7 ways to increase traffic to your blog

Many of you have been asking me on how to promote blogs. I wish to share some of the tips that will be effective in promoting blog yourselves. By following these tips, you don’t need to ask some one to view your blog or strive hard to promote. You just need to utilise the tools and resources around you. There are many such tools and a huge number of effective ways to attract traffic. I have made an attempt to list what I have learnt so far, here they are..

1. Email : Include a link to your blog in email signatures while sending/replying to emails. This is a powerful medium to drive the traffic repeatedly. This is very effective since email is a very common mode of communication among friends, colleagues as well as to many known and unknown people. People will occassionally click on your blong link out of curiosity to know what’s new. To live up to their curiosity, keep writing interesting articles possibly with images/videos embedded on to it. Another point you may want to note is that people do forward your mail to many people in their contact list at times and thus increased traffic to your blog:)

2. Social Network Sites: These are great places to promote your blog too. Include a link to blog on your profile for sites like Yahoo! profiles, Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, Hi5, MySpace etc.,

3. Web Search Engines: Web search giants like Yahoo, Google, Live etc., are the major traffic boosters. Make sure your blog is search engine optimized. This can be done in a number of ways by providing sitemaps for search engine crawlers. Submit your sitemap to all these search engines. This is free of cost, all you need to do is ensure your blog articles are accessible by crawlers to index the content on to their search results.

4. Messengers: If you use instant messengers like Yahoo, Gtalk, MSN, AOL etc., use the option of status updates space to promote your blog.This is customizable and you can use creative captions to grab friends attention.

5. Blog Rolls & Comments: Share links with fellow bloggers. This can be a kind of bartar system. If you add your friends blog link in your blog roll, they will reciprocate the same too. This is certainly a powerful method to drive traffic to your blog. This results in mutual benifit This may sound silly, but very effective for sure. Do comment sensibly on others blog with a link associated to your name. This doesn’t mean spam others blogs, they may block you! Based on the kind of comment you make, you will get a good amount of traffic from the owner of a blog to his audience.

6. Social Bookmark Sites: If you are not that familiar with SEO, there are a bunch of sites that do it for you like Yahoo Buzz, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc., There are tools to do it for you to embed all these social bookmarking sites by using simple tools like ‘Add this’.

7. Feeds: Support your site with RSS/Atom feeds. Almost all the blogging solutions provide feeds feature to subscribe to a blog. You can associate yourself with tools like FeedBurner for new articles notification service.

All the best in promoting your blog with these simple steps. There may be other effective methods of promoting blogs. Feel free to share if you know something that has not been covered above.

Tagged as: blog, blogger, promote, traffic, wordpress