Tips about traffic

Tag your post

Tag the important keywords in each of your post. I am using Jerome’s Keywords plugin for Wordpress to help me do this.

By default Technorati tag the Wordpress post category as keyword.

With Jerome’s Keywords, I can specify keywords to be tagged by Technorati as you can see at the bottom of this post. Once installed, a keyword field is added into your Wordpress editor for entering and editing keywords.



Leave your mark

One easy way you can start receiving traffic right away is by leaving comments on other people blogs. If people read your comment, it’s likely that they’ll also be interested in you and might click on your link to learn more about you.

Another thing you can do is to link other blogs with trackbacks.

When you find some interesting post in a blog, blog about it in your blog and include a link to the original source to send it a trackback. The trackback URI is normally published in public somewhere on blogs which support it.



Exchange links with other blogs

Actively seek other blogs to link exchange with. Make sure that they are related to your niche. You might also want to setup a link exchange manager in your blog.



Ping your posts

Use ping services to automatically notify blog search engines or blogging content aggregator each time a new post is published. Just be careful not to spam these services with repeated pinging, either with a duplicate or different post, within a short period of time.



Post regularly

Posting regularly gives your visitors a reason to return to your blog. Posting regularly is particularly paramount during the early development of your blog to build up your readership.

As time goes on, each post will continue to attract traffic from different sources such as the search engines and links from other blogs. You should notice your blog traffic increase steadily over time.

If you are unable to post, try not to go longer than a week without posting otherwise people will forget that you exist.

If you could write 100 posts each month, you’ll have 1200 posts in your blog after a year. By that time, you’ll have many pages that can act as entry points to your blog for the search engine to send traffic to.



Leverage traffic from somewhere else

If you already have a web presence, you can use your position to influence your current visitors to visit your blog.

You can also take advantage of the AdSense ads on your other sites.

Instead of showing the PSA (Public Service Ads) on your pages, replace them to show your own ads pointing to your new blog. You can learn more about implementing alternate ad here.



Advertise with AdWords (Optional)

If you are willing to spend some money, you might want to give AdWords or BlogAds a try.

You can read more about my experiment using both methods to get traffic here.



Use online bookmarking services

Bookmark your articles at del.icio.us and other bookmarking services. You will get some traffic from other people who is subscribing or clicking on certain tags in your profile.

Although, you won’t enjoy any search engine advantage from sites such as del.icio.us since it’s using the no follow tag for all out going links. But that does not matter as long as you can get some traffic for free, right?



Write high quality posts

There’s no need to write long post, in fact some people will skip reading your blog entirely if it looks like work. What you really need is quality posts, while it does not have to be original, you should try to include opinions from your own perspective.

As some people may have guessed from the grammatical mistakes in my blog, English is actually my second language. However, I believe that shouldn’t be an excuse for me to write low quality posts.

My problem is that I have the tendency to just write what comes to my mind without thinking about the correct grammatical rules that I should use or without ensuring that my sentences flow naturally.


Create a buzz

This comes hand in hand with writing high quality posts. If you could write something good enough to get on Digg or Slashdot, this would bring you thousands of visitors. Some people reported to receive over 30,000 visitors per day!

In addition to that, you will also get a few thousands links to your site.

Traffic building takes time and continuous effort before you could see the fruit of your labour, unless of course you are already famous.

The reality is that you have to be prepared to put in the hours. Most successful blogs don’t hit their strides until they are at least 12 months old, so keep that in mind when you feel like giving up.