There’s nothing worse than a vacant blog. You put your blood sweat and tears into your content, follow every quality guideline you can find, and yet the traffic seems to trickle in and bounce away.
Clicking the “publish” button shouldn’t feel like you’re just clicking “preview”. Here’s how you can be sure to get some easy links and traffic to every new post you write.
1. Using Social Social news / voting sites to Promote New Content
First things first, Tweet your post and share it on Facebook… duh!
What’s next?
Share your new blog post on each and every relevant social site you can find. Social voting sites in particular can lead to big gains in targeted traffic. They have voting systems in place that can potentially get your post tons of visits. The trick here is to…
- Add your content at the right time of day
Understand your niche and when they respond the most. This gives you a better chance to get lots of votes that will get you published on the homepage.
- Write Click-worthy titles
Don’t publish your content until you’re sure you’ve got a great post title. Your success in social sites rides heavily on the quality of your post title.
- Is it Targeted?
Make sure your post is targeted to the audience you’re sharing it with. Also, submit it within the right category on the site and use plenty of related tags to make your submission easier to find.
There are social sites for every niche.
BlogEngage is a great example for the blogging community and many niches. Adding the upvote button plugin to your site from BE can also help your older content eventually reach the homepage.
You can view a list of the best social sites that I put together to help find some that suit you and your niche.
2. Blog commenting
The key to sending traffic with comments is simple:
- Comment first or very soon
- Make your comment interesting and valuable
- Share a link that is relevant to the current post
CommentLuv blogs are by far the best for driving traffic because of the link to your most recent post that you get. Here’s how you can make sure you’re early to the comments on a new blog post:
Strategy 1: Follow popular bloggers or blogging communities on Twitter. Comment right away when a new post is tweeted.
Strategy 2: Subscribe to RSS feeds of popular blogs to get to new posts quickly. Feedly is a great user-friendly app for following your favorites feeds.
Strategy 3: Search for CL blogs only using the search string “this blog uses premium commentluv” and add a keyword relevant to your niche/industry. Then either…
- Amend “&tbs=qdr:d” to the end of the URL to find only results from the last 24 hours
Or
- Click on “More Search Tools” in the left-hand sidebar and choose only results from the last 24 hours
Pro Tip: We all know you can get 2 links from CommentLuv Premium enabled blogs – one in your name and one recent post. But did you know you can actually get 3 links? Here’s how…
If you allow Twitter to post to your Facebook Page then you can input your facebook page URL in to the website box when commenting. Since FB pages have RSS feeds (yes you can submit this feed to aggregators/directories too) your most recent activity on your wall can be shared.
If you choose a post that was added to your FB page via Twitter this will actually post 2 links. One will be to where you shared it on Facebook and the other will link to your post. Talk about link love 🙂
3. Forum Participation
Forums are a great way to drive targeted traffic and build a reputation. If you haven’t seen Brian’s post about his success with forums for traffic, well I don’t know where you’ve been.
You might already know of a few forums in your niche, but if not you can always visit Big Boards to find some popular ones or simply do a google search for forums in your industry.
It might be difficult to find a current thread where you can share a link to your recent post and not seem spammy. Not to mention, you don’t want to link to your site in every post. Instead, link to your new post in your signature so that all of your posts on the forum now lead to this post and then post helpful comments and answer questions. Make sure to bold your link and make it enticing to click.
Pro Tip: How to Double, Triple, Quadruple your forum traffic
FACT: Like blog comments, a post near the top of a thread will likely get more signature clicks
FACT: Threads are bumped to the top of a forum after every new post
FACT: You can link to anything you want in your signature
How do we combine all this info for a traffic driving strategy?
- Make a really insightful or helpful thread on the forum
- Link to your helpful thread on the forum in your signature
Usually, after your thread falls off the first page of a forum you’re at the will of some wayward commenter to bring it back from the dead. This only happens if someone finds the thread in Google or is using the internal search function. Also, most people purposely won’t comment on an older thread because it can be annoying.
If you link to your own thread in your signature, every old and new post you make can get more eyeballs on your thread. If just one of these people posts on it, it’s all the way back at the top again sending you more targeted traffic.
When this happens, wait until your thread falls off the first page to reply to any comments so it rises back to the top yet again and gets more clicks.
4. Build your RSS Subscribers
The most effective but most time consuming way to ensure your newest posts get traffic is by building up your RSS subscribers. Obviously this isn’t a quick fix, but as a blogger you should always keep a concentration on buffing your subscribers.
Some places you can add links to your feed to build subscribers…
- Your sidebar
- The end of every post
- Signature in your newsletter or email list emails
- Your “Thanks for Commenting” email
Any time someone is enjoying your content you should have a call-to-action or readily available option for them to subscribe.
You can also publish your RSS feed around the web by submitting it to RSS directories. You can download my own software, RSS Launch, for free to submit your feed(s) to many sites.
Are you struggling to get traffic to new posts? Do you think the tips in this post will help you increase your traffic?