Nowadays it seems that everyone is having a blog, but many have no idea how to drive traffic to blog. I hope today’s discussion can shed some light to bloggers who are struggling to drive traffic to their blogs.
From time to time, I get people asking me if they should advertise their blog to get traffic. My advice is always ‘No’. If you have a new blog, remember, advertising it is not the way to get traffic. There are some exceptional cases of course. But in most cases, advertising is not a good traffic source for blogs. (Blog plays a different role in advertising. I may discuss this next time.)
Have you heard of gurus saying that blogging is a way to get traffic?
Yet bloggers are scratching their heads wondering how to drive traffic to blog.
Shouldn’t blogging generate traffic? If so, why do you need to drive traffic to your blog? Shouldn’t you just keep blogging and your blog should generate traffic on its own?
Well, you know things are not that simple.
A new blog is capable of generating traffic on its own ONLY IF it’s optimized for search engine. Else, you’ll have to think of ways to drive traffic to the blog and that can be tedious and even frustrating to some.
In my opinion, if you were to start a blog, it must be optimized for search engine. That’s the laziest way to drive traffic to your blog.
How do you build a search engine optimized blog?
There are just two things you need to do.
1) Write search engine optimized posts
Most bloggers simply blog whatever they like to say. You can do that if you are Paris Hilton. If not, you’re not likely to attract people to read what you’re writing.
A ‘purpose-driven’ blogger will do careful keyword research and optimize his article for search engines before posting it to his blog. Almost every blog post is his arrow that aims to shoot down the top position in the search results.
2) Build backlinks
The objective of a blogger should be to turn his blog into an authority site.
My definition of an authority site is one with a high PageRank. To get a high PageRank, you have to get many backlinks to your blog.
The game of search engine optimization is unfair. Authority sites receive more attention and better rankings from the search engines. You can write very good content but if your blog has no backlink, you’re not likely to get much attention.
Link building is boring and tedious. And you won’t see the return immediately. But it is necessary.
Did I say ‘necessary’?
Besides the normal ways of getting backlinks, such as submitting articles, press release, forum marketing etc, there is an innovative way that you should explore if you are serious.
It’s to create a free online application that people are interested to link to. If you don’t know how to create one, you can always get a freelancer to do it. But you need to come out with the idea.
For example, in the blog industry, many bloggers create free WordPress plugins. Useful plugins get lots of recommendations from other bloggers and thus backlinks.
Final comments
Building a blog that can drive traffic on autopilot takes time and effort. In the meantime, you should look for other ways to drive traffic to your blog. The way I recommend is to build a list. You can easily build a list through advertising and offering something for free. Then you can send this list to read your blog.
This is the beginning stage, when you have to actively drive traffic to your blog. If you keep following the two steps above, your blog will eventually get traffic from the search engine automatically. This is when your blog can become your faithful and passive traffic generator. This process can take 3 to 6 months, depending on how hard you work.
And don’t forget to Ping your blog too, this is another little thing that can bring in some extra traffic, with little effort. Great post today Kenneth!
Hi Kenneth,
Yep.., That is good article for me, I really want to increase my traffic more than 100 a day, and my page rank site too.
Thanks,
Widi
Hi Kenneth
Great article. I have had great success building traffic to my blog just by leaving good relevant comments on other peoples blogs. It is best to choose a high traffic blog, well kinda like this one.
Right now there is a very good traffic building interview on my blog with Michael Cheney as well as a free traffic Ebook by Cheney.
These could be additional help for your readers
Thanks Kenneth
Thomas Northrop
Thanks Ken.I am trying to increase traffic to my credit repair blog so all advice is most welcome.
Brian Jones
Hi Ken
Sorry I forgot to ask how urls are treated in the posts as they do not appear in the comments.
Brian Jones
Interesting post
And really important the traffic question.
I think at the end of the day it is about stamina and quality. Buiding backlinks is rather tedious [one could always outsource] but backlinks seem to be the highway that brings the traffic
Thanks Ken for the summary. I’ve been successful search engine optimising my husband’s site http://www.coloroflincoln.com for 3 keywords but I find it very hard to optimise broader sites and categories which have a great deal of competition. Conversion is another story. I am hoping the economy picks up so conversion rate will also increase
Apart from the above you can find a lot of useful tips from ebooks by JOhn Chow and Others. Most important thing is to encourage others to comment or employ professional bloggers initially. Once the traffic begins to come in, then it grows itself.
Thanks Ken I am very new to blogging and I will use this information. http://workfromhomewithrealonlinejobs.blogspot.com/
Hi Ken,
I agree, keywords are crucial to driving traffic to your blogs. SEO may be more important to a blog, than a website. I think even the keywords in your URL are very important.
Keep the good info coming our way!
Regards,
James
Yes, URL are important too. It’s part of SEO.
Great Advice Kenneth! There are some free and shareware tools also available to help find the nofollow and high page rank sites as well, like comment hut.
Hi Kenneth,
GREAT JOB! Very well explained. I would love to know more about blogging. By the way: what do you think about “Automated Blogs” which are updated daily, you know this staff!?!
Thank you.
I’m not familiar. If you auto update your blog with unique and high quality content, I think it’s fine. If you are adding crap to your blog everyday, I don’t think it’s the way to go.
Thanks Kenneth for your input,
I personally like using a wordpress blog, there are a number of plug-ins to help you with this. Don’t overlook social book marking. It takes a little time to do but well worth the effort.
Well said Kenneth. Simple yet effective training and tips. We love them. But hey members – Now it’s our responsibility to take action. To use blogging to promote our businesses and brands globally using the power of Blogs. I have personally referred over 200 members to LeadsLeap. I urge you to promote LeadsLeap because it’s such a useful advertising tool + learning place :)
hi..
firstly thanks kenneth for your info..i’m newbie,now i start trading with forex..i hope somebody can help me..just give me your opinion please check this website [URL]http://hotforexreviews.com[/URL]..sorry kenneth tq
Kenneth gave very good views on how to drive traffic to blog. But to me, it depends on the blogger. If you aim to make money from blog whether direct or indirect, it is a MUST to bloggers to learn on how to increase traffic to your blog. As a beginner,FIRST, the basic principle is to enrich your blog contents. You must regularly update your blog whether by introducing new tittles or update the present blog. We must understand people come to your blog for something to read. SECOND, active in blogging by visiting, give comments and write your blog URL on the blog you visit. This is in line with Kenneth suggestion to create back links. THIRD, you must put relevant keywords in each blog you write(in blogspot they call ‘labels’ at the bottom of the blog)
There are SEO firms that offer Link Baiting services. Writing good posts and bookmarking them on Social Media sites will help you get traffic and top rankings in the search engines.
Good article ken !
Thanks for the blog tips Kenneth,
I recently did a post on driving free targeted traffic to your
site http://www.marketingyoursuccess.com/?p=20 but the one mistake I’m guilty of is not posting enough on my blog.
I was told to post two to three times a week, is this correct?
If you can post once a week, it’s good enough. The main thing is to post keyword optimized articles. The idea that search engines prefers websites that post regularly may not be true. I have websites that has not updated for years and still holding the top positions in search results.
Once again, Kenneth hits the subject straight on. It is a pleasure reading this blog and I love sending my potential new associates here as well. WordPress blogs were made to be traffic magnets and with the advent of Web 2.0 and all of those really cool and mostly free widgets you can do just about anything imaginable.
hi kenneth..
thanks for your tips…since i am your subscriber i read almost of your article..but i still want to motivate myself to do all the seo aspect because sometime i feel tired and boring to do that.thanks again
How do you “ping”you blog?
Where do you build widgets that others might use?????
You can go to http://pingoat.com/ and ping your blog right now if you want. There are several pinging services out there but maybe Kenneth will use that for another post. :-)
Thanks Chad. When should a person do this? Every time they write something new or once a week?
Chad,
Pingoat is a new thing to me! What is the purpose, can you tell us why we need it?
Another great post from you,
tHANKS,
Traffic is a major problem for so
many people online, and thats what
brings in the money.
I don’t mean to change the context of this post but this does relate to getting traffic to your blog. I use it everytime I make a new post. Pingoat is a service that pings or notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog’s popularity.
I use Site Build It! Complete Website System for my websites.
This week,I added a new entry to my site Web-iConnect.com with all optimized elements
and so glad that it show on page 1 and list no.1 on Google
The entry is Easy Video Producer.
Will you get more traffic when your post get listed on no 1 of Google ?
thanks my friends,i will learn more about SEO,i will try pingoat too..:)
Driving traffic to a website or a blog is truly a hard task. I agree with you that you should create optimized post and backlinks to get good massive readers. But you need to keep in mind that it’s not only the amount of traffic that matters, but traffic that converts.
Driving traffic to a blog can be a hard task. I agree, the best way to drive traffic to your blog is to give away something of value for free, of course, and then follow up with them with an autoresponder and send them to your blog and encourage comments and on your posts. Of course, if you provide good, quality content then you will attract more readers.
Great post.
Like you mention at the beginning of your article, the best way to get a bunch of visitors to your blog is to Write search engine optimized posts.
With time you get many of your post rank well in the search engine and you’ll get plenty of free ‘targeted’ traffic from google, yahoo and so on…
Very important to check your cpanel stats every couple days, you’ll find all the Keywords that have bring peoples to your blog and you will definately find some ‘GOLD’ keyword in there.
Oh an make sure you have a optin form on your blog.
Once again great blog post ;)
Very good article, well done, explains many SEO tactics we all need to learn over time, great job, thank you!
Search engine optimised blogs will always get visitors from the search engines.
For most people keyword research is better said than done but it is nevertheless critical if you want toget traffic to a blog.
Back links will also always push your blog higher in search engines and even though you won’t see immediate results,it is always worthwhile.
To your success online,
Kevin Njoroge
http://www.internetwealthlab.com
P.S.
for a limited time only, you can download your free internet wealth report at http://www.internetwealthlab.com
This is a great post because I think a lot of people don’t understand that creating backlinks is necessary and they often overlook it. If you want great page rankings, you need solid backlinks, bottom line. Also, you should always write around a keyword whether it be in an article or a blog post. Nice work.
Angel
really great information. Thanks a lot
Thanks. This is a useful article indeed. For me I ran blogS related to niche on
forex price action trading.In my early days I started a simple blog without having any knowledge of SEO and traffic generation.
Initially I was filled with passion and aimed to make a part time passive income online. But soon after I started the blog,I “banged the wall”. I only have 2 or 3 uniques a day even after a month! …sigh!
This is a good article for all IM beginners. Great article!
Great article on traffic, as we must all expose our product or service to the public, to become known or branded online or offline.
Norm Heseltine
P.S.
For a limited time only, you can download a free report entitled “The Simple Truth for making money online” at http://goheretoget.info/8177/
Thanks.
Driving traffic to website is really very important to make your site visible and to do this I suggest you do all the techniques listed in this post because we cannot succeed if we do just 1 or 2 strategies, I have an idea to add to this post because there are millions of people going online each day to play game. I used YourKidsClub games as it has wide variety of games that are related to my niche and can help generate more traffic.
Great tips. I have been doing some of these suggested tips myself. Blogging is a great marketing tool to expand your business. This is an inspiration to fellow bloggers–to strive to become better contributors of new information and make our readers feel their time was best spent reading our blogs.
Ken, I have been following you for about 3 weeks now and I am consistently impressed with your professional level of training. I am just coming out of the gate with my site and my heart skips a beat every time you challenge me to a new level of growth or a different way of thinking.
Many Thanks,
Kim McDaniel
http://www.whoiscoachkim.com
Great info, certainly a treasure for a newbie..thanks for sharing this :)
Or you can try making an page on Facebook.
Everyone is running after social networking sites. So we need to run after them to get a good and consistent traffic.As time changes strategies also changes.There is not a single way to get traffic for all times.
thanx…it really works for me on premiumsurveysites.blogspot.com
Another Great Article from Leads Leap!