6 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Blog
Blogs are a great marketing practice for businesses of all sizes! They allow companies to create a voice and personality online, while engaging their consumers on a different kind of level. Producing original material that is relevant to your current industry is key when starting up a blog for your business. Remember, blogging should not be used as a one-way street for your company to promote products and services, but as a way to show consumers that you care about your industry and would like to supply with them with valuable information. Once you have understood the concept of blogging from a business standpoint, it’s time to get your views up!
1. Promote your blog across other social networks.
Facebook and Twitter are great ways to drive traffic to your blog. Sites such as WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger all give you the option of posting automatically to Twitter or Facebook, which makes this process very easy. The second you have published a post on your site, it will be up for all of your fans and followers to see and click into! Throughout the week, make sure to post at least one more time about the blog that you wrote for your consumers. Don’t spam them with too many links to the blog though; because this will hurt views more than help them.
2. Use social bookmarking sites.
By adding your blog to sites such as StumbleUpon, Reddit, Diggit, etc, you are giving it the opportunity to be found more easily. Interact with other social bookmarkers in order to increase a fan base around your blog. Once you have a significant amount of followers, you will see an increase in traffic as they begin to share your work with others.
3. Link back to other bloggers.
By forming relationships with other bloggers, you are tapping into their reader-base. There are programs like Zemanta that help you to find related articles and posts to each of your entries. By adding related articles to the bottom of your post, you are linking to other blogger’s pages, who will hopefully show some reciprocation. If you see that someone has linked back to your blog post or included it one of their articles, make sure that you always thank them in order to open up the door to further networking!
4. Give your readers the ability to share.
Make sure that you activate the toolbar that allows your readers to share your blog posts. The toolbar usually includes sites such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc, and will be included under every single post you create. Your readers will have the ability to share with just the click of a button!
5. Include pictures and videos.
Photo and video content allows for more space to include key words and phrases that can help your SEO. By naming these kinds of files with your top search terms, it will increase your blog’s likelihood of being found on search engines. The more searchable your blog is, the more traffic it will see!
6. Use tags in your blog posts.
Tags are another way to get more views for your blog, as search engines will often pull them up. They are also easily recognized on blog search engines such as Technorati, so if you have posted to your page to sites like these, it is only in your benefit to take the time and add tags.
If you currently have a business blog and are using these methods, let us know if they are working for you. Also, feel free to leave comments that include more advice for driving traffic to blog sites!