Blog Traffic Tips

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.