This is a guest post compiled by Ibrahim Abdullahi
Traffic is the back bone of every blog. Without visitors, your blog content is useless because no one is reading what you offer or teach. Many bloggers get frustrated and quit blogging if they can't get their blogs noticed. Below are some tips that would surely help you increase your blog traffic.
1. Social Media
Successful bloggers uses social media strategies to build their blog popularity. With Facebook and Twitter having millions of users, failing to syndicate your blog content to these platforms is a big mistake.
Try opening a Facebook and Twitter account for your blog and syndicate each post you make to those accounts. There are free services like "Twitter Feed", "Networked Blogs" that can automatically do that for you. You can read: "How To Make Blog Post Automatically Appear On Facebook and Twitter" to learn how I use those two services.
Apart from syndication, making your content easy to share is also a good strategy to increase your blog traffic. All you need to do is allow people to share your posts to different social media platforms to your blog and see how popular your posts would be. You can install the floating share bar to allow your readers share your posts with ease.
Moreover, do not under estimate the power of Linkedin, Scoop.it, Stumbleupon and Google+. You can also check out : "Traffic-Pulling Formulas for Posting on Facebook".
2. Domain Name
Buying a domain name for your blog can give you a world wide exposure. A domain name is a blog online identity, and if you are using a free domain name like .wordpress.com or .blogspot.com, there is a good chance of people to think less of it.
Furthermore, blogs using free domain names rarely rank as good as blogs with custom domain names in search engines. Though I know many popular blogs that are still using .blogspot, the chance of making it with free a domain name is very low. If you are still using a free blogspot address, you can consider changing it to a custom domain.
3. Guest Blogging
Writing articles for other blogs gives bloggers an opportunity promote their blogs. This can be done by attaching a link back to their blog in the article or in the author bio. This would help increase your blog traffic as well Google ranking.
Imagine, what you stand to gain if you write guest posts for OgbongeBlog; a blog with over 10,000 RSS subscribers, thousands of Facebook fans and twitter followers.
4. SEO
For you to rank high in search results, search engines must be able to determine that your site is relevant to the search queries people are using to find the information your niche covers.
You should consider learning how to use Google Keyword tool when composing your posts and make sure your target keyword appears in your post url, title, first paragraph and throughout the content but do not over-do it. Put your readers in mind when writing your posts.
You can download free SEO ebook from Google to learn white-hat search engine optimization tricks you can be implementing on your blog.
Finally, other practices like submitting sitemaps and pinging your blog to search engines can very helpful in increasing your blog traffic.
Do you know other ways of increasing blog traffic? Please. let me hear from you via comments.
This post was written by Ibrahim Abdullahi. He is an engineering student and a full-time blogger
that writes about anything related to blogging and technology in his ArewaTech Blog. You can follow him on Twitter: @Abdul_IG
Great tips. Thanks for sharing especially the SEO ebook. I have been hearing about scoop.it but I just don't understand that site. Hope you can explain how to use it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tips. Most of my traffic comes from Facebook and Nairaland (a forum). So, I think been active on forums can also lead to increase in one's blog traffic.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing...
ReplyDeleteNice one. Thank you for the post.
ReplyDeleteNice one bro, you've just said it all. Those are the major things to consider as a blogger if you really want to survive in this competitive blogosphere. Mr JIDE Permit me to add "no 5". (No 5). You can also drive traffic to your blog/website(s) using commentluv enabled blogs, doing so will definitely help you rank well in Google.
ReplyDeleteVery informative.
ReplyDeleteGreat article..love this
ReplyDeletei totally agree, guess posting can be very helpful. I would start doing that more often in order to give my blog more traffic and exposure.
ReplyDeleteNice Information
ReplyDeletebut i'd like to as something about guest blogging.
is there any community/group on facebook about guest blogging?
nice blog
ReplyDeleteMr Jide i wish to write for you blog sumday
ReplyDeleteNice content. It is educative and more detailed. Keep it up.
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Nice one Jide it was a wonderful post. i blog @ WizProf.com
ReplyDeleteNice article
ReplyDelete