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4 Ways to get More Traffic to Your Blog
There are now literally millions of businesses and individuals in the world blogging, all vying for the eyes of as many readers as they can get. Many times blogs are set up, a few posts are created and then the blogger or business just sits back and waits for traffic to come pouring in.
Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.
Blogging takes time, commitment and hard work. But it can be a worthwhile investment and reap great rewards for yourself and your company – if done well. The question most bloggers (including some of my clients) end up having is have is, “How can I get more traffic to my blog?”
This is not an exhaustive look at how to get more readers, but here are 4 good ways to get started:
1. Write Great Content
It doesn’t matter how flashy your site looks or if you post 5 articles a day – people read blogs for the content. Make sure your content is high-quality information that the niche you are writing for cares about and people will come to read it.
Tip: Use Google Analytics to see what pages and posts people are reading the most as well as what keywords they were searching for when they came to your site. Write more content accordingly.
2. Post Consistently
How often you post is up to you. But don’t leave your readers guessing if you’ve given up on the blog. Make it obvious how often your blog is updated and make sure you stick as close as you can to your timeline.
Tip: Future-post! Prewrite a few great articles, then change the publish date on them to the future (super easy to do with WordPress). Viola! You’re already on target for posting consistently in the next few day or weeks.
3. Guest Post
Write somewhere other than on your own blog. This helps new, more and different readers see what you write about, and if they like your post enough they will click through to see your blog. Ideally you should guest post on a blog with more visitors than your site has, and with readers that would want to learn about the same general topics that you write about.
Tip: Make sure you read the blog that you are submitting an article to. Get a feel for the writing style, length, and content. If you don’t know where to start, try guest posting on blogs you like to read often anyways.
Check out the spike in visitors the day one of my clients guest-posted on a bigger blog.
4. Participate
Blogging is all about sharing information, ideas and opinions. Make sure your sharing doesn’t stop when you hit Publish. Engage your audience continually to build a sense of community around your blog. Reply to comments on your own blog and go comment on other blogs. Use social media to interact more directly with readers.
Tip: Make sure it is easy to leave comments on your blog. If the form takes too long to fill out, or if it is obvious the blogger doesn’t respond to comments many people won’t waste their effort.
Some further resources for getting more traffic to your blog:
How to get traffic for your blog by Seth Godin
13.2 Easy Ways to Build a Thriving Blog Community from Men with Pens
9 Things to Do To Make Sure Your Next Blog Post is Read by More than Your Mom at ProBlogger
The Power of a Personal Voice
For the past few months the Gold’s Gyms of the Wenatchee Valley have been doing a great job of connecting to their members in a variety of ways, and not only while they are at the gym working out.
The Gold’s Gyms have been updating their blog often with great fitness and nutrition tips, as well as lots of overall wellness advice. But as the year began Melissa Schwab, a Gold’s Gym member, began blogging on the site about her experience trying to lose weight and get in shape as she participated in the Gold’s Gym Challenge. Hits to the site and comments on the posts are way up as people are excited to hear about someone’s experience from the trenches. They get to hear about the highs and the lows, the good times and the bad – told with the power of a personal voice.
At the same time Gold’s Gym staff ramped up work on the local Gold’s Gym Facebook fan page. And fan numbers and interaction there jumped significantly too. Staff created contests like “Post a picture that best says Strength to you,” kept Challengers and members updated on important times and events, as well as just providing a space for members to interact and support each other online. Read More
10 Excellent WordPress Plugins to Make Your Site Better
WordPress is a great CMS (Content Management System) for building any type of website. Web designers all over the world galaxy love WordPress for its simplicity in setting up, ease in customizing design, and for how simple it is for anyone to make updates to content.
What makes WordPress even better is the great variety of high-quality plugins that add all sorts of increased functionality to your website. WordPress.org hosts a great database of thousands of plugins you can install with one click on your own site. Most plugins are created for free by awesome coders helping make the world a better place. They deserve serious thanks. (So if you are a coder who has created a free WordPress plugin – THANKS!)
In my use of WordPress to create websites that connect my clients and their markets I’ve come across a few that are indispensable. These plugins can be added to your site whether you are a professional developer or hobby blogger. These plugins stand out to me because they:
- Are easy to add to the site
- Have customizable options
- Integrate seamlessly with the WP admin panel
- Are easy to add custom design to
- Are easy for clients to understand and use (when needed)
(see this article about what makes a good plugin in general)
So, while not an exhaustive list, here are some of my favorite plugins:
Akismet
Somehow the evil spam robots of the universe have even figured out how to leave spam comments on blogs. This can get annoying if you are constantly being bombarded with comments that aren’t real. Akismet is the fastest way to shut off the spam-flow. After installation I’ve never seen a spam comment get into the system. Nice!
Google Analytics
Okay, I honestly don’t use a plugin to add Google Analytics to my sites, I do it by adding code by hand. The point is that you need Google Analytics on your site no matter how you get it there. Analytics gives you an incredible amount of information about visitors to your site – where in the galaxy world they came from, what they were looking for, what they looked at while on your site, and much, much more. If you aren’t getting in-depth reports on your website traffic you need to reconsider what you are even doing with your website.
Google XML Sitemaps
On
e key to ranking well in search engines is to make your website easy for them to crawl and index. This plugin creates a sitemap for search engines to see what content you have on your site, then submits it to the search engines for you! How much easier can that get? Read More
My Article Published on FreelanceSwitch
The enormously popular FreelanceSwitch is one of my favorite blogs/websites. I’ve always loved reading it as it continually offers the best advice for bloggers, writers, designers, developers, photographers, and more. The site is dedicated to helping freelancers (or really small businesses) become more efficient, attract more clients, and do better work. When I started my own business FSW and their self-published book helped me a lot. I continue to read the FSW blog daily and often follow advice and tips from the posts there.
My article on the FreelanceSwitch homepage
I also love helping other freelancers and startup companies and recently thought about writing a helpful article and trying to get it published on FSW. I spent some time crafting the post and submitted it. Lo and behold – FSW accepted the article and posted it soon thereafter. I was/am super-excited to be a part of the FSW team!
Here’s how the article begins:
Remember when you graduated from school or first decided to become a freelancer? You likely didn’t have much work to show and had to scramble to fill your portfolio. If you now have a few years under your belt, you’ve probably started to build up quite a collection of finished pieces.
The importance of having a professional portfolio website has been discussed on FreelanceSwitch – it is essential for the modern freelancer. But how do you decide what to include in your portfolio? If you fill your site with only your favorite work it could be focused in the wrong direction and not attract business. If you only display giant commercial projects it may feel like a sterile presentation with no heart. Somehow you need to show that as a freelancer you are both capable in your skills and able to produce high quality, creative results.
I suggest this 5-pronged approach for deciding what you want to include in your portfolio:
I’m looking forward to a continued 2-way relationship with FreelanceSwitch!
