Owning a blog and/or a website is becoming common thing today. Blogs are becoming popular with its ability to share knowledge, information and personal thoughts to the internet. It's easy to build a blog, but it can be difficult to build a successful blog with significant traffic.
Some blogs can thrive and become massively popular, while some others remain unknown, Over the years, successful blogs can see millions of visits each month. There's an art to increasing a blog's traffic, and some that has stumbled on some of that knowledge can have an adequate advantage in popularizing their blogs.
There are many ways to promote and making a blog popular. Although the ways may not work for everyone, but the purpose that is well intended for independent people, marketing professionals to in-house blogs and big companies, can be beneficial if applied and done properly.
Target the Audience that Likes to Share
Writing have strategies. When creating a strategy about who you're writing for, consider that audience's ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in appreciating the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles and content types regularly play better than others on the web.
Blog owners should be able to identify the audience groups that have high concentrations of sharing methods and will. Targeting blog content at less-share-likely groups may not be a bad decision, but it will decrease the propensity for your blog's work to spread across the web.
Participate in Communities Where Audience Gathers
Blog owners should have a list of blogs, forums and websites, as well as social media communities where discussions and content are being posted on their topic.
Finding these communities can be difficult if the blog is targeting specific audience that have a small market. Doing Google searches can ease some of the search.
From the list gathered, blog owners can participate in the conversation, write posts, comment, and so forth. Blog owners can also do some expansion by using a web-based tool like DoubleClick's Ad Planner. By being a good web citizen, they can be rewarded with traffic, trust and fans. By link-dropping, spamming or trolling, they can get a reputation as a blogger no one wants to associate with.
Sharing with Social Media
Social media networks are growing phenomenon. With the total of billions of users together, these networks are attracting vast amounts of time and interest from the internet users all around the world.. And those that participate on these services can fit to the distributors by sending the words about the intended blog.
However, leveraging these networks to attract traffic requires patience, study, attention to changes by the social sites and consideration in what content to share and how to do it. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ are the top three social media today. By connecting with users on those sites with whom the blog owner already share a personal or professional relationships, influence can be built.
Consistent participation, good contents to share and memorable impressions can increase followers and fans. These people will drive traffic back to the blog, further increasing the shared contents. For many bloggers, social media is the single largest source of traffic, particularly in the early months after launch. While SEO drives mainly searches from search engine, social media attracts attracts the people into attention.
Participate in Q+A Sites
Every day, thousands of people ask questions on the web. Popular services like Yahoo! Answers, Answers.com, Quora, StackExchange, Formspring and more serve those hungry for information whose web searches couldn't track down the responses they needed.
The best strategy is to provide high value to a Q+A community by engaging in those places where:
- The question quality is high, and responses thus far have been thin.
- The question receives high visibility.
- The question is something the blog owner can answer in a way that provides value.
Answering questions can also be a great value by producing an actual blog post to tackle them, then linking back. Answers provided on Q+A sites should be authentic, particularly if the you are linking your blog.
Participate in Social Sharing Communities
When the major social networking sites are not enough, social sharing communities like Reddit, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Tumblr, and many more, can channel traffic to a blog.
Each of these sites have different rules, formats and ways of participating and sharing content. As with participation in blog or forum communities described above, blog owners need to add value to these communities to see the value back. Blog owners should engage authentically to create fans, links, and traffic.
These communities are also excellent sources of inspiration for blog posts. By observing what performs well and earns recognition, blog owners can tailor their contents to meet those guidelines and get the rewards in visits and awareness.
Making Your Blog SEO-Friendly
Search engines are a massive opportunity for traffic, yet many bloggers ignore this channel for a variety of reasons that usually have more to do with fear and misunderstanding than true problems. SEO, when done right, should never interfere with great writing. In 2012, Google received over 5 billion daily searches from around the world, and that number is only growing.
Taking advantage of this massive traffic opportunity is of tremendous value to bloggers, who often find that much of the business side of blogging, from inquiries for advertising to guest posting opportunities to press and discovery by major media entities comes via search.
SEO for blogs is simple and easy to set up, particularly if you are using an SEO-friendly platform like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!.
SEO can make to a blog's traffic and overall success. 20 percent of the effort and tactics to make the content optimized for search engines will yield 80 percent of the value possible.
Using Analytics to Improvise
Analytics enable the blog owner to see how their site work in the eye of visitors. Analytics can give information about visitors, from where they visit, sources of high quality traffic, links, and much more.
Analytics have been a metric for marketing on the web. Blog owners should pay attention to the numbers and information to see where they succeed and in which part of the web they failed. With these information, you can create new strategies to further improve your blog.
Employing analytics is critical to knowing where a website or blog succeed, and where they have more opportunity.
Playing with Decoration and Graphics
Websites and blogs have 2 types of visitors: search engine spiders and humans. Search engine spiders are mainly used by search engines to browse through the site, give it ranks, listing it into their database, etc.. Humans on the other hand, are the main target.
When search engine spiders are unable to judge graphics, humans appreciate them, sometimes even more than the information given from the blog's pages. Graphic illustrations, photos and other visually appealing images can leverage the talent of a blog.
When using images, it is recommended to create a way for others to use them on their own sites legally and with permission, but in such a way that benefits your blog as the graphic creator.
Using Attractive Designs
The power of beauty, usability and professional design can not be overstated. When readers look at a blog, the first thing they judge is how it feels from a design in their perspective. Sites that use default templates or have old unattractive design will receive less trust, a lower time-on-page, fewer pages per visit and a lower likelihood of being shared. Those that feature stunning design that clearly indicates quality work will experience the reverse - and amazing benefits.
When a website or blog is designed, it should be well made with elements within place and able to show flawlessly across many browsers. Designs should not put a heavy load on the server, which will decrease page loading time.
Conducting Keyword Research
A big part of showing up in search engines is targeting the terms and phrases your audience are actually typing into a search engine. It's hard to know what these words will be unless you do some research.
When you are writing a blog post, keyword research is best utilized for the title and headline of the post. Optimizing a post to target a specific keyword can be difficult. 80 percent of the value comes from merely using the phrase effectively in the title of the blog post, and writing high quality content about the subject.
Referencing Your Own and Others
The web and the internet are growing. The internet consists of websites woven with links that connect them to one another, making the term "web". The web is not static, and links are what makes the web. And on the internet, links are appreciated, sometimes more than any. Readers appreciate links, as do other bloggers, site owners and even search engines.
When a blog owners reference their own material in-context and in a way that's not manipulative, they potentially draw visitors to their other content, and at the same time, give search engines a nice signal about those previous posts.
Perhaps even more valuable is referencing the content of others. Other site owners will often receive alerts or look through their incoming referrers to see who's talking about them and what they're saying. Linking out is a direct line to earning links, social mentions, emails and new relationships with those that referenced.
Using to Web Profiles and Email Connections
When the internet is growing into a massive place with billions of population, people are engaging themselves to the internet, providing information and details about themselves. These are done by social media, media sharing sites, as well as web portals and other web 2.0 sites.
Including the blog's link on an actual profile page is among the most obvious, and also valuable. On any service where interaction takes place, those interested in someone and what he/she share, will follow links he/she provide on his/her profile pages. This can create an opportunity to earn loyal visitors and further sharing.
Bloggers, as well as other active internet users are most likely to send emails. When given an opportunity in a conversation that's relevant, you can bring up your blog, a specific post or a topic you have written. Email signature is also able to promote your blog.
Creating Surveys and Adding a Value to Conversation
Web surveys can be run to produce high engagement and great topics for conversation. Surveys may create debate, and when it is done correctly, anything mentioned on the survey, and links to actual sites with related information have a high opportunity to seen.
Surveys that has debates involves people with different thoughts and views. Diving into the conversation can be a great way to present the blog owner's point-of-view. This can earn attention from those interested in the discussion and potentially get links and traffic from the industry leaders as part of the process.
Attend and Host Events
Despite the immense power of the web to connect people regardless of geography, in-person meetings are still remarkably useful for bloggers seeking to grow their traffic and influence. The people blog owners meet and connect with in real-world settings are far more likely to naturally lead to discussions about their blogs and ways they can help each other. This yields guest posts, links, tweets, shares, blog roll inclusion and general business development
Subscriptions and Feeds
Visitors come and go. Loyal customers will return and forward the news. The massively populated internet consists of many services that can drive people in and away. Most visitors that happen to land on a blog/website will scan the information given on the page, and decide whether to stay and browse the links provided or navigate away, all within a few seconds.
One way to make these wandering visitors to return, and create loyal customers, is by giving them an easy solution to keep themselves up-to-date with the blog/website content. RSS feed encourage people to sign up and opt-in.
Learning what plays well for those who subscribe to the blog content can help you to become a better blogger, and earn more visits from RSS.
Participating and Commenting
Blogs are usually flow around comments. Comments are usual in a blog post, and these can be a way to see how popular the post is. Although, bloggers may see a lot of spam and irrelevant comments on their blogs, some can be a great value, and fewer are truly remarkable feedback.
Participating by commenting on other blogs, and use URL(s) to point back to the blog can be beneficial. Consistency matters, particularly on naming, and linking to internal pages or using a name that's clearly made for keyword-spamming rather than true conversation will kill your efforts before they begin.
Conclusion
Search engines and people appreciate quality and original contents. However, writing quality content can take time, especially to personal and in-house blogs that usually have the owner to be the writer. To be seen, blog owners should write quality content frequently and promote their blog in numerous ways.
The web, blogs and website, are all connected with each other with links that share information across pages all over the internet. To be create traffic, you have to see how their your blog's URL and information link to other places to observe how its market is at the current state, at the given time.