A blog is a fantastic way to communicate with your audience and to help build your online business. Even the best intentioned blogger can fail if they don’t build traffic. However, even the well-designed blogs can see a slump in quality traffic if they don’t build traffic correctly. To help drive targeted traffic to your blog, take a look at these top 5 tips.
1. Keep your blog updated regularly.
Providing quality content and promoting yourself across all the right channels isn’t enough if you don’t update your blog regularly with fresh content. Without doing this you will never see enough targeted traffic and in the end it is likely that your efforts and blog will fail. You should aim to add content to your blog every two or 3 days, certainly no less than once per week. Posting on a regular basis is likely to create targeted traffic and turn one time visitors into repeat readers, of course this is key to building and maintaining any successful business.
2. Resist the urge to over advertise on your blog.
If you want your visitors to think “desperate” or “amateur” then simply over load your pages with adverts, it will work a treat!! Seriously though think about when you visit a site and the ads are almost jumping out of the page, what are your own impressions??? A few carefully selected ads are fine of course, and if you can tie them into your content then all the better. For example if you have say a review site for some high end photographic equipment and feature some sidebar adverts that have a Nikon D5100 then your readers may even click on them to find out more, this is adding value to your posts – remember your readers are there to read your content first and foremost. When it comes to colors, avoid garish bright ads, ones that play video/audio or use Flash and of course a big no no is inappropriate adult content.
3. Make your content interactive.
You can add pictures and images to enhance your blog, but why stop there? Why not consider adding videos, tutorials, polls and checklists – these will engage your visitor more and it is common knowledge that interactive websites have the highest repeat volumes, they are bookmarked and shared more often by visitors.
4. Keep things organized.
Don’t make it a challenge for your readers to find things of interest on your blog, it should not be a maze or the krypton factor! A rule of thumb is if you can’t find your way round it yourself how can you expect a first time visitor? Use post categories and tags effectively so that users can find information in your archives easily. Between 5 and 7 tags is usually good for an individual post, and just one or two well-defined categories. Be specific. For example, a blog about Sports Equipment could be divided into such categories as “Soccer”, “Badminton”, “Basketball”, and “Ice hockey” and so on, while tags may be “Balls”, “Kit”, “Racquets” etc.
5. Get involved with your audience.
You should always respond to comments on your blog, this will help to generate further discussion on the specific post and ensure the reader is valued. Customers want to know that business owners care about them and are genuinely interested in them. Otherwise, you become another faceless corporate entity. You can ask for recommendations and even guest posts from your readers. Commenting positively on other blogs in your niche is a fantastic way to promote yourself and your blog and can provide valuable cross referencing.
Use these tips and build targeted traffic to your blog. Quality targeted traffic and engagement doesn’t have to come from expensive paid ad campaigns, but from a little time, effort and genuine interest in your readers.
If you have any thoughts, suggestions or comments then I’d love to hear from you, this is your blog as much as it is mine – just use the box below, simple as that!
Oh yeah and before I forget, many thanks for taking the time out to read this post
