Blog Commenting
A great way to get targeted visitors to your blog that will be interested in your content and products, is by leaving comments on other similar blogs in your niche with a link back to your blog in your comment or ‘signature’.
Do a search on Google for other blogs in your niche that are relevant to your own blog and try to find blogs that have a lot of traffic, a lot of activity, and are seen as somewhat as an authority in your niche.
Try to engage constructively in the conversations and threads and offer useful advice.
Try to help people the best you can, the more you positively contribute to forums and blogs, the more clicks you will get on your link back to your blog and the more traffic you will get.
Don’t ever try to spam blogs by leaving comments of little value like leaving one liners like ‘great post’. This will never work and no one will even click on your link.
Try to actively participate in the community and build up a bit of a reputation for helping people and you will see a huge jump in your traffic!
Submitting To Directories
There are hundreds of directories out there that let you submit your blog to them for free (there are also some paid ones).
This will not only help increase your traffic by people looking through the directories and finding your blog, but it will also help you to get backlinks to your blog.
A lot of blog directories have a high page rank and this in turn will help you to rank in the search engines.
Submitting RSS Feeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds allow readers of your blog to automatically receive any updates for you blog as they happen.
The great thing is, WordPress automatically creates an RSS Feed for your blog.
Submitting your RSS Feed to RSS Feed sites will help give you more high PR backlinks which will help with your SEO and rankings.
Do a search for RSS Feed Feeder sites that you can submit your RSS Feed to.
Pinging Your Blog
Pinging your blog will notify the Search Engines of your blog’s content, since the search engines are always scanning the net trying to pick up any new content.
By pinging your blog you will speed up the process of getting all the pages of your blog indexed.
There are also a lot of sites out there that publish any new content found on the web. By pinging your blog you will also notify these site’s of your new content.
Here are a couple of free pinging sites to ping your blog on:
http://www.pingomatic.com/
http://www.just-ping.com/
http://www.pingthatblog.com
Social Bookmarking
If you social bookmark your blog you will not only get more high PR backlinks, you will also get more traffic by people finding your on social bookmarking sites and visiting your site.
Make sure to bookmark every single post you make.
There are dozens of social bookmarking and web 2.0 sites out there that you can submit your blog posts to.
Doing this can be very time consuming though so I suggest using some kind of software to automatically social bookmark your posts for you.
Here is one that is free:
http://www.onlywire.com/
Also remember, there’s the plugin we talked about earlier that can automatically do submissions with Onlywire.com every time you publish a new post:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-onlywire-auto-poster/
Article Marketing
Article marketing is very popular and has always been a very effective way to not only get backlinks, but also traffic from interested readers.
The key here is great quality content that leaves the reader wanting more.
It’s fairly easy to come up with new articles because you can just use material from the blogs posts you’ve written.
Try to submit your articles to the top articles directories, but try not to double-up on content.
Try to re-write your articles a bit to change it up and avoid duplicate content.
Here’s a few of the top article directories I recommend:
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.articlesbase.com
http://www.buzzle.com
http://www.helium.com/
http://www.articlesnatch.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlealley.com
http://www.articledashboard.com/
Article Writing Tips:
The headline is one of the most important parts of your article. Try to create a catchy headline that creates curiosity.
Here are a few good ways to format your headline:
Top 5 Ways To….. (using numbers)
Would You Dump Your Boyfriend For $100,000? (using questions)
Discover the Secret Method To….. (using words like ‘discover’ ‘secret’ etc)
Because submitting your articles to many articles directories at once can be very time consuming and tedious, here’s some free software that can help automate this process for you:
http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com/
Video Marketing
Video marketing can be one of the most effective and efficient ways to get traffic to your blog.
Video blogging is incredibly popular right now and people prefer to watch video over anything else (e.g reading articles).
If you have a really good video that’s both informative and entertaining, you could get hundreds of thousands of views!
With so many people viewing your videos, you can be sure to expect a large amount of people then clicking on your link to your blog. And that’s a ton of traffic!
These, days people prefer not to read long-winded sales letter, they would rather just watch a sales video. The same is true with your blog posts.
If you take the content wrote for your blog posts and turn each blog post into a short video, you will be able to upload your videos to video sites in no time.
Plus you can also embed them on your blog as well once you’ve uploaded them to YouTube (we covered that in the previous chapter on Content).
Videos are also great for backlinks too, because video sites are so popular and they have a high PR.
You have 3 main options here for creating a video:
1) Use a flip cam and record yourself or someone else.
2) Record Powerpoint slides using Camtasia (or the free version ‘Camstudio’ ) like what we discussed in the previous chapter.
3) Using Animoto http://www.animoto.com which can create videos for you in minutes for free.
All you need is to upload your own photos or put your own text in, pick the music and layout, and Animoto will do the rest (it’s really easy).
There are quite a lot of popular video sites out there that you can submit your videos to for free.
However if you don’t want to do this manually I would suggest using a software program such as TubeMogul http://www.tubemogul.com which is free, or TrafficGeyser http://www.trafficgeyser.com which is paid (but is really good).
Web 2.0 Sites
Another great way to not only get traffic, but also increase your blog’s rankings and backlinks is to create a network of web 2.0 sites.
This method involves creating a network of web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Tumblr.com etc and having them all link back to your main blog.
This can be very powerful and you’ll not only increase your blog’s rankings, you’ll also see your Web 2.0 pages appear in the search engine results too.
Another tip is to also social bookmark every web 2.0 page you make as this will help boost the ranking of your blog as well.
If you create plenty of web 2.0 sites, you could end up dominating the whole 1st page of Google for your keyword!
Social Media Sites
These kinds of sites are sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
For this traffic generation method, first sign up to each site and create your own page (or in YouTube’s case, create your own channel).
Next try to join other relevant online groups that are in your niche and have similar interests.
It’s important here that you don’t ever try to hard sell anyone or over promote.
Try to show your personality and get people to like you and be interested in what you have to offer.
Try to be friendly and sociable and network with as many people as you can.
Try to make as many friends as possible but don’t try to add just anyone, make sure they’re people who would be interested in what you have to offer.
Offer a lot of free gifts and advice…. remember people on social media sites don’t really like hard-sells.
This can be a very effective and rewarding way to drive traffic and create a long-term fan base and a reputation in your niche.
