How to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog

Imagine that you’ve taken the giant leap to start a blog to bring more brand awareness and exposure to your small business.

You’ve taken all the necessary steps to build your blog platform and now comes the day when you create your very first blog post. You spend hours crafting a post that is educational, inspirational and positions you as an expert in your field. You’re as proud of this post as if it truly were your own flesh and blood. And, most of all you can’t wait to share it with the world.

So, you hit “publish” and wait for your readers to react to your nuggets of wisdom. (And, you wait and wait and wait…)

Why aren’t you generating any comments? Why aren’t people emailing you thrilled with your expert advice?

It’s called “lack of traffic” and if there’s no traffic to your blog, no one will ever see it. Period.
So, how can you begin enticing readers to visit your blog? Here are ten quick ways to generate a flow of non-stop blog traffic:

1. Create Great Content
Obviously, this goes without saying. But, your content needs to educate, entertain, inspire or offer a solution to your reader’s problems. You want to try to accomplish at least one of these tasks with every blog post.

2. Keep Your Posts Short, Sweet and to the Point
We’re living in an age where short attention spans are the norm. Keep your posts around 500 words so that you don’t lose your ADD readers.

3. Get Your Blog Indexed With the Big Boys
Take the time to index your blog in the top directories such as Dmoz.org, Yahoo, Google and Technorati. You can easily do this manually in less than 30 minutes.

4. Submit Your Blog Feed to Smaller Blog Catalogs
There are hundreds of niche blog catalogs on the Internet. When readers are searching catalogs for blogs to read, you want to make sure that your blog is there. For about $25, you can use a service such as SEOFlicks to manually post to hundreds of blog catalogs.

5. Entice Your Readers to Subscribe to Your Blog
Offer your readers a free goodie (such as a downloadable ebook, whitepaper, audio class, etc.) if they subscribe to your blog. Make sure that your readers can subscribe to your blog through an RSS feed as well as email. You can use Feedburner to manage your subscriptions.

6. Include Your Blog URL on All of Your Social Networks
Include an obvious link to your blog on all of your social networks including: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Flickr, Slideshare, etc. You’ll be surprised how many folks find your blog through your social networks.

7. Get Involved in the Blog Community
Blogging is a social activity. Read other blogs, comment on other blogs and link to other blogs within your own blog posts.

8. Engage With Your Readers
When your readers make comments on your blog, make sure that you comment back. You want to encourage a natural back and forth dialogue between you and your readers.

9. Offer to Write a Blog Post for a High-Traffic Blog
Research various blogs within your particular industry by heading over to Technorati. Read the blogs, comment on the blogs and interact with the blogger. Once you’ve established a relationship, send them an email politely letting them know that you would be willing to be a guest blogger for them at any time in the future. Include a link to your own blog so that they can check out the quality of your work.

10. Use Your Blog Posts in Your Ezine or Newsletter
Instead of writing a brand new article for your weekly ezine or newsletter, send out the first few paragraphs of one of your past blog posts. Then include a link for the reader to continue reading the post on your blog.
Once you implement these ten strategies, you’ll certainly notice a spike in traffic and begin generating comments and interaction from hundreds (even thousands) of readers in your particular industry.