Blog Traffic Tips

I have had a conversation since I posted my original article titled - Use Full Text RSS - which has changed my recommendation slightly regarding how you should implement RSS on your blog (whether to use full or summary text). I still believe in everything I wrote regarding using full text RSS but I have since modified my opinion on how best to implement an RSS strategy.

RSS Scanning

Just as some people prefer to scan headings in articles to determine what they want to read the same goes for RSS. While personally I dislike seeing summaries in RSS feeds forcing me to click through to the web page version of the blog article I realize some people prefer summaries so they can scan quickly.

My opinion is that both full text and summaries should be available and the options should be the responsibility of the RSS reader software to provide, not the blogger, giving the power to the user to choose which format of RSS they want to read. For the moment though many RSS readers don’t allow the option and of course as long as bloggers only activate the summary version within their blog software feed readers will only be able to offer summaries.

Offer Both Options

The best solution is to offer both a full text and summary RSS feed from your blog so your readers can choose which to subscribe to. This isn’t necessarily an easy thing to implement depending on which blogging platform you use. If you don’t have the ability to control and switch between full and summary text for your blog feed than using a service like FeedBurner can help you to do it.

Using FeedBurner To Create Multiple Feeds

Using FeedBurner you can create two feeds that both draw from the same root feed from your blog. Within FeedBurner you can change the option and choose how much text to show (truncate) your RSS feed. Simple create two feeds, call one ‘full’ and the other ’summary’, use the truncate function within FeedBurner to limit the feed for the summary version and then link to them both on your blog.

It’s definitely not the best solution but given the variables involved with all the different blogging platforms it’s the most widely applicable method. I suspect as blogging software evolves more and more options will become available to control your feed. If you presently use WordPress, which I use, you get reasonably good control over your feeds. Services like Blogger unfortunately don’t provide much control over your RSS feed so the sooner you upgrade to a professional solution the better.

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!

I hear many business blog teachers tout the importance of staying on topic with blog content if you want to establish the right type of audience. I agree, this is a smart thing to do, however some bloggers worry when it comes to talking about their personal or business lives, whether they risk becoming too off-topic, too wishy-washy and unprofessional, especially if they are blogging for business purposes.

Defining Your Niche

The most important thing is to pick a niche that is 100% in-line with your blogging goals. If your blog is designed to generate new leads for your small business you better produce content that is relevant to your target audience - your prospective customers.

If you aren’t exactly sure what your target niche is yet, don’t worry, start writing about what interests you and your audience will define itself. If it’s not the audience you want slowly take your blog in new directions and see where you end up. You are the captain of your ship and it’s never too late to change course. You may lose some readers along the way if you keep changing focus, but eventually you will settle on a mix that brings in the right type of people to meet your traffic goals. It can be quite surprising to learn what people find interesting.

If you already know the audience you want ensure your content is interesting and relevant to them and keep testing. See which articles get a better response and follow the methods that work best. Always remember to ask yourself “how does this benefit my audience?” and work towards helping others. If you aren’t blogging purely for pleasure than you have to consider what others want first, beware of getting stuck too much in your own ego.

Keep Things Personal

One of the true strengths of blogging is the power of personality. Many bloggers blog in a traditional sense, diarising their lives each week with personal anecdotes, stories and opinion. This is fine for hobby and personal blogs but if we are talking business blogging you don’t want to turn people away by complaining about how big your ass is after all the food you ate at Christmas, posting a bunch of pictures to prove it!

To get the right kind of traffic to a business blog you want to project your humanity but also stay tightly on-topic. One of the best ways to do this is to blog about your business mistakes. By explaining how you went wrong, what you learnt as a result and how you dealt with the situation you provide fantastic content. Your readers connect with you (rapport building) because they make mistakes too, all humans do and you provide a practical lesson that your readers will learn so as not to make the same mistake you made. You also demonstrate your professionalism by explaining how maturely you dealt with the situation. Of course this assumes everything did work out reasonably well, but I’m sure you get my point.

The key to good business blog traffic is personality and focus without too much of either ingredient. You don’t want to express your deepest darkest fears, fantasies and passions (unless that is the purpose of your blog - voyeur blogging perhaps), but you do want to inject your emotions, personality and unbiased opinion into your articles. Emotive and personal opinions should be used to enhance your content, not dilute it with rambling off-topic diatribe.

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?

Not everyone will agree with this tip, especially those people that use advertising programs like AdSense to make money from their blog, but in my opinion it’s better to leave full text on for your RSS readers.

In case you are confused when I say to leave full text on for RSS readers I mean that for any user that subscribes to your blog through an RSS reader such as Bloglines, or Google Reader, or NewsGator or RSSOwl they can read the full text of your articles (read this article - What is RSS and How Do I Use It? - if you have no idea what RSS is).

The other option is to only provide a summary or concatenated sample of each article. Subscribers have to click through to read your blog if they want the full text and consequently be exposed to your advertisements and other money making initiatives that may not display within a feedreader.

Arguments Against Full Text RSS

The obvious issue is of course loss of revenue if your readers never visit your site and only read your RSS feed. Depending on why you are blogging this can be a good enough reason not to switch RSS to full text.

Another issue is that your content may not format correctly in an RSS reader. Often images won’t align neatly within text and dynamic content such as forms and tables may not display correctly. Given the variety of feedreaders out there it’s next to impossible to account for all possibilities and if you use full text RSS you just have to live with the fact that your articles may not appear exactly how you want them to.

What’s Really Important To A Blogger?

My argument for always switching RSS to full text is a simple one - you want to build an audience. In my opinion building and retaining an audience is more important for a blogger than making sure your ads are exposed. By limiting what you give to your RSS readers you stifle your communication and risk loosing readers that are frustrated by seeing only samples of your writing.

Blogging is about establishing a dialogue and relationship with your readers. The larger your readership the greater your potential for benefit. Even if in the short term your advertising income suffers as a result of less page impressions, your contacts network, your reach and your potential for future income will far outweigh the short term “losses”.

Even Probloggers Should Use Full Text RSS

I argue that even those bloggers focused on AdSense (etc) should also leave full text on. By providing full articles in your RSS feed you ensure that your audience reads your content and is not turned off. As a result they will be more inclined to help spread the word about your blog, possibly by linking to your article in their blog (bringing web based referrals by the way - more page impressions), sending email to friends or adding your content to a social bookmarker such as del.icio.us. The result is more readers, some of which will no doubt visit your blog outside of a feedreader.

Your focus should be on increasing readers, not increasing advertising dollars. Income opportunities abound when you have a critical mass of readers. Don’t stifle your blog’s growth by focusing on short term monetary gain.

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.

This is a tip that is not easy to execute well because it can be unpredictable and you need to be quick. When you get it right though the traffic numbers can be significant, if not always very targeted.

Tracking trends for traffic is all about staying with current events and then making blog entries based on what is really popular. Here are a few ways you can determine what is really popular, both in the blogosphere and in general news.

1. Go to Technorati and watch the list of top terms people are searching for. The good thing about this list is it is very current, up to the minute data from all the blogs Technorati monitors. Often the top search terms mirror the top news stories of the day but it’s a good place to keep watching.The problem of course with this technique is that you may be too late. Once it reaches the top of the Technorati list it can already be old news and you may have missed the traffic rush.
2. Follow news sites like Google News to find top stories in your field to blog about. Again though this can results in you missing the boat because interest in the story has already died down.
3. Watch mainstream media like television and radio and blog about news as soon as you watch/hear it. This is a speculative technique that can work really well for mainstream topics (think disasters, sports events, politics).
4. Follow niche sites focused in areas you blog about. Most markets have a major news source (think slashdot for geeks, ESPN for sports, or Political News Daily for politics) and if you carefully watch these sites you should be able to pick the hot topics in your area and contribute to the conversation bringing you relevant traffic.
5. Monitor social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, especially the popular list and cover topics that are getting bookmarked often.

The trick here is to be a trend picker rather than a trend follower. If you can blog about a trend before it hits it’s popularity spike then you can enjoy traffic from people searching blogs and websites for news on the topic of the minute. Of course often the traffic is short lived and can bring you people that don’t really care for the rest of your blog but hopefully you end up with a few new subscribers and repeat visitors.

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.