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10 Ways to get more traffic to your blog

by Scott Bird | July 18, 2007
Filed in Blogging , Favourites , Magnificent 7

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There are many, many ways to drive more traffic to your blog. Here’s a quick look at 10 of my favourites.

MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog is a simple way to put a face to a number - specifically that of a person visiting your site. This feels somewhat more human, and encourages conversation. To see it in action, take a look at the ‘Recent Readers’ section in the sidebar.
Comment on other blogs
This one is often quite effective, and deserves more attention than it often receives. Blogging is all about conversation - not lecturing - and a great way to encourage this is to take part in conversations elsewhere. Leaving a comment on another blog is a sure-fire way to get the blog owner to take a look at yours.
Controversy
Although I avoid this one in most cases, it can work well - particularly for blogs that focus on current events. Espouse your views on race, religion or politics and watch as the mobs (both angry and supportive) descend.
Be the first
Another one for blogs that focus on current events - be the first to share the news (or at least to provide a reasoned argument). It’s not an easy ask by any means, but it pays off.
Develop a widely used tool
Creating a popular plugin for Wordpress, an add-on for Firefox or a new iPhone app (wishful thinking) is a guaranteed way to drive traffic to your site. Of course, it has to be good.
Guest post on popular blogs
Write a guest article on a popular blog or two; making sure there’s a link back to your own site. If there’s no link by default, just leave a comment or trackback.
Squidoo
Squidoo - when used well - is an incredibly powerful service. If you’re not sure what it’s all about, take a look at Everyone is an Expert [.pdf, 1.6mb].
Use social media
Whenever you write something you’re happy with, promote it. A simple way to do this is via the many social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us and social news sites like Digg.
FeedBurner
FeedBurner has always been a terrific service, but the recent Google acquisition took it up a notch. With it, you’ll be able to keep tabs on exactly how your feeds are being used, by whom, and when.
Look at your stats
Whilst FeedBurner (above) will help you keep an eye on your feed statistics, a good stats package (personal favourite - pMetrics) will track everything else that takes place on your site. Two key areas to look at here are the Site Searches (the things people type into Google which take them to your site) and Inbound Traffic (the sites that are linking directly to yours). As with many things on pMetrics, both of these are available as cutomisable XML feeds. Beautiful.

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Comments

Hi Scott,
Long time no chat! I’ve been pretty quiet because of the move overseas but I’m alive and getting back into the swing of things. Great list here but, from my experience, you really need to mention Stumbleupon (I guess it would come under the social media). I’ve stumbled your article to prove this to you ;-)

Posted by: Peter | July 21, 2007 12:38 PM

Cheers Peter.

Posted by: Scott | July 21, 2007 2:34 PM

Thanks for the list
The big omission is search engine optimization. This is still the top method of getting long term free traffic to your website

I like forum participation as well. The amount of traffic you generate via your forum comments generally depends on how insughtful thise comments are

Article marketing is the other method worth mentioning. Yes it requires some effort but it is rather effective

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