30 Days to Pumped Up Blog Traffic

It’s pretty much universally accepted these days that having a blog is a smart move for any business.  And because just about everyone understands that, just about everyone (and their uncle) has a blog.  What that means is that the competition for traffic to your blog is strong and growing on a daily basis.  After all, people can only read so much every day, so they’ll naturally gravitate to the blog content that is most relevant and meaningful to them.  But even the best-written, most content-packed blogs are useless if no one sees them in the first place.  So building traffic flow to your blog is at least as important as making it stick (getting people to follow you).

Especially if you’re just getting started with blogging, building traffic can be a bewildering, and often frustrating proposition.  With all the advice out there on what to do and how to do it, how can you know what works best for you?  The truth is, you can’t know.  Mostly, you have to research and see what makes the most sense to you, then try it and adjust as you go.  And once you have the formula down… well, actually, there is no formula.  If you think you’ve found the perfect formula, don’t get too comfortable.  It will change soon enough.  All that said, below are just four simple steps you can take immediately that will begin to increase your blog traffic.  It will take time to see significant results, and you’ll have to pick and choose where to spend most of your time, but these methods (as of today) will put you on the path to more traffic within 30 days.

1. Participate in forums. Forums, like the one at YoungEntrepreneur.com, are a great way to connect with fellow business people in your field as well as blog readers.  If you target your efforts at forums within your target audience, you’ll often find hundreds or even thousands of people interested in exactly what you’re talking about in your blog.  Get involved in the forums, offer real, useful advice, and when appropriate (and not too obviously), direct people to relevant blog articles on your site.  Also include your blog URL in your signature when allowed.

2. Use social media. We’ve written extensively on this site about the benefits of using social media sites like Twitter & Facebook and others.  So without going into great detail, let’s just say once more that social media is like no other medium in its ability to reach a targeted audience in a meaningful way, at little or no expense.  If you’re not using these tools, you’re missing out on traffic that you could be gaining right now.

3. Comment on other blogs. You probably read other blogs right?  So make it a point, whenever you’re on another person’s blog page, to comment on their posts.  This will often help to build a relationship with the blog writer, which can be beneficial in many ways, and it will allow you to post a link back to your blog.  As these are pretty much always no-follow links, you won’t benefit in that way, but you will benefit from the traffic generated by people clicking on your name.  Of course that won’t happen if your comments aren’t thoughtful or interesting, so, “Nice post” won’t help much.  For more on the topic of comment marketing, read this.

4. Make sharing easy. It’s amazing how many smaller blogs don’t offer an easy way for readers to share posts with others.  Even if you don’t like Twitter, for example, or if you don’t think having a Twitter account will help your business, you have to recognize that millions of people, including most of your readers, do use Twitter.  So at the very least, install TweetMeme or Topsy buttons on your posts.  If you want to really optimize the possibilities and you’re using WordPress, SexyBookmarks is a great plugin that makes it easy for readers to share on over 80 bookmarking sites.  Whatever you use, make sure people who love your stuff can easily tell others about it.  Word of mouth is still king when it comes to getting people to look at what you have to offer.

Is there more to driving traffic to your blog? Of course there is.  We didn’t even touch on SEO, SEM, backlinks, or a thousand other tools and methods you can use.  But these four steps are some that anyone can take without having to do much research or decipher complex methodology.  And if you start using them today, you just might see pumped up traffic in 30 days or less.

Quit Wasting Time on SEO

Now hold on… Before you think I’ve lost my mind, notice the title doesn’t say “Don’t do SEO” or “SEO Doesn’t Matter.”  In fact, spending quality time on SEO is anything but a waste of time.  It’s no secret that search engines are the primary source people use to find your site, and it’s also true that if you’re not ranking pretty high in the search results for your relevant keywords, you’re not going to get much of that traffic.  So SEO is unquestionably vital to your site’s success.  But which areas of your site’s pages should you be focusing on to improve your SEO?  If you focus equally on everything you can, you’re going to be wasting your time, because the truth is, some areas just don’t matter as much as others.  While people have different views about which areas are most important, most agree that there are 5 critical areas you must nail to really have a positive effect on your SEO, so here they are:

1. Content - Well, duh, right?  As is often said, content is king.  That’s not only true for keeping people coming back to your site - it’s also true for SEO purposes.  Search engines love fresh new (relevant) content.  There are a lot of bloggers who post infrequently and sporadically, and they’re just not doing themselves any favors from an SEO standpoint.  Relevance is another important issue when planning your content.  There are blogs out there that are mind-blowingly broad in their content topics, and this makes them less attractive to the search engines.  If you have posts about software, nutrition, politics, celebrity gossip, and how to do origami all on the same page, chances are you won’t rank high for any of those topics.  The exception might be a news site that already has substantial traffic, but even those tend to categorize their content both for better readability and SEO performance.

2. Keyword Frequency - The trick for some people is to balance quality, well-written content with keyword frequency.  This shouldn’t be hard though.  If you’re writing about a topic and you’re going to cover it well, you’ll naturally use your keywords in your writing.  One thing you can do though is scan what you’ve written and change some wording to other keyword variations - as long as it doesn’t make your writing sound dumb.  For instance, in this post, it would be fine to mix it up and spell out SEO as “search engine optimization” now and then, as long as it flows and doesn’t detract from the writing.  But it shouldn’t be obvious that you’re optimizing.  That’s annoying to read (even if it’s an SEO blog about SEO), and your readers - who want to learn about search engine optimization - will not tolerate it, nor will the search engines who you’re trying to search engine optimize your search engine keywords for in your article about search engine optimization. (SEO)

3. Title - Your title tag (or post title for a blog) is an important consideration for a couple of reasons.  First of all, and perhaps most importantly, you want to give your readers and idea of what the page is about.  In doing so, you’ll no doubt use your target keywords in your title - which is the other important aspect of title tags.  This makes perfect sense.  When people get a long list of search results, what do they do?  They scan the titles to find the result most relevant to their search.  So you’re helping yourself by helping your site’s visitors when you optimize your title tag with relevant keywords.  Also, for search purposes, try to keep your title under 72 characters.  That way the full title will show in search results.

4. Meta Description - Following your page’s title in the search results is the page description.  There are varying opinions about whether using keywords in your description meta will improve SEO, but it’s still something you want to pay attention to.  Why?  Because even if it won’t help you get ranked higher, it will increase click-through rates once you are ranked.  After scanning titles of search results for relevant content, searchers read descriptions, so even if you have the perfect title, the proper description will validate and cement their decision to click through to your page.

5. Links - Search engines believe (if a computerized algorithm can believe something) that the more connected you are, the more relevant you are.  So both incoming and outgoing links matter when it comes to SEO.  Outgoing links can be to other sites with related content or to relevant internal pages.  This basically tells the search engine, “See - what I’m presenting must be relevant.  Here are other sites and pages talking about the same thing.”

Obviously, like I said in the beginning, there are a lot of other areas that can affect SEO, including H1 tags, link alt tags, image alt tags, keyword meta tags, etc.  But if you want to spend more of your time running your business, focusing on the above five areas will improve your SEO without wasting your time.

Search Engine Marketing – The Basics on Getting Started Today

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, ranging from free methods, like social media, to very expensive approaches, like buying banner advertising.  Somewhere in the middle is Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  While this method is never free, you can decide how much you’ll spend, and that number can literally go as high as you’d like.  If your marketing budget isn’t unlimited (is anyone’s?), can SEM be an effective way to get traffic to your site?  The answer is almost certainly, yes - if it’s done right.

What exactly is SEM?

Search Engine Marketing is buying search terms and keywords from a search engine.  This means that when someone searches for these terms, they see your ad.  Obviously there’s more to it than that, but that’s basically the general idea.

What Makes SEM Effective?

Whatever form of marketing you use, you goal is obviously to get your target market (those who most want your products and services) to see that marketing.  The more laser-focused your marketing is, the less your per-customer acquisition costs are, because you’re not wasting marketing dollars getting your name in front of people who don’t care.

SEM, more so than just about any other marketing vehicle, allows you to advertise to a potential customer in a highly-targeted manner.  When you think about it, when done right, SEM is effectively showing your ads only to people who just told you that your product is what they’re looking for.  It doesn’t get much more targeted than that!

How should you go about starting an SEM campaign?

As with any other marketing or general business initiative, your first step is planning.  You don’t have to put together an elaborate marketing plan, but there are some things you need to decide.  First, figure out which search terms and keywords you want to target.  This should be easy in the beginning, as you’ll simply pick the terms that most relate to your business.  As you get further into the process, you’ll evaluate other possible terms, using tools like Google’s keyword tool.  Next, you want to set a budget for your campaign.  This of course is an individual decision that only you can determine.  Suffice to say that in general the more you spend, the faster you can expect results.  Once you’ve decided on your keywords and budget, you’ll want to figure out exactly what will display when people see your ad.  There are volumes of information online about how to write compelling SEM copy, and it’s a great idea to review some of it.  Don’t try to reinvent the wheel on this one.  Last, but certainly not least, you’ll need to decide which page on your site people will land on when clicking on your ad.  While at first it might seem like your homepage makes sense, there are a lot of reasons to customize your landing pages based on specific SEM purchases.  Again, there is a lot written about landing pages, and you should research this thoroughly.

Ready, Set, Go!

There are three primary search engines, and most agree that your efforts are best spent with them than with any of the smaller sites.  Here are the three, with links to their SEM programs:

Google: AdWords

Yahoo: Yahoo Advertising

Bing: Microsoft adCenter

Each of the above programs offers solutions for the smallest of budgets, and each provides a wide range of tools and training to help you realize success in your SEM efforts.  This post is just an introduction to SEM.  If you’re considering your own SEM campaign, be sure to research your options and educate yourself on the ins and outs of this advertising medium.  And if you have experience to share, please don’t hesitate to do so in the comments!

Bringing in Blog Traffic With Micro Niches

Today I’d like to talk to you about a technique for generating more search engine traffic. This is something I stumbled on in my own blogging and I am shocked at how well it works. Obviously it isn’t fool-proof, but if it is done right, you will see a huge amount of supplemental traffic coming to your blog. For lack of a better term, I’m going to call it “blogging with micro niches.”

Most bloggers have identified at least one niche in their industry and have based their blog on it. For example, simply blogging about “Business” would be difficult to develop and focus in-depth content unless you further defined it as “Online Business” or “Home Based Business” or “Women Owned Business.” Each of these niches provides you with a substantial enough subject that you can write every day—yet it limits your topics and gives your blog clarity. Blog readers are often drawn to niche blogs that speak to them personally, and are more likely to subscribe to these blogs as well as recommend them to other people.

But in addition to your main blog subject, it is possible to dissect your blog further and add even more refined niches that create an even finer point to the subject matter. You don’t have to try to manage a huge number of these micro niches—even one or two can be effective.

The key is choosing a micro niche that is not covered extensively in the blogosphere but which still ties into the main theme of your blog. So, for example, if your blog is about your catering business, you could choose to write about the latest season of Top Chef—the Bravo Network reality show contest for professional chefs. Each week you might write a recap of the episode, or dish about who won and lost the challenge. What does this do? For one thing, it brings in traffic that has nothing to do with your catering business. Many people watch Top Chef and do online searches for information about the show regardless of their interest in catering. By writing about it every week, you’re building up a cache of keywords that will bump your blog up to the top of the search engines when people make specific searches about the show, the contestants, or the guests.

Another example: If you write a blog about entrepreneurship, you might regularly post book reviews by popular business gurus. Having their names and book titles on your blog will bring in traffic long after the post is archived as people do searches for these books and authors. You’re going to be reading them anyway for your own use—why not make the most of your reading by blogging about it, too? Or if you have a favorite business guru, you may choose to follow their career on your blog, writing about new book releases, speaking engagements, television appearances, etc. The more content you have about this particular person, the more likely your blog will come up in the top results when someone searches for them.

Micro niches are also a great way to keep yourself motivated. Writing about these topics can be fun and help you break out of the mold of the same old style of posting. You can have fun with these micro niches—use humor and a little sarcasm to make them entertaining. Investing a small amount of time each month into building up a micro niche or two on your blog will help your blog stay fresh, current, and give it a broader appeal.

Are you blogging on any micro niches? Leave a comment and let us know what has worked for you!

Boost Your Blog Traffic Today

If you have any desire to make your blog profitable, traffic is the name of the game. But for a new blogger the task of bringing thousands of people to your site each day seems almost impossible. You write great posts, you send your links out on Twitter, and you exchange links with a few other blogs; but still it seems you are not getting the attention you deserve.

There are many ways to boost your blog traffic, but I’ll briefly discuss some of the most important here.

Be topical.

People are on the hunt online every day for information. If you have a track record of providing up-to-date content about topical issues, you’ll be part of the daily routine for thousands of people. Find ways to incorporate current events into your blogging, even if you don’t specifically write about politics or business. Subscribe to major news sites and power bloggers so that when news breaks, you hear it right away; then as soon as possible afterward write a post. You will find that you draw in a wide range of people who may not have initially been attracted to your blog simply by writing your opinion on the day’s news.

Anticipate high traffic days.

Some days are going to be busier than others: Election day, the day of the Oscars, New York Fashion Week and the season premiere of American Idol are just a few examples of times that you know in advance internet use will be high. Plan around those dates (and other dates that are pertinent to your blog’s main subject matter) by preparing posts in advance, or making sure you have time open on your calendar to blog as events occur.

Participate in online communities.

Blogs, message boards, forums, and social media sites like Facebook are excellent ways to stay connected to people and alert them when you have fresh content up. It also exposes you to thousands of other potential readers who happen to be ‘friends of a friend’. Make sure that any site you participate has a complete profile filled out, linking people back to your blog.

Use regular features to keep them coming back.

Regular posts such as a monthly book review or a daily “top ten” list is a great way to get people coming back to your site again and again. They’ll be more likely to link to your blog, and refer friends to it and make it a part of their regular online reading if they have something enjoyable to anticipate.

Learn to Read Your Analytics.

These programs help you track your traffic. They can tell you everything from which site referred each reader, to how long a particular visitor spent on your blog and how many pages they viewed while they were there. You will be able to tell which efforts in marketing your blog are most effective this way, and you’ll have a concrete way of knowing which topics you write about get the most attention.
Free traffic tracking apps:

• Site Meter http://www.sitemeter.com
• Stat Counter: http://www.statcounter.com/
• ShineyStat: http://www.shinystat.com/
• GoStats: http://gostats.com/
• GoogleAnalytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/
• FreeStats: http://www.freestats.com/
• OneStat: http://www.onestat.com/

I would love to hear from you if you’ve got personal experiences you would like to share in boosting your site traffic.