You have set up your blog and started posting concise and useful information that your niche would benefit and enjoy. Days go by, you keep posting, but no one comments and your traffic stats barely register. What is your job?
Just like any website you own, you need to do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to drive traffic to your blog.
1. Set up an email subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so that the Yahoo search engine regularly crawls your site.
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post”. Write smart and useful comments with a link to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you post.
5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines.
6. Submit your blog to blog directories.
Tip: Create a form to track your shipments; this can take several hours when you first start, so schedule an hour a day to send or hire a VA to do it for you.
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.
9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.
10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence, such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures, and flyers.
12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, or some may take its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a type of document that lists website or blog updates available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) can be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds can display headlines only or both headlines and summaries.
13. Post frequently to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles, and websites in your posts
14. Use Trackback links when citing or referencing other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know that it has posted a reference to your post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on your site.
15. Write articles to publish on the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author information box (see example in our signature below).
16. Commit to writing a blog every day. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.
Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit.