10 Tips To Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Blogs have many advantages over normal WebPages when it comes to internet marketing. Blogs are indexed much faster, blogs can “ping” hundreds of blog and news directories, and blogs can be listed in places normal websites are not. Here are some Power Tips to get your blog rolling!

1.) If your blog is new, create at least three to five posts per day. People who visit will want something to read. Also, focus on keywords in your niche topic for “natural” search engine optimization.

2.) Add your blog to your My Yahoo! page. If you haven’t setup a My Yahoo yet, just go to yahoo.com and click on the My Yahoo! icon near the top right. After your setup, go to your My Yahoo page and click on the “add content” button found near the upper right. You will be presented with a form to enter your RSS link. You will enter something like this http://yourdomain.com/blog/?feed=rss2. When you submit your own RSS to My Yahoo it is indexed by Yahoo.

3.) Add your blog to your Google’s Reader. When you submit your own blog RSS to Google’s Reader the Google Blog Search will index your site. To do this, goto google.com, click on the “personalize home” or “my account” button in the upper left. After you account is setup, sign in and click on the “add content” button in the upper left of your page.

4.) Add a link directory to your blog and trade links with sites that share a similar niche. At this point, you want to trade links mainly to get direct traffic. In the long term, this will help with your rankings in the search engines as well. Do a search like “add ur”" or “add link” in your favorit search engine to find potential link partners.

5.) Use ping sites like http://pingomatic.com Ping your site every time you add a new post. Check to see if your blog software is already doing this. Wordpress and B2Evolution do this automatically and is a real time saver.

6.) Submit your blog to traditional search engines such as Google, AltaVista, and MSN.

7.) Submit your blog to traditional directories such as DMOZ.com Directories (particularly DMOZ) increase relevance with Google. DMOZ is very picky and can sometimes take months to get listed.

8.) Submit to as many RSS Directories as possible. There are over 150 listed at http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/. This is a simple but repetitive process that can be done automatically with RSS submission software.

9.) Comment on other blogs and forums. Do not just leave short, lazy comments like “I agree.” Try to really answer questions or give opinions on subjects you know. How long your post will be depends on you. Generally, five to ten sentences is enough to explain yourself on someone else’s blog or forum. Most forums require you to register, so include a link to your blog in your profile and/or in your signature file. But be tactful about it; some forums get annoyed with those who selfishly drop a few links to their own site and leave. Find a relevant group on Google groups, Yahoo groups, MSN groups or any of the thousands of other FREE group services and find like minded people and talk with them. Make sure your use your blog URL like it is your name.

10.) Use track backs. If there is a blog that you refer to or quote and it is highly relevant to your subject, leave a track back. It increases your link popularity and may even score a few interested readers from the linked site. A TrackBack is a mechanism used in a blog to show, around an entry, a list of other blogs that refer to it.

Although these are some of the most popular ways to drive traffic to your blog, do not limit your self to tips and lists. Use your imagination and you will come up with thousands of ways to drive traffic to your blog!