31 ways to get traffic to your blog

[its_me_shaners]

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Since Blogging has become popular and useful to marketers today, here are few ways that may be useful for promoting your blog:

1. Commenting on other people's blogs : Comment fairly on other people's (similar to your's); Make sure you post relevant and useful comments, otherwise you'll be considered spam. Commenting helps you get : Spiders, New visitors and useful backlinks.

2. List your blog on blogtopsites (Google hasn't considered these linkfarms yet). May get you new visitors and SE placements.
www.blogtospsites.com .

3. Allowing commenting on your blog and inviting new users to contribute. This is a basic use within a blog itself. Comments help give your blog a certain popularity and maybe an identity. Blogs such as Wordpress and Blogger allow multiple users to contribute to a blog. However this may take time as you may have to wait till your blog gets some traffic.

4. Try traffic exchange for blogs such as www.blogxchange.com (similar to trafficswarm); I am not keen on it.

5.Posting reviews of products that may help your visitors. Blogs not only allow you to give your personal opinion, thier main flexibilty lies in using other people's articles, reviews etc without copyright issues (Complete article and review duplication is harmful though; You may add your personal opinion on someone's articles; Usually they'll be happy because your sending them traffic)

6. If you're using blogs like Wordpress, several plugins (extensions) allow you to aggregate RSS feeds, Easy insertion and promotion of affiliate links etc. So consider changing over to Wordpress or MovableType over from Blogger-type blogs.

7. Use Services like www.feedburner.com which allow your Blog's feed to be easily distributed in a ready format to your site users. They also allow email subscription of your feeds.

8. Another way of posting fresh content is by using News sources such as News sections of Google, MSN, Yahoo etc. If you pick up an article fast, you may rank well in the SEs. You can also pick up fresh news from ww.PRweb.com or submit your press-releases.

9. Hosting your own blog is a better option (or use a host which give you free or cheap PHP hosting). Since many blogs are based on PHP, you are easily in control in case you want to expand your Blog.

10. Sometimes, if you look up your server stats, you may find that visitors may have landed up in a totally different post then they intended (from the Search Engines). try fixing up your Permalinks or post a new post related to the search term. For example people might have searched for " sports trivia " and somehow they landed up in your post " Sports in England" , where you have nothing to offer in "sports trivia". Then write a new post on sports trivia and make sure you link to this post from the "sports in England" post

11. Apart from regular adsense and other ads, you can opt for Ads for your feeds such as :

www.feeddirect.com
www.kanoodle.com

Though not popular, these ads allow you to monetize your RSS feeds.

12. For clickbank prducts you can try www.affiliatesensor.com which allow you to display contextual Clickbank ads (with or without images).

13. A popular way of promtion is through services like technorati which allow users to find your blog or post through tags. For example you've made a post on Traveling to the Vatican and tagged it as "Travel to Vatican", tecnorati may help people find your blog post on that topic. Technorati is a definite and a must-use option for any blogger. www.technorati.com

14. Social Bookmarking is another must-have for a blogger. Allowing people to Bookmark your Blog and specific posts help spread your blog's popularity. Social bookmarking sites are also a nice way to get many visitors fast to your site.

www.digg.com
www.furl.com
http://del.icio.us

Apart from social bookmarking these sites ( Digg and Furl) allow you to submit "stories" or to specific articles on your blog which may bring immediate traffic.

15. Some ways, other than news sources, to get articles are RSS feeds ffrom other sites/blogs. RSS feed search engines like

www.syndic8.com, www.pheeds.com allow you to get RSS feeds from million os sites.

16. If posting directly to blogs using thier GUI seems difficult to you try tools like Wbloggar ( free ) or Post2blog ( trial)
that allow you post, edit and retrieve to one or many of your blogs right from your desktop. This is helpful if you post many articles a day and hate to use your Blogger's interface. Post2Blog even allows you to add adsense and chitka codes to your ads.
www.wbloggar.com
www.post2blog.com

17. Sometimes your Sever Stats (Keywords, referrers) may give you valuable info on search terms that you may have improvised on. In such cases do a research for those terms and make new posts.

18. Some Plugins (Wordpress) allow you display Popular posts, related posts etc. These may help keep the Stickiness to your blog

19. Also make use of tradtional Link exchanges like : www.linkmarket.com and www.gotlinks.com (I think now they are a paid service). Even though some may not find this useful, Search engines and people may find you through these directories.

20. Sites like www.blogexplosion.com allow traffic exchanges. members of this service are required to surf other member blogs before they earn credits. These credits can then be used for Posting free ads on member blogs for a particular time-period.

21. Linking to other blogs can be made easier with www.blogrolling.com which allow you to easily add and manage links.

22. You may try for a blogger award from sites like www.bloggies.com ( a private awardee). These may make you famous (If you win ) and more popular. Alternatively if money is lying in your bank sponsor an award and be famous .

23. Another alternative to adsense is www.blogads.com. This is gaining popularity among bloggers and may provide you with additional monetizing opps.

24. Podcasting and Videoblogging are extras that you may use to enhance popularity (though I don't use them). Sites like www.youtube.com allow you to upload videos and then directly embed them in your blog using thier code.

25. Scripts like MagpieRSS, CARP RSS, FeedforALL allow you display other sites feed or feeds in a search engine friendly format. Helpful if you want additional content to supplement yours.

magpierss.sourceforge.net

www.feedforall.com

http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/

26. Using Photo hosting services like www.Flickr.com (Yahoo) may save a lot of your bandwith ( If you're hosting your own blog). Wordpress and MovableType Blogs provide plugins which allow easy photo posting Through Flickr.

27. Though Pinging ( Announcing to the world when you've posted a new article) is part of many blogging platforms some don't offer that facility.

www.pingomatic.com(only pinging) and www.feedburner.com (pinging and many other features) offer you just that.

28. Stickiness to your blog may be improved by : Quizzes , Polls and other such fun-stuff. People may atleast be willing to play and have fun even though they didn't find what they were looking for.

29. Categorization of Posts (offered by many Blog softwares except Blogger) help vistors and SEs find relavant topics easily. If you 're using blogger consider switching over to Wordpress or Movabletype

30. www.weblogsinc.com which is a huge company running a blognetwork on different topics, accept Bloggers and content writes to write articles for thier blogs or allow you to run your own blogs. You're paid to write good articles. Apart from getting good publicity you also get good traffic and get paid fot that.

31. When setting up your blog profile. Don't forget to add your keyword(s) when describing who you are or what you do. I have seen blog profiles ranking high. So obivously google treats your profile as a page of content.

32. Last but not the least and the most important is CONTENT which keeps people coming over to blogs again and again.

[renegade]

Great post, thanks for that, might even update my blog - hasn't been updated since Valentines day

[mikey_freedom]

Does this fall into the 'spam is what I don't do' category? Sorry Shaners - you post cut and paste comments about blog spam earlier (just so your own spam doesn't get deleted as a blatant link) when you have two keyword loaded spam blogs yourself. LOL

Hope anyone doesn't think this is too critical but today I am up to my mailbox eyeballs in link request spam emails and more cr*p that I just don't need and most of it seems to come off make a million in 5 minutes 99p ebay ebooks.

M

Added: I've edited this post instead of adding a new one as I don't want to bump it up to the top and give it any more exposure than it deserves, but racked with guilt and probably a little worry that I'd just flamingly insulted someone unjustly I ran a random text selection into Google "members of this service are required to surf other member blogs before they earn credits" (from #20) and felt less guilty altogether.

Would seem that the 31 tips was originally posted at associateprograms.com on the 1st of April under the title "31 Useful Ways to promote and improve your Blog" by deadlyminds (whose own site also has an 11th April copy of it at thenet.to.md/blog-promotion/) and picked up by our poster here (at least honest enough to use the same user id!) on the 18th when they pop in to post. By the 3rd May it had been reposted to 5staraffiliateprograms.com and three days later we got treated to it.

Quoting, even at length, is no problem of course. We all do it with articles in discussions, funnies we've discovered etc etc BUT reposting verbatim, purely for the linkjuice from your sig in a popular forum is just blatantly cynical plagiarism. Sorry but one in context response of ten words in one thread would have been far more valuable. Smells like spam, tastes like spam...methinks it must be spam.