It takes a considerable investment of time to create a good blog. Obviously, you want to maximize the return on your investment by getting as much traffic to your blog as you can.
There are a number of steps you can take to increase your blog traffic:
- Consistently produce quality content. If you want people to read your blog, you have to give them something to read. Increasing the frequency of posts will give people--as well as search engines--more chances to find your blog and more reasons to regularly come back. Of course the content still needs to be interesting and useful so that they will want to come back.
- Promote via social media. Facebook and Twitter are some of the main ways that blogs get noticed--especially in the early stages, as you are building your audience.
- Create an RSS feed. Hopefully readers will like what you have to say and want to come back to your blog. With a simple RSS feed you make it much easier for them to keep up with your blog and follow your every word.
- Use good SEO practices. To expand readership beyond your social network, you will need your blog to come up in search engine results. There are many ways you can improve your search engine rankings: using key words or phrases in your posts, adding tags of those same searchable terms and submitting your blog to search engines are some simple places to start.
- Include images. Besides adding visual interest to your posts, photos and graphics are also searchable items and provide another avenue for new readers to find your blog.
- Link to other posts and other blogs. Links to other related posts within your own blog can encourage visitors to stay longer and read more content. Links to other blogs can draw in entirely new readers, though, particularly if the blog utilizes trackbacks. Trackbacks automatically produce a link back to your blog, posted in the comments section, any time you link to a post.
- Comment. Replying back to comments posted on your blog shows that you care about your readership, and can start conversations that might be just as interesting as the blog post itself. Leaving your own relevant, interesting comments on other blogs--complete with a link back to your own blog--is another way to draw in new readers.
- Guest blogging. Many blogs feature posts from guest bloggers on a regular basis. Writing a guest blog post for another site can introduce you to a whole new audience, many of whom may then check your site to see what else you have to say. Inviting guest bloggers onto your own site can have a similar affect, as their audience comes over to follow their favorite writer.
- Pay attention to results. As you build your blog, pay attention to your site analytics. You will soon discover what topics or links draw the most traffic, and can then spend your time focusing on what works.
