Blog Traffic Tips

Not all blog readers are young and have perfect 20/20 eyesight. Consider your readers, use a large font for your main text or at least make the text adjustable so your readers can increase the font based on their browser preferences.

To test whether your blog has adjustable fonts in your browser there is a font size setting. In Internet Explorer and FireFox it is under the “View -> Text Size” option where you can increase or decrease the font. If you do this and your blog’s text doesn’t change that means you have hard coded pixel values for your font settings. You may have to switch this to emphasis values using the “em” font size setting or use good old traditional font tags. If this sort of HTML and stylesheet coding is beyond you, enlist the help of your local web monkey or ask your friend who is a web monkey.

If you are absolutely determined to use a fixed font since any other font sizes totally wrecks your blog design consider making it big, not huge, but big enough so that any human can read it. You wouldn’t want to lose readers because they can’t read your blog entries would you?

Wayne Hurlbert who blogs at Blog Business World has written up a good how-to article (as he always does) about submitting your blog to the Yahoo directory.

I checked and was surprised to find out that I had never submitted my blogs to the Yahoo! directory so I spent 10 minutes getting it done. As a rule I don’t consider most directories too important but there are a handful of prominent directories that are worth the time, especially if you are having trouble getting your blogs into search engines. The Yahoo! directory is definitely worth your time given the prominence of Yahoo! so follow Wayne’s instructions on how to do it. Once you have done that move on to DMOZ (see below).

All Powerful DMOZ

I especially suggest you submit your site to DMOZ - The Open Directory Project because Google places a lot of value on DMOZ backlinks.

If you are interested in more directories to submit your site to take a look at this post about Free Directories from Entrepreneur’s Journey.

Two Vital Rules

There are two important rules to follow when submitting your blog to directories -

1. Make sure you follow the instructions to the letter. It’s very important you submit your blog to the right category in the directory and carefully fill out all the pertinent details about your blog.
2. You must have patience. Unfortunately some people will find that no matter how hard they try their site will never get listed. Some sites get listed in a day or two. I don’t know how it works but I do know that the best thing to do is submit and forget about it and definitely DO NOT submit more than once. There are human beings at the other end updating these directories so you don’t want to do anything that will make their job difficult.

While directories won’t send you much traffic they are important factors in your overall backlink strategy and since it doesn’t take much time it’s worth doing it for at least the big two - Yahoo! and DMOZ. If you have the time it doesn’t hurt to use the other directories as well, just don’t expect amazing results.

This is not a tip that I can explain the ins and outs of from a technical point of view. Story telling is a more creative activity, one which, when it comes to blogging I really love (I’m not so good around the camp fire story telling though!).

A fantastic traffic tip is to sit down and recount a story about something that just happened to you or one that you remember from your past that had strong impact on you. It’s best if you can tie it into the theme of your blog somehow and since most people blog about something relating to their lives it should not be too hard.

Don’t worry if you are not that great a writer, just think about how you would verbally tell the story and type it out. Keep it simple, you don’t have to impress people with your fantastic vocabulary, just let it flow naturally. The spellcheck will fix the most obvious errors and a good once over should bring it up to publishable standards (except for you perfectionists out there of course).

Stories are fantastic human attention grabbers. They invoke emotion and create that magic ingredient called empathy, which is one of THE best traffic building tools available to you. The more your audience can empathise with you and your stories the more rapport you will establish. Your loyal audience will grow as they come back each day to learn more about your life and how it reflects on their life.

This may seem like an obvious tip but it’s worth reiterating especially because many who begin blogging may not start out as writers. Learning the fundamentals of good writing is important and most bloggers (myself included) become better at blogging as a result becoming better writers. The two skills are linked.

Headings Capture Attention

From a copywriting point of view headings and sub-headings have proven to be effective at capturing and retaining the attention of readers. Copywriting’s purpose is usually to generate sales, or specifically to elicit an emotionally triggered response to the words written on paper or screen. While blogging doesn’t necessarily have the same purpose the techniques are just as sound.

Headings gain the attention of your readers and sub-headings ensure attention is retained from start to finish. Headings break down blocks of text to less daunting segments. Tests have been conducted on heading use which demonstrated that even if non-related headings were used they still were more effective at capturing the attention of readers than not having headings at all.

Speed Scanner

Many net users are notoriously impatient speed readers. They look to digest information as quickly as possible and only “screen” content by scanning over the page quickly to see if anything interests them. For this type of user the article heading and all the sub-headings are the most vital element to keep them reading your writing. If you don’t have them chances are they will completely ignore your article.

Flow Of Ideas

Headings help you as an author to sequence your thoughts and arguments into a logical order. I structure a lot of my major articles by thinking of the top headings first and then go through and fill out the content. This gives my writing structure and a blueprint I can follow to help get my ideas from my head to a computer effectively.

Apply Headings After The Fact

Sometimes you may have an article just pore out of you and you don’t want to stop the flow to break things up into headings. Once you have finished your article go through and break up each significant new idea into a section and label it with a nice attention grabbing heading.

It’s a simple rule - headings, use them!

This is a basic tip for beginner bloggers that should become a standard procedure whenever you write new blog posts. Each time you write a new post think back to your previous posts and if there is an article you wrote that is relevant to the current one make sure you link to it. This can be simply referring them to the article as extra reading on the same topic at the end of the blog entry or perhaps as a citation style reference within the text to define or explain a term or idea mentioned.

Linking to your own blog posts is called interlinking. Make sure you use the full URL of the post when you link and if possible use smart linking text (anchor text) that includes good keywords and descriptions, not just “click here for more information” or similar generic phrases or words.

Help Yourself To More Traffic

Interlinking is a smart practice for two main reasons -

1. It increases your pageviews, which means each person that visit your blog will stay longer and read more of your work.

2. It helps with your search engine rankings. Google and other search engines follows these links and although they are part of the same website they still count as backlink votes. As you may already know, backlinks, which are incoming links to your blog pages, are important to help your blog get good search rankings and bring in search traffic.

If you would like to learn more about backlinks and why they are important read these articles -

• Beginners Guide To Backlinks
• Monitoring Your Backlinks - How Popular Is Your Website?

This is a simple tip that anyone can implement and you may be surprised to know that in my experience it is by far one of the most powerful tools to bring you more blog traffic.

Today’s blog traffic tip is to send some of your traffic to other blogs.

As a blogger it’s your duty to help other bloggers gain exposure for their blog if you believe they have created something interesting that your audience would enjoy reading too. All you have to do is make a post recommending or even just briefly mentioning, referencing or trackbacking another blogger’s post.

How can this help you? In so many ways. Read on…

In life the more you give the more you receive in return. That’s a rule I live by and it works. It’s human nature for people to want to give and to give back if they have received. Blogs are very ‘human’ so they are ripe targets for this wonderfully friendly traffic tip.

By linking to another blogger you do a few smart things that will result in more traffic for you -

1. You get the attention of the other blogger. There is a good chance they will start to monitor your blog on a regular basis and quite likely will one day make a post linking to your blog paying back the favour. It’s win-win, you both get new traffic, the perfect relationship.
2. You take the first steps to create a new relationship. There is a good chance that your new blogging contact may turn into a friend, a business partner or even a lifelong partner! The possibilities are limitless and it all begins when your blogs say hello and interact through links.
3. At the very least you gain a tiny bit of exposure. The blogger you link to may not take notice of you at all, but you can rest assured they you have appeared on their radar. Do it a few more times in a tactful manner and you may get results. This especially applies when your blog is new and developing as other bloggers may wait and see how committed and ‘long-term’ focused you are. The more established you are the easier to make new blogging connections it is, so don’t be discouraged if at first you don’t succeed.