Posts Tagged ‘blog commenting’

In this guide on how to get traffic to your blog, I’m going to take you through a few traffic basics (including some important clarifications), followed by several methods that I’ve used to drive thousands of people to my sites over the years. If you’re at an intermediate or advanced level with you business, you may want to skip to the traffic strategies further down this page.

*     *     *     *     *

When it comes to creating and building a business online, one factor dictates your success over all other factors…

Traffic.

Put simply, traffic is just another name for visitors to your website or blog. If you have traffic, you can start to convert some of those people into regular readers and then some of those regulars into customers.

Just before I show you how I get traffic to my blog and other sites, I want to clarify something very important when talking about traffic.

Getting lots of traffic is great, and if you were able to drive tens of thousands of visitors to your site each month, it would be hard to see how you couldn’t profit from those visitors. However, the key is to get targeted visitors.

What do I mean by ‘targeted’? Well, quite simply it means visitors who are already interested in your subject matter and who are likely to want to find out more about it. Ideally, they will be specifically interested in one particular area of your subject matter which your niche blog will inform them about.

The reason this targeting is so crucial is that they are far more likely to want to stay on your blog, become regular readers (subscribers) and sign up to find out more. They can even become customers, either of your products and offers or those you are an affiliate for.

On your travels around the internet you will see lots of services that offer to get your lots of traffic for relatively little money. The problem with them is that they are usually sending low quality (non-targeted) traffic which is largely worthless to you because they’re not qualified visitors i.e. they’ve shown no interest in your subject matter, they’ve just clicked because of some incentive or other.

So, in this guide, I’ll only be looking at how to get targeted visitors to your blog.

Before we start, I’m assuming you have Google Analytics set up on your site already. If you don’t, get it set up so you can effectively track where the traffic is coming from. Here’s where to start: Google Analytics

Part One: Targeted Content is King

You may have heard the now cliche phrase ‘Content is King’. I’ve added the word ‘targeted’ for the reasons stated above, but also because marketing that content is much easier if it’s specific in its nature.

As in my post on How To Get More Fans on Facebook, you may read what is essentially the advice ‘Write Good Content’ and wonder how effective that is. But think about this for a second. What is it about the blogs and sites you like reading that makes you want to read them and return to them in future? It isn’t the design or the photo of the blogger’s shiny head, is it?

Good content is what draws people back to the site again and again. It’s also what gets picked up by the search engines, to bring you more traffic (assuming it’s optimised correctly, of which more in a minute).

People like to share content via social media and this is another strong reason why creating and writing good content is so important.

But what do I actually mean by ‘good’ in this context?

Well, a more accurate description would be ‘content that helps, educates and/or entertains your reader’. A concept I learned from Yaro Starak about building blog content was the idea of ‘Pillar Content‘. This is simply the idea of creating strong (usually educational) articles that will become reference points for other people and will likely be shared by those people with others, who in turn will use it as reference and share it with their peer group and so on (a viral effect). If done properly, it will also be picked up by the search engines and become the reference for anyone searching for the terms you’re discussing.

There are several kinds of pillar content which include:

• ‘How To’ Articles – You take or find a concept that lots of people want or need to know and you show them how to do it. If you’re in any doubt as to the effectiveness of this idea, look at the title of the blog post you’re reading right now!
• Technical Blueprints – This is especially suited to the more technical blogs where you take people through the exact steps they need to follow to achieve something of a technical nature. It tends to be quite scientific.
• List Articles – You will have seen these all over the place, because this concept works well. For some reason we humans love a list. We like the order and simplicity it brings. Consequently, ‘The 10 Best Ways To ___________’ or ’7 Ways To ___________’ tend to be good ways to share information with your readers as it becomes easier to digest.

Personally, around 20% of my traffic to this site comes from ‘How To’ articles. The main reason is that I’ve researched the title and concept of my ‘how to’ beforehand.

Here’s how I do it: Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick ‘cool tool’ for you today. This is an excellent and very simple tool, whether you’re a blogger or just a blog commenter.

As you may know, blog commenting is a great way to get a little bit of traffic from other blogs, but also to build backlinks to your site from other related authority sites.

I always saw that some of the commenters on blogs had a photo (avatar) next to their comment. It made them more engaging and made them seem more transparent. Also, the fact that they have a photo when most commenters don’t, makes them look more professional. All of this makes me want to find out more about them, especially if they look approachable.

A good comment that adds to the discussion on a blog, plus a good photo, is a far more effective way of commenting on blogs and having your comments approved. If you Read the rest of this entry »