Traffic is life and blood of any online entity. Bloggers are always wondering how to get traffic to their blogs. Newcomers specially, are to a good extent, oblivious to the different techniques they can employ to bring in traffic to their blogs. Understandable though, not everyone is jack of all trades. You’re only good at certain things. Blog traffic is an essentiality and chances are your blog will not survive for long unless fed with stream of visitors continuously. You’d eventually lose interest if no one cares to visit, as simple as that.

Even if you are good at creating quality content, it doesn’t guarantee success unless you market it properly. A while back, I wrote on the right way to earn money blogging for beginners. If you are a beginner to blogging, you would find the below article a good reference and starting point to set your blog marketing efforts in right direction.

An active and popular blog can add greatly to your online assets. It’s one of the fastest ways to promote yourself to others and create followers and buyers within a particular niche, however there is no way you can make any niche blog a success without significant amounts of traffic. So what can you do to get significant traffic to any blog? There are a few quick things you can do that will help instantly increase visitors count and help make your blog popular and profitable. However, I am not going to tell you all the fluff or the dirty shortcuts like emailing everyone in your contact list to ask to visit your blog or getting in chat rooms and mindlessly pasting links. Yes, people do do these things to lull others to their blog. The following ways will help your blog prosper and set your marketing efforts in right direction.

Be a Content Producer

How many times do you actually sit and write your own content? Content producing is time consuming. People avoid time consuming things. Website owners and bloggers are no different. Majority want to get done with without much effort. We’d rather copy others, just google information over, pick/steal someone else’s content or idea, spin/reword it a bit and post it with our name tag than actually creating something out. That’s why genuine good quality content is precious. People come looking for genuine content. And, that’s where an opportunity arises. Be a content source, content producer, create content and people will come looking for you. Write what you believe in, what you know, what you think will help your readers. It is one of the surest ways to get noticed. Generate good content found nowhere else and you’ll not only attract loyal visitors but also search engine bots! Search engines will love your blog as you’re enriching their value by adding your valuable content.

What to do

• Product likeable content
• Write Good blog posts. See writing tips for better blogging
• Write long posts, properly conveying your message
• Possibly Post more often. Majority of highly successful blogs generate good quality content regularly.
• Write something that fulfils a need, solves a problem, helps people learn, grow better.

Advantages

You’ll be deemed as an authority and credible source with your unique content Increased search engine trust & rankings Good content attracts traffic mystically Increased chances of repeat visitors Better ad conversion. People will like to listen to you.

Learn to Spread the word

Spreading the word is important. Telling others about your blog is obviously helpful. How do you spread the word? Where do you find others? To let others know your blog exists, put your blog link in all the prominent places where people frequent. No, I am not going to suggest to include your blog link in your email signature, your facebook, your gtalk, yahoo messenger status, your visiting to pull massive amount of traffic, although that does its bit. Every little thing helps you know. Still, very few would actually come clicking it and chances are most of them would be your acquaintances already knowing about your blog. Lets’ do something better.

Article Marketing

Article marketing works. Articles marketing is what every serious blogger should incorporate in its marketing strategy. All the seasoned internet marketers take advantage of this vehicle, why? Simply because it works and works in the long run. Beginners usually are unaware of the power article marketing holds and that’s probably why they fall short of properly utilizing it. Make a habit of submitting atleast two of your best written articles per week or every 10-12 days to article directories. You don’t have to submit what you have already written and posted on the blog. If you’d rather like to keep your well written stuff to your blog, no problem, just reword the information, modify a little, give it a unique touch, submit! Articles marketing is one of the most effective ways to get backlinks & spread the word.

Article directories to target primarily

Ezinearticles
Buzzle
Articlesbase – Generates no follow resource box links.
Goarticles
Articledashboard
ArticleBiz
ArticleCity
iSnare
Articleset

Advantages

• Search engine bots frequently visit and index article directories content as they are one of the leading source of good quality articles. Your submitted articles will be indexed faster and ranked higher in SERPS.
• There are much bigger chances of other bloggers and website owners noticing, picking and publishing your content. Many of them regularly head over there to get content for their websites. The prerequisite is they have to give the author its due credit. Your Bio will be put intact.
• Lots of good quality incoming links.

Finding Ezine or Newsletter publishers

It is not much different to article marketing and guest posting. It is however very under utilized marketing tactic and very few marketers leverage it properly. We can call it a subset of email marketing. You just have to look out for good ezine pubishers in your niche and offer your content to be included freely in their ezines with a link back to your blog. It sounds a little more time consuming but worth the hassle. There are ezine publishers having very huge lists. You know what that means? They have Hundreds of thousands of subscibers and their marketing efforts are focused primarily on list building. As a newbie, you may not have so many loyal followers listening to you. List building takes efforts and good time. By sending your articles to ezine publishers, we’ll be making use of their lists by offering valuable content and thus its’ a win-win situation for both parties and the subscribers. As always make sure your Bio is convincing enough to give people a reason to click & check your blog. Its’ similar to a classified ad. Remember, if you have provided a real value in your content, people will definitely want to know more about you. Check out this helpful link describing how to write for Ezine publishers. How to Write Articles for Ezine Publishers

Publishers to target primarily

Amazines.com
BestEzines – You can submit your ezines for review here.

You can also Google newsletter publishers in your particular niche.

Advantages One of the best way to gain exposure & repeat visitors Able to take advantage of others’ list even if you don’t have one. Increased chances of repeat visitors

Guest Posting

Guest posting is also similar kind where in your contact bloggers or website owners in your niche and offer them your articles to be published on their blogs. Many blog owners are looking for content and they will generously publish your articles with the Bio included if they find that their the information will be helpful for their readers. Check with bloggers if they will accept guest posts on their blog. Better go through the blog, see if there are already any guest posts. Also look for any specific terms the blog owner have set for guest posting before sending your article. Some would not accept affiliate links in the body of the article. Some may not accept a link anchored in a keyword. Generally all of them insist that the submitted content must be unique and must not have been submitted elsewhere.

Bloggers to contact primarily

Problogger
CopyBlogger
Daily Blog tips
Search Engine Journal

and of course, contact Electric Ego also. I do publish quality guest posts.

Advantages

More exposure, faster and better way to reach new audience
Check out tips on writing blog posts http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/blog-promotion/a-guide-to-promoting-your-blog-through-guest-posts

Make connections & Engage in conversations

Visit blogs in your niche, the ones that attract sizeable amount of visitors. Engage in conversations, make comments that make sense. Simply saying ‘thanks for the useful post or info’ will not do. Just like you, other bloggers also like to feel appreciated/elated, feel good when someone visits and contributes. Don’t always look for Do follow blogs (there are not many with substantial amount of visitors these days). If a blog incorporates Do follow or CommentLuv or similar things, its’ better. However, do not make ‘no follow’ an excuse for not commenting. It doesn’t take much to comment, does it? Even if you are out there reading or researching for your new article, why not spare few seconds of your time to comment before closing the tab. Some blogs wouldn’t mind if you enter your real name or your keyword in the name field. Also, remember you don’t just have to link to your home page. You could just link to one of your articles.

Blogrolls, Trackbacks and blog carnivals

Apart from regular interaction with other bloggers via comments, link to their posts if you can in your posts. Almost all of blogging platforms will send trackbacks to the original source if you link to them linking them to you. If people find that you’re linking to them, chances are many of them will heartily throw a similar gesture.

What to do
Each day make a habit of frequenting blogs in your domain and comment on atleast 10 of them. It won’t take sizeable amount of time. Plus start taking parts in blog carnivals or offer your articles to the blog authors taking part.

Meet Social Networking, sharing, bookmarking, Time killing

Social media web has evolved exponentially in the last few years and it is still a force to reckon with. Utilize social media marketing to bring in an avalanche of traffic to your blog. People love to connect online. Social networking fulfills that need. People love to share stuff. Social bookmarking helps in that. People love to kill time online. Social time killing aids in that. Lol…Social time killing isn’t something as of now..but yes, over indulgence in social media may have its repercussions. You may end up wasting much of your precious time. Twitter is a good example. Telling the whole world what you’re doing at the moment isn’t a wise thing all the time specially if you are not doing nothing more than tweeting. Creating a web presence in social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter is important only until it doesn’t make you an addicted online junkie.

Sites to target primarily
1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. StumbleUpon
4. Bebo
5. hi5

Community driven

Vox
Squidoo – Go get your lense created.
BigAdda (india specific)
Gather
Ibibo
My Opera
Spicypage

Social bookmarking

Digg
Del.icio.us
Slashdot.org
StumbleUpon
Reddit

Advantages
Although most of the bookmarking sites have switched to nofollow links. Still, those links are followed and indexed by search engines (though may not treated as backlinks). Spreading the link is still important and helps. Many of them will give you valuable one way backlinks and increase your domain trust in the eyes of search engines. Faster indexing.

Worthy Mention: Socialmarker. This one handy little website will instantly ping your blog content to all the major social networking websites, give your site backlinks, back link traffic & saving you many hours. Socialmarker makes it easier to publish to multiple social bookmarking services. Leverage social media wisely and you’ll have loads of visitors coming to your blog in a very little span.

Meet Blog & Feed Directories

Another good method to get some blog traffic is to submit your blog and RSS feed to blog & feed directories. Blog directories act as an additional network of traffic by generating back links for search engine optimization and creating an additional path for visitors to be lead to your blog. People searching around a specific niche will often go through blog directories in the hopes of finding compelling and worthwhile content that will answer questions and give them an interesting source of information on a particular topic.

Which directories to target:

Technorati – Not much effective these days. Still worth a try until I remove it from the list.
BOTW Blog Directory – Best of the Web Directory
Blog catalog
BlogFlux
Bloggernity
BlogPulse
Blog hub
Blogging Fusion
Blogarama
EatonWeb
Getblogs
Globeofblogs
Blogged.com

Many of the blog directories & feed submission services below will require you create a free account before posting your blog or blog feed.

Feeds directories to target

2RSS.com
Dr. 5z5 Open Feed Directory
Blogdigger
Blo.gs
Feedage.com
RSS Feed Directory
Leighrss.com
Syndic8.com
Yahoo RSS submit
Topix

Worthy mentions: Pingoat – Ping multiple blog services instantly.
Pingomatic

Yahoo Answers & Groups

Bloggers often overlook this one. Yahoo answers can be a very good source of traffic if you utilize it wisely. Spam it and you won’t likely benefit. Yahoo groups also a bit difficult but worthwhile to target. Start looking for qustions in subject matter of your expertise. See how you can help. Think you can fit in your blog there in the answer? Have a post solving any particular problem raised? or Just see if its’ possible to create a new blog post solving a problem. Yahoo answer links are no follow but the content is indexed in an instant both by google and yahoo. Good thing is you can put helpful links anywhere in the answer and in the research box. Also, many bloggers have those automated content generating scripts employed in their blogs that regularly scan and pull content from Yahoo answers.

Begin incorporating the above ways to attract traffic and you’ll soon see the effect. Remember, the success of your marketing will largely depend on two factors:- 1. How disciplined your efforts are. 2. How wisely you make use of above methods And, lastly, nourish your blog as a baby, don’t let it die. Feed it regularly and it’ll grow stronger over each day, day by day. I wish you good luck in your blog promotion efforts. Happy promoting!

Related posts:

1. Blogging for profit or just wasting time
2. Should you care about Search Engine Optimization for your Website
3. Blogging to impress your girlfriend?