More ways to Generate Traffic

My recent posts have been more about traffic generation and SEO. I had a pillar post for “10 Ways to Increase Traffic” and also wrote about “Guest Blogging” providing links to my first guest blog published on Leora Wenger’s personal website. All said and done, is this all a blogger can do to improve the visibility of his website to the outer world, or maybe we have neglected other means of achieving this. I thought I need to review this and found that several established bloggers have opined their thoughts in their blogs about the same. Here is a jist of what I found useful and easy to incorporate.

Leave Comments on Other Blogs – Make this a habit and spend almost an hour on a daily basis to read your fellow bloggers’ articles and comment on the same. You can of course include your website link to your profile and can expect at-least a handful of visitors from the site to spill over to yours in no time. You can use Comment Kahuna(read more) to find relevant blogs and to make your commenting task more easy.

Join a Blogging Community or Forum – There are several bloggers forums across the web, find relevant ones with good amount of subscribers and join the same. Read through the already posted questions and articles, leave your comment with your thoughts on the same. Also open up new topics relevant to your niche and ask questions.

Be the First to report – It is very important to keep yourself updated to the latest in your niche, it may be a new tool or a new version of software or a new update to an existing service. Your readers will also expect you to provide your review of the same, so make yourself aware of the features and write like a movie critic. Be sure to mention the good and the bad, give your honest opinion and leave it open ended for your readers to comment their thoughts.

Write a How-To Article – People are usually attracted to “Guides” especially ones that will resolve an existing issue they are facing. How To Guides are effective in reaching out and getting noticed in the blog world. Make the guide complete without arising the necessity for the readers to browse more about the topic to get a full picture.

Seasonal & Holiday Posts – If you write about specific holidays or seasons, it is expected to draw more visitors, be sure to keep a post ready for the upcoming holiday season or a sports event like “Cricket World Cup” or “BlackFriday Deals”.This will make visitors flock to your website like never before.

Create Freebies – Everyone likes something free, make use of this human nature and create something which your readers can download for free. It can be anything from a eBook to a free software. If you are a techie, you can think of creating a free CSS template or even a free WordPress Plugin. This can really bring you a lot more visitors than anything else since bloggers are always on the lookout for free tools to make their lives easy.

Launch a Contest – If you can afford to spend a little more on your blog, you can think of launching a contest like ‘Comment Contest’ or a ‘Re-tweet Contest’. This will require readers to re-tweet your article or comment on your post to get an entry into the contest. The winner can be gifted with either gift coupons or products/services from your sponsor. This will increase your traffic because the readers will have to come to your website to leave their comment or tweet your article to enter into the contest.

Use videos/screencasts – This is particularly helpful when writing ‘How-To’ guides, it is always better to create your own video or even capture your screen to explain to the users what exactly they are expected to do. There are several free tools available (like CamStudio) for capturing your screen-cast.

Interlink your pages – Always have 2 – 3 of your posts linked in any of your other posts. This will allow you to retain the visitor to your site for a longer period by re-directing him to another of your related article. This will also help to increase your search ranking because your links will be distributed across all pages of your website.

Most Popular Article – People would like to know what to expect from your website and what is it all about. It is effective to give relevant links on your home page to the most popular articles on your site thus giving it more visibility and even more traffic.The easiest way to achieve this will be to create a ‘Popular Articles‘ category on one of your sidebars.

To summarize the left-overs, I would say there are many other ways one can follow to attract more and more traffic to their website. These may include following good SEO practices, creating facebook fan pages, submitting your blog to blog directories, creating a mobile application for your website, use images, build HTML site-maps, use relevant keywords, and other offline methods like spreading the word among friends and family, print website  URL on business cards & email signatures, create stickers with your website URL and spread them around, put an ad on a local newspaper etc.

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