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.
 

I just wanted to let you all know that I now have a new Twitter "handle" (or is it ID or username?). It's — guess — IMMuscle. I'll be posting all of my new blog content right to Twitter, based on my Headway theme settings. Hopefully, we won't see duplicate "tweets" since I'll still be using some other social networking tools like ping.fm and onlywire.com.

Happy Tweeting!

Of course, you can still reach me at my old twitter account, billspaced. Either way works. Let's just say this is an experiment.

In an online business, more information is usually better than not enough. Unless, that is, you get all tangled up in the details. Which is easy, because with tools like Google Analytics, there is SO MUCH information and there seems not to be much in the way of easy-to-follow documentation on how to use the tool.

MyBlogLog (an unusual name, for sure) is different. Essentially, you can see 3 things that are very important. It's a tool I use every day.

The 3 things are:

1. How visitors got to your site
2. What they looked at when they got to your site
3. Whether or not they clicked something on your site

To me, it's critically important to find out where a user came from. Most of my traffic comes from search engines, most specifically Google. The cool thing about MBL is that it shows you the exact URL a visitor came from, which means you get to see the search term(s) that a visitor used to get to your site.

This is extremely valuable information.

You can do a lot with just this simple information. For example, you can build a page incorporating that exact search phrase. Then, you can link that new page to the page the viewer visited (link both ways). You can also tweak the original page to target that key phrase. Now, you have 2 potential pages that are reachable by that search phrase.

You now also know what potential customers are looking for. Why not write a short report (that's an affiliate link to an awesome report on how to write short reports that sell) that addresses this most obvious need?

MBL also has a neat social networking aspect to it. Your visitors can join your "community" and you can send public and private messages. You can use this small subset of your readers (face it, not everyone will sign up to join your community) as a test bed for offers, as a way to find out what your readers really want, or a host of other things. The potential is limitless.

You can also connect with your readers by adding them to your contacts. You can quickly amass hundreds of contacts, and you know what? Because all of your sites are posted on your profile page, your contacts see them all and — more importantly — they visit!

MyBlogLog is a fantastic way to accomplish multiple things with one tool: It's a social networking tool, it's a stats package (albeit not fully-fleshed out in the free version, which is the version I use because a) I'm cheap and b) it's all I need for now), and it's a great way to find like-minded individuals who write some incredible blogs.

I encourage you to check it out.

By the way, I get nothing out of recommending MyBlogLog, other than you might happen across my profile and connect with me. There is no financial incentive.