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. It is just that the tools for blog promotion are slightly different, a bit more diverse and on the whole much more effective.

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

However, this doesn’t mean you should neglect standard promotion techniques in favor of blog only techniques. In fact, traditional marketing activities can become even more potent with a blog due to its nature.

For example, you will still want to utilize your email list. 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 compile a list of new posts and descriptions 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, I use an unobtrusive bottom slide-up opt-in form on this blog, which is Instant Slideup. Since incorporating it, my optins have tripled.)

You don’t want to neglect keywords either. I’m 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 for you whenever you post. And it does so automatically. This way, you don’t need to ping a bunch of them since they do all the work for you. They are:

• Pingomatic.com (rpc.pingomatic.com)
• PingGoat.com (pingoat.com/goat/RPC2)
• FeedBurner (ping.feedburner.com)

You may want to consider submitting your blog posts to ezine directories, publishers, and even offline magazines. Actually, you should likely considering 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, target specific industry leaders online 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.

Speaking of opt-in forms, around the RSS button you can add your own opt-in form from your favorite autoresponder service, or use an RSS-to-email service like FeedBurner.com or FeedBlitz.com to increase subscriptions.

It’s preferable to use a third party site because they provide extra features that will help you promote and publicize your blog with little extra effort.

In conjunction with the lists and feeds, you’ll want to create a separate landing page for subscribers. This is similar to your typical “About Me” page, but instead of promoting you or your products, you’ll want to 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 or special offer for those who join your list.

Another tactic I recommend for increasing blog traffic is to submit your RSS feed to the various RSS engines like Yahoo and Technorati.

There is no point in doing this manually as 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.

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, have someone else whether a friend, client or staff member, submit your posts to highly trafficked social sites, like Digg.com, Facebook.com, Sphinn.com (the one I use), PlugIM.com, and more.

Get someone other than you to do this. 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. 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.

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

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