Tips to Increase Your Blog's Traffic

Susan Gunelius at About.com shared 15 tips to increase your blog’s traffic. If your purpose in blogging is making money online, getting large traffic is a must. The problem with the blogosphere is that it has more than 100 million blogs. So, how can you make your blog visible? The essence of her tips is summarized here.

1. Write often and write well with quality and meaningful content to keep readers interested.
2. Submit blogs to search engines to make sure it is listed (it may take time for it to go up the list).
3. Link to others using Blogroll. Owners of the blogs you link to will most likely link to you back and have their visitors use the links to go to your blog.
4. Use comments efficiently. Increase your readers' loyalty by responding and interacting with your commenters. Leave thoughtful and relevant comments on other blogs to draw others to visit your blog.
5. Syndicate your blog using a feed so that others can get updates to your blog easily. (Read more on how to increase your subscribers.)
6. Use links and trackbacks. Links to your blogs are powerful 'vote of confidences' that are counted in ranking your blog. You can create internal links from your posts to your other posts too (works best when you use the right keywords to link). Trackbacks are links in other blogs’ comments that link back to your blog. They’re created when you link to these blogs' posts in your posts. Some blogs either don't have or don’t allow trackbacks to appear.
7. Add tags to your posts. Tags increase the chance of others finding your content in search engines.
8. Submit your posts to Social Bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc). If your posts are excellent, others will vote for them as well and make them more visible to other millions of readers.
9. Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Use the right and relevant keywords relevant that can draw large number of readers to your posts. Using keywords that’s not searched often will decrease visibility of your blogs in search engines.
10. Use images with the right keywords. Other people don't just search for contents, they search for images too!
11. Try to write posts in other blogs as a guest blogger. The more popular those blogs are, the more traffic they’ll send to your blog.
12. Participate in forums and social networking with people of relevant interest.
13. Promote your blog outside the blogosphere. Add your blog URL in your email signature or business cards. Basically, tell others about it.
14. Nominate yourself (or other blogs) for blog awards to get more attention to your blog.
15. Don't be shy to do all of the above.

My Comments
These tips are not explained in detail to give you the bigger picture of the overall strategy. It's important to understand them as a whole before going deep into details. You can dig(g) into each of these tips by Googling or Yahoo!ing more about them.

Photo by emdot.

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This post is a summary of an original post by Susan Gunelius at About.com (Alexa rank: 140). The original length of 1166 words has been reduced to 463 words (60% less).

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