subject: How To Increase Traffic To Your Blog [print this page] If you want to monetize your blog the first step is getting enough traffic on it to start earning some money via advertisements. To accomplish that, writing good and relevant content is crucial, since that will get visitors to come back for more and recommend it to their friends... but it's not enough. There's many ways of increasing the traffic to your blog or website, but the ones listed here are free and only require some time and effort on your side.
Search Engine optimization (SEO)
If your content is relevant and clearly organized, your domain and urls have the right keywords on it, and generally your website follows the SEO guidelines, you have a lot done. Every time somebody searches for the keywords you have optimized for, you will get new visitors. If they find your site topical and interesting they will stay and probably browse more articles. Your main priority is that your users enjoy your content; keyword stuffed articles that are a pain to read are not going to accomplish that. To help search engines rank your articles highly, make your article titles relevant and try to stay on topic; if there's something else you want to talk about you can write another article on it later. Selecting the right keywords is also useful, most often than not long tail keywords have less competition and work better, since they are more similar to what people actually search for. Black hat SEO will only get you banned or penalized, so avoid it even if it might offer quick results.
Digg, Del.icio.us and other media sites
There're plenty of media sites that work by allowing their visitors to submit content they find interesting all over the Web and displaying links to those articles on their pages. You can get many visitors if your articles get Digged, so make it easy for your visitors to do that by providing them with buttons to automatically submit your site to those media sites. Enabling the ping feature on your blog software will also notify services such as Weblogs.com about your new article, and that will lead more visitors to your website, as well, at no effort from you.
Joining conversations
If you want visitors you must be the first promoter of your blog. Post relevant and useful comments on other blog articles that you find interesting, making sure your user name links to your blog. Nobody likes a spammer, so don't post things like "Oh, I really loved your blog, by the way, here is a link to mine," since that will get you banned and will give a bad impression. Join in the conversation and if people like your comments they will probably check you out.
If you're a frequent user of forums, add links to your blog in your signature. That means you will get both page-rank (what some people call link juice, and is a very important factor on your rankings) and traffic from people who are interested in the subjects you like to write about.
Getting people to link to your site
Chances are that if you link to websites that you consider relevant their webmasters will return the favour and link back to you, and links from highly ranked websites are invaluable! Also your visitors will like that you're providing them with more resources, and everything adds to make a user come back to your site frequently. Stay away from shady link exchange programs that won't give you traffic but can instead get you banned. Instead, focus on submitting your blog to relevant directories on your areas of interest. Google, for example, pays a lot of attention to DMOZ, a human edited web directory. You can also contact webmasters directly, and ask them what are their conditions to include links to your site.
Remember that links incoming from sites whose content is related to yours are much more valuable. If your site is about gardening and you get a link from a car seller it won't really do as much as getting a link from a smaller, but gardening oriented, website.
Update frequently
Visitors will stop coming back to your blog if there's no new content often to catch their interest. Also, search engines spider more often websites that update frequently. For both of those reasons, try not to leave more than 2 days between article and article. Most blog software allows you to change the date on when a blog was posted, so maybe you want to split a very long article in three pieces and schedule it to appear in 3 different days.
RSS feeds
RSS feeds are links to your blog content that can be read on a feed reader, and will notify users subscribed to it when there's new content on your blog. To improve the odds that a user actually clicks on the feed link and goes to your site, try to make sure that the first paragraph says enough about the subject to know what the article is about but leaves them hungry for more. Most websites can also publish RSS feeds from other sources. If your articles are interesting and people do that for your site, you will get new visitors coming from their sites every time you publish something new.
Those are just some ways of increasing your traffic that doesn't include paying for it. You will need to adapt them to whatever works better for your type of site. Using a web analytics package you can see how your visitors are reaching your site. You will be able to see sites that are sending your traffic and contact their webmasters to say thanks, or maybe write some extra articles on those keyword searches that are bringing visitors to your website. The results won't be instantaneous, but with a bit of constant effort you will see your users (and your earnings) grow.
