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Best Way to Increase Blog Traffic
What is the best way to increase traffic to my website (kombuchafuel.blogspot.com)?
There are limitless ways to increase a website’s traffic:
- SEO and SiM
- Advertising (e.g., Google Adwords)
- Social Media (e.g., Facebook)
- Hire an Internet marketing company
- Direct Marketing
- etc.
You can achieve great results with any of the methods, but the best for web blogs is direct marketing. Direct marketing is free but time consuming. The more time you put into direct marketing, the better the effect will be.
Definition: Direct marketing involves building your blog’s reputation and standing in your blog niche by interacting with other bloggers and your visitors.
Ways to Use Direct Marketing on Your Blog
1. Comments
Enabling comments on your blog is a great way to get users to interact with you. However, smaller blogs sometimes have the problem of users not leaving comments on every post.
Get more comments! A great way to get users to leave more comments is to write posts on controversial topics that people are sure to have an opinion on. Another way to get users to comment is by asking them. By simply asking a question at the end of your blog post and asking your visitors to answer in the comments section will increase the number of comments on your blog.
What do you do after somebody leaves a comment? If you simply read their comment and ignore it, users will not be as compelled to leave other comments on your blog. In small blogs, the author should be responding to each comment. Sending a quick personal email to the user telling him or her that you enjoyed their comment and responded will also go a long way.
Usability Always be sure to make it as easy as possible for a user to comment on your blog. The Asker’s blog allows a visitor to easily comment using a Google account, AIM, OpenID, WordPress, and many more. If a user already has one of those services, he or she will be much more likely to leave you a comment.
2. Social Media
Creating a Facebook page and interacting with your fans through the website is a great way to increase traffic. The Asker has started a Facebook page and currently has 184 fans. The Facebook page is active and has a lot of fan interaction. This is a great start!
Facebook is not the only social media tool bloggers can use effectively. There is also Twitter, Digg, MySpace (some people still use it), Delicious, and many many others.
Problem: One downside to using tools like Facebook can be seen on the Asker’s Facebook page. More people appear to be commenting on the Facebook page than on the blog. The way to solve is problem is to think about why people prefer to comment using Facebook. In this particular case, the reason is simply that most people are more comfortable with Facebook than the Blogger comment system.
Solution: Using the strategies above on getting more comments, we can get visitors more comfortable with leaving comments. Once more people are leaving comments and having conversations on your blog, others will follow.
3. Your Niche
What is a niche? Niche is a biological term defining an animals local ecosystem. To a blogger, a niche is your topic’s local ecosystem on the Internet. For example, if you blog about making kombucha tea, your niche could be blogs/websites about a) kombucha tea, b) fermentation and homebrewing, and/or c) tea in general.
You should look at other blog and websites in your niche as your partners not competitors. By interacting with members and owners of these other websites, you can start effectively building your brand by direct marketing.
Here are some examples of ways to interact with others in your niche:
- Link to other blogs (they will notice)
- Comment on other blogs
- Register and post on online forums
- Write guest posts on other blogs
- Become friends with the people you meet and stay in touch
What It All Comes Down To
You might be thinking that you run a blog and not a company. What difference does branding make?
It makes all the difference! If people like your blog, like you, and view you as an expert in your niche, your blog will become more renown, other people will start linking more and more to your website, and visitors will follow.
Question by Annabelle Ho
Published on July 3, 2010
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