Link Roundup - 20 Essential Ways To Increase Blog Traffic

The more I surf, the more I find to share with you.  I've answered a lot of questions for people today on getting traffic to their blog.  It seems to be a big question with a big answer, the reason being because there isn't just one solution to the problem of getting readers to your blog.

What I have for you today is a link roundup (or a resource dump as I like to call it) of important articles, tools, and resources regarding the issue of driving traffic to your site.  Some of these are articles from Hot Shot Blogger because I've already taken the time to write about them for you, and others are fresh off the web.

1) Post Basics 202 - Adding Social Sharing Buttons - Those social sharing buttons are essential if you want people to spread your content around to the masses.  Learn how to add them to your blog in under three minutes!

2) Ping-o-Matic - The best free pinging service on the web.

3) Google Analytics - Without a doubt, one of the most important free resources a blogger can have... a service that tells you how much traffic you're getting, where it's coming from, how long visitors stay, and more!

4) Google Keyword Tool - Another important and free resource.  Use this to research hot keywords with low competition so you can SEO your posts, headlines, and tags.

5) Stumble Upon - This site will bring some traffic your way.  To learn how to add your site to their listings, look at our how-to guide HERE.

6) Yahoo Answers - Whatever your niche is, you can use Yahoo Answers to your advantage to bring traffic in to your blog and build your reputation as an expert in your niche.  Sign up for an account, search the open questions pertaining to your niche, and answer away!  Your goal here is to have your answers chosen as the best one, so you'll want to be as in depth (and polite) as possible.  Also don't forget to add links to your own helpful blog posts that pertain to the question, as well as put your link in the "What's Your Source" field.  Whatever you do, try not to appear 'spammy' about sharing your link.

7)  Getting Traffic 107 - The Mega SEO Resource Guide - You really want to take a look at this one.  If you have any hope at all of people finding your blog from search engines, you want to take care of some basic SEO stuff on your blog and within your posts.  The Mega SEO Resource Guide has a great info-graphic to help you out, as well as links to several helpful articles that are crucial to your SEO success.

8) How to get 2,281 Subscribers, And Increase Blog Traffic by 69% - In 27 Days - Ok, so Derek's post is a bit long (quite a bit) but he does give you a step by step rundown of how he managed to increase his blog traffic by 69% in such a short time.  He used a Podcast (I won't tell you how, you'll just have to read it for yourself and put it into action)!

9) Run a giveaway with Rafflecopter - Granted, you'll need to have a following already for this to bring you more traffic (you know, you're going to need some blog subscribers and twitter followers) but running a giveaway is a great way to attract attention to your blog.  People love free stuff, and Rafflecopter is a great free resource for you to give your free stuff away to the masses.  Using Rafflecopter is two-fold in bringing you traffic: 1) People like free stuff, so your readers are bound to want to come back and see what you're offering, and 2) The way Rafflecopter works is by getting people to tweet your post, add you on Facebook, follow your RSS and more in order to gain entries into your 'raffle' for the free stuff, so they're spreading your website around to others, who will then in turn do the same because they want their entries as well.  Rafflecopter = Awesome traffic possibilities for your blog.

10) Getting Traffic 303 - Getting Traffic With Press Releases - (Finally a how-to video and why this works)!  Doing a press-release would be a good thing when you have a giveaway going on with Rafflecopter.  Can't hurt!

11) Free-Press-Release - You'll need an account, but this site will let you send out those press releases you'll be doing after checking out #10.  And if this site doesn't float your boat quite the way you'd like, then you can check out Mashable's list of 20 Free Press Release Sites.

12) Write great content! - This should really go without saying, but without great content, you're not going to get any traffic.  Check out our post HERE about how to write great content.

13) Get custom gear on Zazzle.com - What?  What the heck is Zazzle?  Zazzle is a print on demand company where you can create a free account and then put your logo, slogan, website (or anything else) on shirts, hats, bumper stickers, posters, coffee cups etc.  While this is cool in itself, you can generate some traffic to your blog this way.  Consider buying a bunch of bumper stickers (about 3 bucks) with your website url and putting them on your vehicles as well as making your family and friends take one.  Now you've got mobile advertising.  The same goes for shirts and hats that you and your friends can wear.  On top of this, you can get custom gear like coffee cups, shirts, etc, and then raffle them away to followers with Rafflecopter (see #9) and then your followers are walking around in your gear too.  If your blog is big enough, consider hiring an graphic designer to make some gear on Zazzle for you, and then you can sell your branded clothing etc on your blog... and this is where it's sneaky, because you're making money and your followers are advertising for you.

14) Submit your blog to big blog directories like Technorati.

15) Make video Tutorials and post them on YouTube - You might not see how this can help drive traffic to your blog, but it really can.  I run another blog dedicated to Photoshop Tutorials, and a lot of my traffic comes from tutorials I'd posted on YouTube years ago that are still going strong today.  The key is to have a professional looking video intro (get one on Fiverr.com for $5), make sure you announce what your blog is at the start of the video, and show your url at the end of the video as well with an invite for people to visit.  Also don't forget to appropriately tag your video with Keywords found with the Google Keyword tool (#4) and the YouTube Keyword Tool, and put a link directly to your website in the description.  Be sure to have a Google Keyword rich title, and you might just find your video ranking high in the Google search engine results.  The more videos you post that are valuable to viewers, the more traffic you will get.

16) Use Twitter to your advantage.  If you're not already on Twitter, go create a free account now.  Search out other Twitter users in your niche and start adding them.  If I were you I would add around 200 per day.  A lot of them will follow you back as a courtesy.  After about a week, go back and stop following those who have not followed you in return.  Before you know it you'll have a fairly large twitter following that will start growing on it's own.  From day one you need to be tweeting about the updates on your blog with links to your posts.  Don't just tweet once or twice a day, try to tweet 10 - 15 times a day and do it at different times.  Some users only get on in the morning, others late at night.  If you don't want to sit around at the computer all day, then use an automated twitter messaging service like Social Oomph (find out HERE at Makeusof's article).  Don't forget to have a button on your blog in an visible place that will allow readers to follow you on Twitter.

17) Use some of your best advertising space for your own purposes.  Don't be afraid to advertise yourself on your own blog.  Use that prime real-estate to invite people to follow you by e-mail, RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever other social network you're on.

18) Be active on Forums in your niche.  Search out and join forums that are related to your niche, and put your blog link (if allowed) in your forum signature.  Be polite and participate daily on the forums, and try to establish yourself as an expert in the field.  This will help increase your online reputation as you offer advice and help to others, and will get your link out there to people who will find it useful.  Targeted traffic is important, and a great way to get it is by letting people on Forums that respect you see it every time you post.  Be careful not to spam the forums with your link.  Having it in the signature is more than enough.

19) Write articles for other websites online.  Writing quality content for sites like Associated Content (Now Yahoo Voices), and Squidoo will get your name out there and help establish you as an expert in your niche, but it will also allow you to link the article back to relevant posts on your own blog, thus getting your link out there to the masses.  People who read what you wrote on those other sites will be inclined to click on the links to see what interesting content you've suggested for them to look at.  The same principle applies to guest blogging, although as a new and unknown blogger it will be hard to get guest blogging gigs, and as a guest blogger you don't get the links by linking to yourself, but rather in your author bio.

20) Learn what not to do in your blog so you don't scare away the visitors you do get.  We have a post HERE about scaring away your visitors, and I think you'll want to give it a read.  It doesn't matter how many techniques you use to drive traffic to your blog if visitors come in just to have you chase them back out the door again.

Well, that's it for this link roundup.  I've given you 20 essential ways to increase traffic to your blog, and I hope you found them useful.  If you liked this post, don't forget to share it with your friends.

Are there techniques we've missed for increasing traffic to your blog?  Let us know in a comment below.  As always, we love to hear what you have to say!

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Getting Traffic 303 - Getting Traffic With Press Releases

Not only can you get great traffic for a short period of time, but you can also be on the first page of Google for a few days if you utilize this strategy right.  Take a look at a great video I came across on YouTube today.  I want you all to see it, and I want to know what you think about it in a comment below.



Do you use press releases to generate traffic or a high temporary page ranking?  If so, how has this worked out for you?  What free (or paid) press release sites do you use?

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Getting Traffic 106 - How To Scare Away All Your Visitors

So I'll bet you're wondering why you'd want to scare away all of your visitors, right?  Well, no, you probably aren't, and there's no good reason to want to.  You want them to come in, relax, and stay a while.  Let's have a gander at some things we shouldn't do then if we want to keep our readers.

1) Pop-ups

Pop up ads are like shoving a blood-sucking vampire into the face of someone who's just walked in your door.  Even if the pop-up is just asking visitors to subscribe, they are an irritation that will make visitors not want to come back.  Who wants to close out a popup every time they visit your blog?

2) Ad Viruses

For this one lets think back to websites like surfthechannel (if you ever went there).  Surfthechannel was a website that let you watch TV and movies for free.  The issue: they sold advertising space to people who were lacing their ads with viruses.  So every time a visitor went into the site and the advertisement loaded, a virus was downloaded to the user's computer.  Lesson for bloggers: Be careful of who your ad space goes to.  Google Adsense and Chikita are two good advertising companies you can trust, but you will need to be wary if you sell ad space to individuals.

3) Linking to Questionable Sites

This is almost the same as point number two.  Be sure that if you link to another website or article in a post that you thoroughly check the site out to make sure that a) they aren't fraudulent, b) their site doesn't have any viruses c) the ads on their site don't have any viruses.  If you send people to sites that are fraudulent or give them viruses, they're not going to come back to see where else you might send them.

4) Lack of Content

We've talked about what a lack of content can do to your site before... it can kill it, and let's face it, who wants to walk in on a murder scene?  People are visiting your site looking for good content, and probably lots of it.  If they come in and see only a few posts, they're going to hit the back button.

5) Trying to Sell Something That Looks Fraudulent

How many of you have stumbled across a site that looks crisp and clean, but the only thing on the site is an attempt to sell you somebody's secret way to make millions of dollars?  People are generally very quick to back away from anything that looks too good to be true.  Lesson:  If you're selling something legitimate, then don't oversell your product, and sell it through a legitimate selling platform like Amazon or Zazzle.

6) Websites That Aren't User-Friendly

The basic concept of web design is that your website needs to be user friendly and be easy to navigate.  People should be able to find what they need in just a few clicks.  If you frustrate your visitors by writing information they can't even navigate to, then they won't be coming back.

7) Music

Back in the early days of the internet, somebody somewhere thought it would be a cute idea to put music on their website so that people could listen to that cute little song that made you think of kittens while you browsed their page.  And then someone thought that they should put heavy metal on their goth site, and another person wanted music on their site too.  But what if your visitors don't want to hear the type of music you stuck on your site?  What if they're sitting in bed in the middle of the night next to a sleeping spouse, and your page starts blaring death metal at top volume unexpectedly?  Music on your site: don't do it!

8) Profane Content

Ok, so maybe you have a site dedicated to obscene photos or language.  If so, then ignore this point.  But if you're a regular blogger like most of us are, then keep in mind that the average user doesn't want to see obscene pictures or bad language (and neither do most advertising companies like Adsense or Chikita).  Be careful, you may not be cursing or posting bad pictures, but what about your advertisers?  This is the same as advertisers putting viruses in their ads.  You have to be wary of what ads are going on your site, or you may come in one day to see a naked pic of some guy or girl there in your sidebar or between your posts.

9) Loud Advertisements

It seems that somehow we keep coming back around to advertisements on your blog.  Some of the ads I hate the most are the ones that are a video that starts playing a few seconds after you enter a site.  This goes right with point 7.  If visitors don't want automatic music on a site, they don't want noisy ads either.

While I'm sure there are a lot more things that webmasters can do to scare away all of their visitors, these are some of the top ways to get the job done.  What do you think?  What are some things that chase you away from a website?  Let us know in a comment below, and don't forget to subscribe for more great tips on building your blog!

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Getting Traffic 104 - Stumble Upon

Like using the Ping-O-Matic, adding your site to Stumble Upon is one of the easiest ways to start getting traffic, and should be one of the first things you do after setting up your blog.

What is Stumble Upon?  It's a website that allows users to install a toolbar into their browser with a 'Stumble' button.  Users make an account with Stumble Upon and then choose their interests.  After that, whenever they click the 'Stumble' button, their web browser jumps to a new page matching one of their interests!  It's a fun thing to do when you have some time to kill, and it has helped thousands of people discover new favorite sites.

How does this help you?  Simple:

1) Go to Stumble Upon and sign up for an account (free).

2) Install the Stumble button into your web browser (you can uninstall it easily as soon as you're done with this tutorial).

3) Go to your website.  Once you're at the homepage of your blog or website, use the stumble tool bar to add your site to the stumble search engine.  Be sure to set it to the appropriate category, and put an interesting and accurate description into the description box.  Add it to the Stumble site, and you're done!

4) At this point you can uninstall the stumble toolbar from your web browser if you want to.

Congratulations, now people from all over the world will be 'stumbling' onto your website.  The whole process takes just a few minutes.

Keep in mind that some of these 'stumblers' you get may not stick around on your site, and may keep on stumbling along, which is really useless traffic to you as guestblogging.com points out.  I still maintain however that some of my favorite sites have been found by using stumble, and there is the possibility that you may get some loyal traffic from it, but perhaps not as much as you would hope for.  It is worth a try anyway.

To discover more great tutorials and articles about building or monetizing your blog, click on the category tabs at the top of the page!

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Getting Traffic 105 - Forums And Backlinks

As you've seen, you can get traffic to your blog in a number of different ways: Search engines like Google, ping-o-matic, stumble upon, social networks, word of mouth in the form of other sites sending traffic your way via backlinks...  Today we're going to talk about you doing some footwork (or typing work as the case may be) by using forums to send traffic to your site.

We know that the more backlinks you have out there to your site, the higher up your site goes in the search engine rankings.  Forums can help you push your site up in the rankings as well as send you some direct traffic, and here's how:

1) Find a forum that matches whatever topic you blog about.  For example, let's say you blog about cats.  Go out into the internet world and find a lively forum about cats.

2) Sign up on the forum, and customize your profile.  Many forums allow you to have a link and maybe even a banner or a few words in your forum 'signature'.  The signature shows up below every single post or reply you make in a forum.  Let's imagine the potential of this here for just a moment:

You sign up on the cat forum, and in your signature put:  
Visit my cat health site at www.cathealth.blogger.com.  (Yes, you want it in bold, and in a different color than black if you can.  Sometimes you can even make the signature a larger size).

Now you go onto that cat forum once a day and make one valuable, insightful post or reply to someone else's forum post, every day for a year.  (Don't reply with, 'wow that's cool...' or something else meaningless.  Try to be an active part of their forum community).

After a year you have made 365 posts on this cat forum, and below each post is the link to your site.  Odds are you're going to get at least a little direct traffic from people clicking on your link in your signature.  But even better than that is that the Google bots are out there crawling the web, and finding all of those backlinks you've made in your forum signature.  You slowly climb the search engine page ranks.

Let's imagine now that you've actually signed up to two different cat forums, and you make one post in each, every day for a year.  That's 730 of your links out there on the web
after only a year.

This is the first way you should use forums to get traffic to your site.

The second way you have to be careful with, as you don't want to be considered a 'spammer'.

1) Sign up for a few forums in your niche (topic), again we'll say they're cat forums because you're writing the best cat blog around.

2) Post insightful, meaningful content on the forums in posts and replies to other people's posts.

3) Every once in a while you'll get the opportunity to post a link to one of your posts in a reply.  Let's say you've written a post about what to do when your cat is sick, and you've just come across a person on the forum asking about what to do when your cat gets sick.  Simple, you give a little information and then give a link to your post and say, "I've already written a great post about this on my blog if you want to check it out!"  And there you have it, yet another link to your site on the web, and more chances for people to click on the link and give you some traffic from the forums.

I say to be careful because if you do this too often, they will call you a spammer and you might get removed from the forums.  But if you're giving them a link with valid information to a specific problem every once in a while, odds are they'll appreciate the help.

If you're using the forums in this way, then you should really be signed up to three or more forums in your niche area so that you get more chances to do this.  You can also do this with Yahoo Answers, where they love for you to give links to valuable information that relates to the question.

Check out our other great tutorials and articles by clicking on the category tabs at the top of the page!

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