Five Easy Ways To Get Traffic To Your Blog

A blog without readers is pretty much useless. If you’ve been blogging for a while and have only been getting a trickle of viewers to your posts, you need to put a traffic building plan into action. Building traffic is just as an important skill to bloggers as writing quality posts is. Many bloggers are terrific at creating content but don’t know a thing about building traffic. Here is a quick guide to the five most popular (and most effective) traffic building techniques.

1. Get SOCIAL!

Social networking and blogging go hand in hand. Your blog posts can be distributed across social networking channels in many different ways. Sign up for Twitter and tweet about your posts as soon as they are added to your blog. Update your Facebook status with a link to your new blog posts. Submit your stories to Digg.com, Reddit.com and StumbleUpon.com. Remember that in order for social networking to be effective, you need to participate with other people on your list. If you visit their links and respond to their updates, they’ll be likely to do the same for you.

Check out the bottom of this post. See the little icons underneath "Share and Enjoy?" That's the "Sociable" plugin for WordPress. I also employ Hootsuite to automatically update my Twitter status and my Facebook fan page. I'll put together a tutorial on how to use Hootsuite for this purpose if you express an interest.

2.Get SEEN!

Find blogs in your niche and start following their posts. Make sure to add insightful and interesting comments on their posts. Not only will the blog owner take notice and visit your blog, other commenters will visit your blog to get more of your great insight into the topic. Don’t spread yourself too thin with blog commenting, but make it a point to comment on a few related blogs each week.

Not only will you get direct traffic, but you'll also get valuable, relevant backlinks from commenting! Win-win, baby!

3.Get SYNDICATED!

RSS feeds are a way to syndicate your blog’s content so that it is sent to many different people in their own blog readers or on their own sites. Most blogging systems have RSS feeds automatically included but you can add a lot more functionality to your feed by using a free service like FeedBurner.com. With FeedBurner you can add things like sharing the feed via e-mail so it will pull in new readers and encourage previous visitors to come back to the blog again.

See the little icon in the upper righthand corner of the page? That is the RSS feed link for Internet Marketing Muscle. You should click on it

4.Get PUBLISHED!

You may think that by being a blogger you can ignore article marketing. However, you can get a lot  of traffic to your blog by tweaking some of your popular blog posts and adding them to article directories. You can post your popular posts as articles with a link back to your blog in many different article directories. Not only will you get a valuable backlink but your article may also be used by ezine owners which will bring you more traffic.

Plus, your article will get direct traffic from visitors at the article directories. Another win-win. Except this time it's win cubed – you get a backlink, direct traffic, possible syndication, AND you will become known as an expert in your field. But don't call yourself a guru! Let others do that

Oh, yeah, you also get to leverage content you've already written! That's 5 benefits to article marketing! Very powerful stuff.

5.Get BACKLINKS!

Speaking of backlinks, you should work to build backlinks to your blog through several different means. By creating backlinks to your blog, you’ll improve your blog’s ranking in search engine results. You can get lots of traffic from search engines if you are within the first group of search results for your keywords.

Check out 5 x 5 A System for Building Backlinks for a simple backlink-building system.

These five ways of building traffic can be used over and over again to help build traffic to your blog and increase your readership.
 

As you know from reading anything here, building backlinks is one of the most fruitful things you can do. Backlinks:

• Build ranking in the Search Engines
• Drive direct traffic, too (don't discount this one)

Put don't put all your backlinking eggs in one basket. Many IM guys try one tactic and that tactic may work – for now. But what if the Big G catches on?

For example, linkwheels are pretty popular. The idea is to get backlinks to a "money page" by writing articles and submitting them to popular article directories as well as Web 2.0 properties like Blogger.com.

One popular linkwheel method goes something like this:

• Write article. Put in two links – one to your "money page" (the page you ultimately want visitors to see and act on) and one to a Web 2.0 property.
• Write a second article or post with 2 links again, this time one to your money page, the other to the first article (prior bullet).
• Repeat, always linking to your money page with one link and with the other link pointing to the last article you posted.

This is all fine and good. What you're doing is building the rank and PR of the articles and posts to Web 2.0 properties (by backlinking to them) as well as getting a ton of backlinks to your money page.

However, linkwheels are pretty easy to spot. Especially if you do your linking with the same properties and in the same sequence every single time (so, don't do this).

What if Google decided that it would discount – or worse yet, disregard - any backlinks from linkwheels? Not that they would or have plans to, but what if they did and this was your only (or primary) backlinking methods?

You would be screwed, plain and simple.

So what I do and wholeheartedly recommend is to diversify your link building methods.

5 x 5 A System for Building Backlinks

I have a very simple system that I follow every day until I'm comfortable with my website's position in the SERPs. I call it a "5×5" system, very similar to a very popular strength-training system in the bodybuilding field.

Here's what I do (every day), put very simply:

1. I make 5 comments on other blogs. I don't necessarily care about PR or whether they are "do follow." I just make 5 value-added comments. One tool I use for this purpose is Comment Kahuna.
2. I make 5 forum posts in relevant forums. The purpose here is two-fold: One, I get the backlink, and Two, I build credibility in my industry.
3. I use "Angela's Backlinks," a very popular service that gives you roughly 30 high PR sites you can visit to get a backlink each month. (I know, 30 sites is only good for 6 days of backlinking here, but I have been a customer for quite some time and each month I can go through old packets to fill in 5 a day for a month). I highly recommend this service! Especially for a brand-new site. There really is nothing better than getting 30 very high PR backlinks when you first fire up a website.
4. I submit my site to 5 directories a day. There are a host of sites that have nifty indexes of literally thousands of web directories. Just find the appropriate category and then find the "submit URL" button. I used to use Directory Submitter by Brad Callen, but it seems to have been taken down and I lost my original copy. But everything you need is on the web – you just have to find it.
5. I make 5 submissions to social media sites like digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and the like. A good "meta" social bookmarking site is Social Marker.

This is the bare minimum that I do with a new website. I also write a TON of articles, set up dozens of Web 2.0 properties, etc. I'll write more on this later. This will give you a really good start on building backlinks to a brand-new blog.

If you do the math, you'll have 750 backlinks by the end of your first month. Not bad. In fact, good enough to rank very high in the SERPs for well-chosen long-tail keywords.

I do have a few tricks up my sleeve for automating some of this, but I'll leave that for another post. If you want to learn more about any of this, just leave a comment.

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Social bookmarking is an excellent way to get traffic to your squeeze page and sign-ups to your list. There are many different social bookmarking websites out there, like Digg, Delicious, and Stumble Upon.

You’ll not only get a backlinks to your website by bookmarking, but you also get the benefit of people in your niche clicking through when they find your info.

Keep in mind that the traffic from these websites is not always super- targeted, but it is well worth it to sign up for accounts. Bookmarking doesn’t have to be a daily task. Simply bookmark your best content every once in a while. It can increase your opt-ins a variety of different ways.

Check them out:
www.StumbleUpon.com
www.Digg.com
www.Reddit.com

This content is fully accessible by:

• Premium Members

• List Building 101 Product Owners

One of the best ways to get traffic is to search engine optimize your website. When people want to find something, they generally go to the search engines to find relevant websites. If your website is at the top of the search engines for certain keywords, you’ll be able to get a lot of targeted traffic and help your list grow in the process.

There are many different aspects to search engine optimization that you need to pay attention to. The first thing to do is research keywords that are related to your niche. It is ideal if these keywords are highly searched and have low competition in the search engine results.

Then, create content based around these keywords that will help you rank more highly in the search engines. You should also work on getting backlinks to your website, to boost your credibility in the eyes of the search engines. Backlinks are nothing more than getting OTHER websites to link to yours, preferably ones that are established, quality websites.