10 Ways to Increase your Website Traffic

In one my other Pillar Posts, I had explained the 5 Best SEO Tactics that any blogger would have to incorporate in his website to make it optimized for the search engines. Now, I would like to take this a step further by putting forth my 10 best ideas to increase traffic on your website. The most common question any blogger would have is ‘How to get more and more people visit my blog?’ or ‘How to make my blog universally accepted?’. You may be writing post after post, but still not able to cross that 50 or 100 visitors per day mark, how to make this shoot up the horizon and cross maybe a 1000 unique visitors per day? Wouldn’t that be something to relish upon? This would be every blogger’s ultimate aim and motive to write creatively and attract every other blogger to come and subscribe to your feeds.

For any blogger, the early days are the toughest where one has to concentrate on his content without actually realizing the potential of his posts to other fellow writers. Here are some basic steps that would help you out of this downtime, and even if you have optimized well and realized good amount of traffic, following these rules will only result in improving further.

1. Write a Pillar Post – or what some of them call it as “Killer Articles“. This is really helpful in attracting visitors and holding them back onto your site for quite a while. Write in brief about the points and use highlights/bold/underline to catch attention to important subject matter in your post. This will even suffice the need to catch the eye of those bloggers who just happen to “glance” over the entire article. Make sure that you have one Pillar Post for every 5-8 normal posts.

2. Add a Blog – If you have a corporate website or a more “static” website, make sure to add a blog to it. This way you can write regular posts and keep it updated to increase the visibility and make it more dynamic. This will give your visitors a reason to come back and revisit your blog, and thus increases your search engine traffic.

3. RSS Feed – Be sure to have a RSS Feed to your website the very day you publish your blog. This will allow visitors to subscribe to your feed and read your articles at their convenience. This will also ensure that your updates are regularly conveyed across and they come back to your site every-time you have a new article. You can use FeedBurner to publish your feeds, this also allows you to maintain your subscriber list and gives you more information about the readers and their feed statistics. It is a free tool to which you can subscribe and get started in minutes.

4. Email Subscriptions – Be sure that you enable Email subscriptions, since some of the users are more comfortable getting their updates delivered to their mail accounts. If you use FeedBurner, this will just be an option that you need to activate and copy the link to your post.

5. Social Networking – Be sure to spend at-least 30mins a day to network among your co-bloggers, exchange ideas, read their articles, participate in blog challenges, comment about their work, give your genuine feedback on other’s posts and re-tweet interesting articles. When you do socialize among your likes, be sure that you are there because you respect others’ work and not just because they may help you publicize your blog. Be honest in your comments, and write a comment as if it was your blog post, spending as much time and thought in the process.

6. Promote your Post – Once you write a post and publish it on your blog, your immediate next step is to push it to all your communities. This will enable people in your network know about your new post, post in a forum, get some of your friends to tweet your article(don’t beg to be linked or tweeted, if your post is of interest, it will happen without asking).

7. Create a quiz – A quiz contest on your blog can be quite interesting for other bloggers to participate and exchange their thoughts on a common subject. Visitors may actually take the quiz and also share the result on their blog, thus giving them more publicity and links. You can use ProProfs to create an online quiz.

8. Add Humor – Once in a while, add some humor to your post that has a refreshing effect on your readers and allows them to take a moment away from all the intense subjects of SEO or Traffic. You can consider adding a cartoon strip or funny images that may actually relate to your post.

9. Release an eBook – Though this might sound difficult, this is proved to be one of the most effective ways to publicize your blog and letting other bloggers and webmasters come and download your eBook. Include a direct download link in your website and promote the same in related blogs and forums. This will let your readers understand your complete flow of thoughts and will surely leave them asking for more.

10. Social Bookmarking Sites – Promote your blog by asking your friends to share on the various bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, DIGG, Reddit, Delicious etc. You can allow visitors to share any article/post of yours on any of the various bookmarking sites by using the AddToAny plugin(more of WordPress Plugins explained here).

I think I should have started off this post like ‘100 Best Practices to increase website traffic’ since there are many more ideas and practices that may result in good traffic (both new and returning). In my next post, I will continue from where I have stopped here and explore more avenues of Traffic Generation. Hope you liked what you read, and do leave your comment to share your thoughts.

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