Increasing and maintaining blog traffic
Content is King
Without a doubt the most essential method of both bringing in and retaining high levels of traffic is through constant generation of high quality, unique content. Regardless of whatever search techniques are used to generate visitors to your site, if they’re not greeted by useful information and interesting articles they will leave and most probably not return.
It’s all too easy to take a step back and go to another site in a few mouse clicks, so it’s essential that you provide a service or a level of quality that keeps visitors at your site, and ensures their return. Blogs are one of the most dedicated methods of bringing in traffic, but the real aim is to retain visitors, obtain repeat custom, subscribers, recommendations, inbound links and build up a community where your site’s visitors are engaged and compelled to provide their own input.
Blog posts are unlike other forms of written literature. Web users scan pages, so it’s important that the useful points are easy to find. Keep paragraphs short, use bullet points and lists, blockquotes, close-captioning and other visual techniques to keep your copy interesting. Large blocks of boring copy will not get read.
Don’t forget to utilise the power of keywords within your posts. Consider what people will be searching for, what are the central points of an article and what words and phrases will stand out against other similar sites. Use visual keys to identify keywords. But don’t overdo it. Don’t sacrifice the quality of your copy for the sake keyword spamming.
Getting people to your site
- Promote articles through 3rd party sites. In the case of a sports blog this could be other sports blogs and websites, sports news aggregators, general news sites, directories, showcase sites etc.
- Ensure that the blog URL is on all print and stationary and in the signature of emails. It’s a basic, obvious point but essential nonetheless.
- Use comment sections on other blogs, forums and sites to promote your blog. DO NOT SPAM. Reply genuinely, but include your website URL in your signature. Most blog comment areas will also use your display name as a link to your site as well.
- Guest authoring. This works 2 ways. Writing guest posts for other blogs can sometimes be more effective then a post on your own blog. This is especially useful when trying to get your blog onto it’s feet and raise it’s profile. Similarly, other writers creating content for your site helps to maintain post frequency when ideas and news are in short supply, and serves to offer variety to the tone of your blog.
- Promote your site and blog through traditional SEO methods such as Google and MSN webmastering. Ensure that your site’s code is clean and easily searchable and acknowledge basic SEO standards such as including ‘title’ and ‘alt’ information.
- Use obvious post titles. Do not keyword spam your post titles but ensure that they accurately describe the article and will be easily searchable. Also make sure the post titles are displayed in the page title on each unique post page.
- Advertising and affiliates. Buy inbound links or swap reciprocal links with other high-ranking websites.
- Observe other high-traffic blogs in your niche. What methods are they applying to continue to attract and maintain this level of visitors? Take ideas and inspiration from similar blogs and websites.
- Use ping services like Pingomatic and Wordpress plugins to notify other sites when you’ve created new posts.
Keeping people interested
- RSS and ATOM feeds, newsletter subscriptions, even SMS updates. Make it easy for visitors to subscribe to your site. Getting visitors to give your email address while signing up to your newsletter will help to build up a database of potential clients.
- Email campaigns. Build up databases of email addresses through subscribers to your blog newsletter, existing clients, purchase lists of email addresses, use email addresses from commenters on your blog etc. Then send out regular email newsletters with the latest articles and company news. Encourage people to subscribe, advertise competitions or products.
- Ensure that your site is usable. Regardless of whether your blog contains high quality content or not – if it’s difficult to read or find – it will be useless. Clean, usable and aesthetically pleasing sites will hold your visitors for longer and help to promote their return.
- Serial Content. Creating series’ of posts, daily/weekly/monthly features, strings of similar-style content, lists, interviews and unique ideas keep visitors coming back for more.
- Update regularly. Your subscribers and regular visitors will constantly be thirsty for new news and articles. If you can’t provide this – they will go elsewhere. However it’s also essential not to overpost as this can overwhelm your readers and scare them away. The ideal number of posts to make per day or week is entirely dependent on the niche and topic of a blog, the size of it’s readership, the length and value of the posts and the manpower behind the blog. Researching and discovering the ideal post publishing frequency takes time and constant monitoring.
- Post Publishing Consistency. Regular visitors will grow to expect and anticipate the frequency of your articles. It’s essential that once you’ve decided on an ideal publishing frequency that you stick to it.
- Blogs are social. Utilise the power of social networking to build your community and promote interaction. Use polls, allow users to submit their own ideas and news, pictures, even audio and video. Allow users to create accounts and profiles.
- Provide services and products that the competition doesn’t. Blogs aren’t just about content and posts. Use your interface to promote other products, provide free downloads, audio or video content, games and offer live feedback and real-time chat solutions.
- Consider mobile devices. With an increase of smart phones and in particular the iPhone – more users are accessing websites through their phones. Don’t block this percentage of your traffic – ensure your blog is usable on mobile devices.
- iPhone apps. If your blog is updated often or contains useful news that needs to be accessed on the fly – look at building an iPhone app that pull in your latest posts and site content. Sites like last.fm, ign.com, twitter.com and facebook are already taking advantage of this.
- Gimmicks. Free prize draws, competitions, monthly or weekly features both attract new traffic and entice current visitors to interact more.
To summarise
Your blog will succeed if it’s providing useful information to people. Good blogs generate traffic because they provide continuous new content all the time, they retain that traffic because visitors enjoy coming back for more and it’s given to them.
All blogs work differently; they attract different types and levels of visitors and are designed for different purposes, whether that be to make money, advertise products, raise profiles or just rant or express an opinion. However the principles behind all successful blogs are generally the same:
- Provide high quality, unique content.
- Ensure your site is easy to use and navigate.
- Employ traditional SEO techniques as well.
- Look after your readers – your current community is just, if not more important than new visitors.
- Research and analyse your market, ensure that your blog tailors to this market in every aspect: tone of voice, appearance, topic, usability and in SEO criteria.
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Mitrea Andrei-vlad said:
Another great article, thank you.
Matt said:
Nicely said, and lots of great points in here. Content is definitely key/king.
Chris Hutcherson said:
I agree – what a great article, so many great thoughts & good reminders of what makes up good sites and keeps traffic coming – content! Thanks again.
graham | YourProHits.com, free fast traffic exchange said:
A well thought out and usefull blog, thanks.
do you consider traffic exchanges a valuable resource for bloggers?
Joseph Murray said:
Great article, you make some very good points here, thanks!
Marc Binells said:
i am currently working on integrating Email marketing in my blog, i stumbeled upon your post with google…thanks
Brad Hart @ A DoFollow Blog said:
I have to agree on the serial posts it is a big traffic generator, especially if you keyword your posts well and link them internally. I do them on a fair number of my blogs and using the in series plugin for wordpress really helps by linking them together automatically. My current series is a 50 state local news wrap up from around the country. I did 25 posts yesterday and I’ll do another 25 today. It not only lets me send traffic to some well written online newspapers, it lets me examine how people are the same and different across the country. If my schedule allows I will do a full 50 state posts on Wednesday.
nathan said:
Thanks guys, glad you enjoy!
@Brad Hart – wow I wish I had the time to put out that kind of volume. I couldn’t say what my average post frequency is because I have good and bad phases (which I need to work on to tidy up and improve consistency) but I’d guess over the past 6 months I’m getting no more than 2 a week. However I’m now aiming for quality over quantity, so loyal readers will stick it out to wait for a new article, and hopefully new visitors will be blown away!
Chelle said:
Great tips. I think there’s a big borderline between comment spam and genuine comments…one of the perks of having multiple blogs (most of mine are do-follow w/keyword luv) is I can tell real quick who’s a genuine commenter and who’s just out there to get a bunch of dofollow comments.
One thing I think you overlooked though is getting seen in search engines for popular search phrases. Most of my traffic anymore is organic search engine traffic, which has been much more profitable.
DoFollow List for 11-5-2008 : What Is A Blog said:
[...] redswish – a web design blog » Increasing and maintaining blog traffic Use comment sections on other blogs, forums and sites to promote your blog. DO NOT SPAM. Reply genuinely, but include your website URL in your signature. Most blog comment areas will also use your display name as a link to your site as well. Last 5 posts in Traffic BuildingBack To Business – October 3rd, 2008SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “DoFollow List for 11-5-2008″, url: “http://bloggingfornoobs.com/traffic-building/dofollow-list-for-11-5-2008/” }); Sphere: Related Content [...]
redswish - a web design blog » 1 year down! said:
[...] Increasing and maintaining blog traffic [...]
arm loan modification said:
May I add another point to your great list provided here.
In my point of view I believe that identifying your readers mind i also important in keeping them interested in your blog. That means we need to provide more and more content which most of our readers are looking at. I think you will agree with me. Thanks.
uniquelasvegastravel said:
Hey very nice blog!! Man .. Beautiful .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your blog and take the feeds also…
aroopk said:
Its like when many people are discussing SEO techniques and marketing gimmicks a more experienced SEO guy comes and says..all this is crap and content is king.. cliche but so true..
Websites said:
I agree content is king. As part of your seo effort will be looking at alexa, take a look at your alexa when you add more content!
vardis said:
Call be selfish but…….
I’m not a big fan of giving articles away to 3rd party sites. Why should I work hard and let them benefit? I’d rather publish my article on my own site ad have 3rd parties link to them.
Perhaps that’s just me!
Increase Traffic said:
Really nicely explained, man. You do a good job of rubbishing the misinformation out there. I appreciate the value of your content greatly!
Pagerank Checker said:
I strongly recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section. I’ll watch Google Webmaster Tools, and if the links don’t show up after a couple of weeks — I won’t go back to that blog again. Another suggestion: you should have a Top Commentator widget installed. Do Follow and Top Commentator will ensure that you have a successful blog with lots of readers!
nathan said:
@Pagerank Checker (really, your parents give you that name?!) – I do agree about the no follow in the comments, although I thought mine was turned off. I’ll have to look into that. The top commentator sounds like a plausible idea although I don’t really recall seeing it on any other blogs. It seems like more forum-style functionality.
Thanks for all the comments guys!
Pop Up Displays said:
Content is always king, but keyword luv helps it rule.
Alison Miles-Jenkins said:
Just instructing our designer to create a new website for our company using blog technology and found this useful, clear information to help us with the brief. Many thanks
jeniffer@watch hollywood movies for free said:
Another advantage of dofollow plugins is that more n more bloggers becum famiiar with site when they visit improves social networking by coming across different kinds of peole and their featured website making our blog more popular in long term