

By editor3 on October 30th, 2009

Generate-traffic As you get into the blogging business, you would soon come to know of the importance of making people visit your blog. As a professional blogger that you want to become, you can not exist in a vacuum – you need to talk and for that, you need an audience willing to listen. Naturally, the first thing that you would have to invest is your effort and ability to produce content that works. That apart, the next big thing in your blogging journey has to be visitors. Of course, I am assuming that you plan to make it big in the blogosphere and you want to make at least a few bucks, to start off with, before you become rich blogging.

Blogging for the sake of it is not what I’m talking about. I have seen blogs that are utterly irregular in their posts and make no attempts at getting traffic to them. As a serious blogger, that is not an option for you. Generating traffic is the trickiest part of blogging – once you have mastered the art of doing that, you can work on monetising your blog, which is no big deal for a blogger who has generated traffic. Let’s consider some of the ways in which you can get traffic to your site.

Organic Traffic: This is the bread and butter of blogging. While the quantity and freshness of contents do matter a lot, what is more important is the amount of Keywords that you manage to pack your content with. If you want the search engines to feature your blog among search results, you need loads of content with keywords – this, in popular parlance, is called Search Engine Optimisation. If you rely primarily on SEO for your web traffic, you need to get yourself a crash course on SEO. You may visit my other site at SEOflicks.com for more insights into that. That said, you need to acknowledge that SEO is one of the authentic ways for getting traffic on to your site; people who get to your site over search results normally wouldn’t worry about the authenticity of information posted on your site – provided, of course, you get your site among the first 10 results, on the first page.

Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is a way where you share your favourite bookmarks with people whom you want to share with or the general public at large. This is similar to file sharing where entire files are shared; however, social bookmarking does not involve entire files being shared but only bookmarks that refer to the files are shared. These have descriptions about the contents in the shared files, called Metadata, so that users would be able to read through the description before they go ahead and read the contents. Social Bookmarking uses informal tags chosen by users and hence could even get those sites which the search engines do not pick up. You would have to submit your site to social bookmarking sites. You can check the list of top social bookmaking sites at Google here.

Twitter: Twitter is one social media site that has created a lot of ripples. If you are not on Twitter, I would suggest you get on to it. Being on Twitter could give your site a lot of leverage and visibility, if you follow the right strategy, persistently. The majority of people on Twitter are not there just for fun – they promote a product, a service or themselves as a marketable commodity.

The best way would be to start Tweeting about the topics that you put forth in your website. You may choose a trendy topic that would get readers’ attention, such as “Top Ten Social Bookmarking Sites”. Twitter features ‘Search’ facility these days and you do not have to worry much about the number of people who follow you, to begin with. As long as you can have your contents relevant to your blog’s theme and you can get the right topics to them, your Twitter strategy would most likely work for you – again, being consistent and doing it till it works, both are important for success through Twitter.

Be Active on Forums: As a Referral Traffic Generation method, the best way to be known is to be visible. Be active on forums, and be sensible. As much as you would like your online business to work, you wouldn’t want to play with your online reputation. Places where you can post questions or respond to queries would be good to start off with. Answer questions where you have your own unique expertise; be as simple and straight forward as possible in your responses. If you can consistently respond to questions using your knowledge and expertise, you can definitely hope to find people visiting your blog.

Making money blogging is not possible if you do not get traffic on board. Getting traffic on to your blog is a dynamic affair. You need to be at it and keep trying them out till you succeed.