How to Increase Blog Traffic - Effective Blog Promotion Strategies

How to increase blog traffic through free blog promotion should be one of your regular concerns as a blogger. How can you promote a blog or your blog that will be less time consuming and drive targeted traffic to your blog on a regular basis?

Promoting blog and getting traffic to your blog as a result that lasts for just few days after which you're back to chasing traffic is not an effective way to build blog traffic, not if you want to minimize your time and maximize your results.

Your blog promotion strategies should focus on ways of increasing blog traffic slowly but steadily. Like every month there should be an increase on your traffic.

Blog marketing takes time and it's an everyday affair but putting little effort over a consistent period of time usually yield lasting results.

You don't publish articles and expect that people will automatically find it, you have to put some things in place and continuously work on others to get regular visitors and continually increase blog traffic.

In this article you'll learn how to promote your blog and get targeted traffic. And you'll also find useful tips that will help you build lasting traffic.

Getting traffic to your Blog

There are different ways to drive traffic to your blog, some are very effective while others are not so effective. Below I discussed most of the known ways of driving traffic to a blog.

Search engine

When people interested in your topic want to find more information on your topic, they usually go to a search engine and type in a search term. And the search engine display pages related to that search term (keyword).

This makes the search engines a target for every webmaster on the internet. Reason being that you get free traffic to your blog that are actually interested in your niche (targeted traffic). The possibility that such visitors will take your most wanted response is higher. Either subscribe to your blog updates, newsletter, click on an ad, buy a product you recommend or even buy your own product.

If you want to increase blog traffic with search traffic, you have to work on it from the start. Make sure to do an effective keyword research and choose your site and pages keywords wisely. Optimize your blog properly , install the best Wordpress plugins for SEO benefits , write regular reader and search engine friendly content , ensure your blog is set up to update ping services automatically each time you post. This is necessary as it allows for quick search engine indexing.

And build some high quality inbound links to your blog and pages.

The good thing is that if you use the most effective ways of link building to build backlinks to your site, you'll naturally increase blog traffic without having to do extra work to build traffic to your blog.

Using Socia media for Blog promotion

Social media sites is a good way to increase blog traffic. If you use it well, you could get thousands of visitors in just one day to your site. But the problem with it is that it never lasts. It's not a source you can continue to rely on for traffic.

You can get 20,000 visits one day from it and the next you get 100. Worse yet, most of it traffic are almost useless to you because visitors from such sites are just surfers who most often are not really interested in what you have to say, they usually click to your site out of curiosity and most often don't take your most wanted response.

Social media sites which allows for good networking can be used to build a targeted community though, where you can get new blog readers and sustain old ones, like a good facebook fan page.

Social media has it place in blog marketing and advertising but don't give it too much time than it deserves simply because most of it traffic will be useless to you.

Steadily Increase Blog Traffic through Related Blog and Websites

Instead of seeing related blog and websites as your competitors, work with them. There are two majors ways you can increase blog traffic using related blogs and websites. That is through guest posting and Blog commenting. The good part about working with related sites when promoting blog is that you wouldn't only be increasing blog traffic but also you will be building your brand, or authority and backlinks too.

To make this work though you have to write really quality content, make people believe you know what you're talking about.

Another way you can increase blog traffic is through Article marketing. As at writing Google is coming down on content farms but article marketing still works for building backlinks and traffic generation. As long as you use reputable article submission directories and submit unique articles.

Helpful Tips on Free Blog Promotion and Blog Traffic

Search engine Traffic takes time, start the ball rolling by networking

You can't wait on search engines to get and increase blog traffic because you will only start getting good number of free traffic from the search engines when your blog and pages start ranking high in search results. That is when your blog and some pages starts ranking on pages 1-5 of the major search engines.

This most definitely wouldn't happen overnight, it will take some time and efforts especially if your niche is very competitive. So to get traffic to your new blog and increase blog traffic steadily, network and build relationship with other bloggers and their readers. From my experience you can not start or build relationship with bloggers by sending them emails, most if not all will not respond.

The best way I have seen to get recognition in your niche is by regularly commenting and publishing your articles as guest posts on related blogs.

Before even doing that WRITE REGULAR QUALITY CONTENT. I had to emphasize that because that's where it all boils down to if you want to be successful in blogging. Without good content that others will appreciate nothing you do to increase blog traffic will make much difference. But really good content can build traffic for itself, though very slowly.

Imagine you write a really good content and you provide easy means for people to spread your content, even if just 5 persons found the content, at least 1 person will spread it through his or her social media pages or link to it.

So just immediately after writing good content is to provide easy means for your content to be spread over the internet by readers.

AddThis widget is a good tool that allows you to display most of the important social media sites where people can share your content.

It's not Just about Increasing Blog Traffic numbers but Sustaining it

Your aim when promoting your blog shouldn't just be to get as many visitors as possible to your site, rather to get as many targeted visitors as possible. And to sustain them. It is better to have 100 targeted daily visitors making you $50 monthly than have 1000 visitors making you $.50.

So ensure that you create avenues that bring a good number of your visitors back to your site regularly. Such avenues are asking blog readers regularly to subscribe to your blog. An effective way to do this is to add your site feed subscription link at the end of each of your posts.

And please provide an email subscription not just RSS. I know many people are yet to fully understand how to access content they subscribed for through RSS. But having an email subscription delivers every post you make to your blog in your subscribers email accounts so they can easily read through.

And if your post is always interesting and value packed they'll click through to your blog which increase blog traffic daily or every time you make a post.

And also you know that regular readers are often the ones that easily take your most wanted response no matter what it is because they've come to trust you.

Start a newsletter. Once you have some good number of posts on your blog and you start seeing your first few visitors, quickly set up a newsletter opt-in form promising to offer more quality content that wouldn't be featured on your blog. You build a list and follow up with your readers with more free information in your newsletter. That way you can always direct them back to your blog.

While you put these in place consistency is very important. Decide how many times you want to make update to your blog every week or month then stick with it. So your readers know when to expect new posts from you. It is only when you make new posts that subscribers will come back to your blog to add comments and spread your article.

New posts also bring you more search engine traffic and generally increase blog traffic. Much delayed new blog posts can greatly affect blog traffic.

Same goes for your newsletter. It's better to start a value packed monthly newsletter that you can keep up with than promise a weekly newsletter that you won't be consistent with.

Visitors will always leave your blog. The only way to bring them back is to put these mediums in place. That way they are always reminded of your blog and to visit.

Diversity in Traffic source is important

Search engine traffic is the best no doubt and what you should aim for. But also try to generate traffic through other sources just in case something happens to one source of traffic. Just like what is happening now (as at writing) with Google, in the process of dealing with low quality sites, some authority sites are being affected. Though I am sure in time everything will be worked out.

Don't expect all traffic sources to bring equal traffic, some will bring very few while others will bring hundreds and even thousands. Small or big they all matter to the success of your blog and should be kept up. Remember it's not just about where to get the highest number of traffic but where to get the most converting traffic.

Like blog commenting and forum posting will likely not bring you as much traffic as the search engines, social media sites (when effectively used) and article marketing but they are important because they are also targeted and helps you build your brand exposing you to your target readers and fellow bloggers.

Monitoring and Balancing is very Important

When you start marketing your blog and getting traffic, monitor the sources of your traffic and analyze it properly in other to know where to put more effort on for better blog traffic.

One free tool you can use is Google webmaster tool if you've not created an account it's important you do so.

It is important you know that your paramount responsibility as a blogger is to provide quality content regularly, do not forget that to building backlinks and promoting your blog. Writing content is definitely of more importance to creating in-bound links. But you also don't want to publish 3 posts every day with no one to read it, hence the need to balance things out.

No two days Brings equal traffic

What I have come to experience with site traffic is no two days bring exactly the same numbers. At times you get really high numbers perhaps as a result of someone popular in social media sites spreading your article link, but sometimes you'll get very small figures.

It can be frustrating at times. That is why I would advice that if you can, don't check your traffic stats regularly. Instead focus on content writing and blog promotion. And as long as you work on that regularly, your blog will keep progressing even though the stats shows low traffic numbers.

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