Attracting Activity to Your Blog

As with sta­tic web­sites, the suc­cess of a blog depends on attract­ing a steady stream of new and return traf­fic. The dif­fer­ence is, blog pro­mo­tion tools are slightly dif­fer­ent, a bit more diverse, and largely much more effective.

Why? Because blogs are designed with inter­ac­tiv­ity and social net­work­ing abil­ity built in. They are ideal both for devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships and for mar­ket­ing your brand.

How­ever, don’t neglect stan­dard pro­mo­tional activ­i­ties in favor of blog-​​only traf­fic gen­er­a­tion meth­ods. You can and should use both.

In fact, tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing can become even more potent with a blog due to its nature.

For exam­ple, and most impor­tant, you will still want to uti­lize your email list, and use your blog to grow it, too. Ask read­ers to sub­scribe, and let them know when you post a new arti­cle just as you would with a new fea­ture or prod­uct on a sta­tic website.

Of course, if you are pro­lific blog­ger and post every day, you’ll only want to alert them when you’ve pub­lished some­thing extra spe­cial, or you can com­pile a digest — a list of new posts and excerpts — and send it out once a week.

You don’t want to over­whelm and annoy, but inform and share. How­ever, do make sure you ask them to sub­scribe at every oppor­tu­nity — on your side­bar, at the end of every post, on every page, and per­haps with pop-​​ups.

(But use pop-​​ups judi­ciously. Remem­ber, you don’t want to annoy. As you can see, at the time of this writ­ing I use an unob­tru­sive bot­tom slide-​​up opt-​​in form on this blog, which is Ulti­mate Footer Ad. Since incor­po­rat­ing it, my optins have tripled.)

You don’t want to neglect key­words and basic SEO, either. I’m cer­tainly no SEO expert, but I do know that choos­ing titles with strong key­words and using key phrases within your post is impor­tant to attract­ing new traf­fic through search engines.

Blog posts are indexed much more quickly than sta­tic pages whether your key­words are strong or not. Using key­words increases the odds that a page will rise to the top of the search engine list­ings as opposed to rank #65 with a phrase you never anticipated.

In addi­tion, you will want to make sure your blog pings the blog search engines. Most blog soft­ware has this func­tion built in, like Word­Press, but it’s a good idea to dou­ble check if you are using an off-​​brand or an older version.

I only use three of them, since they, in turn, ping the major­ity of the search engines and blog direc­to­ries out there when­ever you post. And they do so auto­mat­i­cally. This way, you don’t need to ping a bunch of them since they do all the work for you. They are:

• Pin​go​matic​.com (rpc​.pin​go​matic​.com)
• Ping​Goat​.com (pin​goat​.com/​g​o​a​t​/​R​PC2)
• Feed­Burner (ping​.feed​burner​.com)

In addi­tion to email­ing your list about new blog posts, you may want to con­sider sub­mit­ting your blog posts to ezine direc­to­ries, pub­lish­ers, and even offline magazines.

Actu­ally, you should con­sider hir­ing this out to a pub­li­cist, as I do. My arti­cles are still dis­trib­uted to thou­sands of ezine edi­tors and pub­lish­ers by my pub­li­cist, Anne-​​Marie Baugh.

Not only will it free up your time, a pub­li­cist will be able to mon­i­tor your blog, retrieve arti­cles, and pre­pare them for sub­mis­sion. And they can tar­get spe­cific indus­try lead­ers and know how to entice the right mag­a­zine edi­tors to reach your tar­get market.

Make sure you uti­lize RSS feeds. Make sure your RSS feed icon is large enough that it can be eas­ily found, and offer an email alter­na­tive for those who pre­fer not to use read­ers. Just like opt-​​in forms, make sure you add it to every page.

Near the RSS but­ton, such as the side­bar, you can add your own opt-​​in form from your favorite autore­spon­der ser­vice (for instance, I use GetRe­sponse), or use an RSS-​​to-​​email ser­vice like Feed­Burner or Feed­Blitz to increase subscriptions.

It’s prefer­able to use a third-​​party ser­vice, because they pro­vide many extra fea­tures over sim­ple blog noti­fi­ca­tions to help you pro­mote your blog with lit­tle extra effort.

For instance, each time I send a new blog post update, I also add it at the end of my email list’s autore­spon­der cycle so that future sub­scribers will even­tu­ally get the same notice — thus bring­ing new traf­fic to recy­cled, old posts, and giv­ing them new life.

In con­junc­tion with email lists and RSS feeds, you’ll want to cre­ate a sep­a­rate land­ing page for sub­scribers. It’s like your typ­i­cal “About Me” page, but instead of pro­mot­ing you or your prod­ucts, you out­line the dif­fer­ent ways peo­ple can sub­scribe to your blog.

You can increase your responses by offer­ing a “bribe” to those who sign up. This could be a free report, an e-​​course, or a spe­cial offer for those who join your list.

Another tac­tic I rec­om­mend for boost­ing your traf­fic is to sub­mit your RSS feed to the var­i­ous RSS engines like Tech­no­rati, and little-​​known or niche-​​specific blog directories.

Inex­pen­sive soft­ware like RSS Sub­mit will accom­plish the job quickly and eas­ily. This type of soft­ware will auto­mat­i­cally sub­mit your RSS feeds to all the major RSS engines. But if you pre­fer to do it man­u­ally, there are ser­vices like Pin​gler​.com.

Next, use a social book­mark­ing and post­ing ser­vice, like ShareThis​.com. By adding ShareThis, you allow peo­ple to book­mark your blog or blog post on a vari­ety of pop­u­lar social net­work­ing sites, as well as send the post/​page by email to a friend.

Finally, you — or prefer­ably some­one else, be it a friend, client, or staff mem­ber, since some sites frown on self-​​promotion — should sub­mit your posts to highly traf­ficked social book­mark­ing sites, like Stum­ble­Upon, Digg, Face­book, Sphinn, PlugIM, and others.

Even if they don’t frown on self-​​promotion, still try to get some­one else to do this for you. Self-​​serving links are viewed poorly in the world of social mar­ket­ing. It’s worth the effort to find some­one to do so for you as the traf­fic you receive can be quite considerable.

This is just a sam­pling of the most used tech­niques to drive blog traffic.

Granted, there are other effec­tive meth­ods for blog pro­mo­tion you might add to your reper­toire. (If you have any, please share them!) But it’s best to start with a hand­ful to get traf­fic flow­ing rather than over­whelm­ing your­self with too many blog mar­ket­ing tasks.

After all, your focus should be your con­tent and, above all, your readers.

In the end, the ulti­mate traf­fic dri­ver will always be fresh, good qual­ity con­tent — con­tent that meets the needs and expec­ta­tions of your tar­get market.

About the Author

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