The most important metric to assess the popularity of any blog is the amount of traffic it is receiving. If you are unknown in blogosphere starting from scratch, building decent traffic on your blog can take some time. Here's how to increase the traffic in recent months by applying some simple yet powerful techniques.
Posted Regularly
Readers and search engines both love regular feed of content. Prior to November 2008, my posting frequency was quite irregular with no definite pattern. Nothing can be better than daily posting, but if you cannot make it everyday, try to post at least 3 to 4 times a Per day. I have created a strict posting schedule and now I publish 3 articles per day. Try to publish at least one long in-depth post per week. Regular posting has not only given crawlers a reason to index the content quickly but it has also inflated the archives rapidly resulting in more traffic from organic sources.Written For Audience
Daily posting alone cannot help build traffic on your blog. To make it clearer, let me ask you some simple questions. Why you visit some popular blogs? Do you like the design of the footer? Or you love to watch animated banner ads on that blog? I'm sure almost all of you go there only for one reason. To get answers of your questions and to get vital information related to your domain. So the key is to identify the needs of your audience and serve what they want. This is applicable to almost every business process - "Anticipating Customer Demands And Delivering The Goods Accordingly".To implement this on your blog you need to do some research. Here's how I did it.
Google Analytics - is one of the best sources to identify what kind of content is receiving most traffic. Use the 'Content -> Top Content' report to identify the posts receiving most attention of the visitors. Generate 'Visitors -> Keywords' report to identity the most popular keywords that are sending traffic to your blog. After analyzing these reports, here's what I found out.
Following type of posts was receiving most traffic.
1. Problem-Solver Articles
2. How-To Tutorials
3. Lists of Resources
4. In-Depth Post About A Service/Feature
Asking fellow blogger - in similar niche helped me in getting a clear picture about the type of content that receives most attention on their blogs. The results were almost the same as I got through analysis of Google Analytics reports.
Following type of posts was receiving most traffic.
1. Problem-Solver Articles
2. How-To Tutorials
3. Lists of Resources
4. In-Depth Post About A Service/Feature
Asking fellow blogger - in similar niche helped me in getting a clear picture about the type of content that receives most attention on their blogs. The results were almost the same as I got through analysis of Google Analytics reports.
Updated Old Content
During this period, I updated and refreshed about 54 posts from archives. This whole exercise helped in making posts more readable, stickier and more useful for the readers. While updating these old posts I stressed on 3 important things.Contextual Cross-Linking - I identified the possibility of cross-linking the posts with relevant anchor texts embedded right in the middle of the content.
Added Relevant Illustrations - This helped me in making the posts more attractive and sticky.
Modified/Added More Content - Some of the posts required updation of text and some of them demanded addition of extra paragraphs.
Commented On Tons of Blogs
You must have read several times about commenting on other blogs to get more exposure and traffic, but how many of us do it consistently over time. I have set a goal to daily comment on at least 10 different blogs similar to my niche.Don't limit your comments on some selective blogs but evenly spread your comments across the blogosphere on as many new blogs as you can. Regular commenting will create new connections generating more traffic and exposure for your blog
Did Aggressive Social Media Marketing
After getting the taste of success on various social media sites back in November 2008 (see traffic chart above), I became quite active on Digg,StumbleUpon and Twitter. The result was some additional traffic from social media sites.
After getting the taste of success on various social media sites back in November 2008 (see traffic chart above), I became quite active on Digg,StumbleUpon and Twitter. The result was some additional traffic from social media sites.
For Further Reading,
0 comments:
Post a Comment