Building your blog traffic from scratch can seem like a long and daunting task, especially when you're just starting out. It can seem like hours of effort and work on your blog will only bring an additional 10-20 visitors, and the traffic levels are hard to sustain without constant effort. However, I want to share with you five simple tips and strategies that will vastly increase your blog visitors and blog traffic.
1. Realize that blog traffic growth is exponential, not linear: One of the biggest mistakes that bloggers make is to give up on their blog right when the traffic is ready to explode. The reason for this is that they fail to realize that blog traffic growth is exponential, not linear. Let me define these terms so that you can understand what I'm talking about.
Linear Growth: This means that your blog will grow at a constant rate proportional to the effort that you put into it. For example, if blog growth was linear, for every 100 hour you put into the blog, your traffic might increase by 1000 visitors per month. So, starting with 1000 visitors per month, after 6 months x 100 hours of work = 6,000 visitors per month if the increase in blog traffic is linear.
Exponential Growth: Here, blog traffic will increase at an every increasing rate proportional to the amount of work you put into it. As an example, lets say that, for every 100 hours of work you put into your blog, the monthly traffic doubles. In this model, after 6 months and starting with 1000 visitors, your blog traffic would be 1000*2*2*2*2*2*2 = 64,000 visitors per month, 58,000 more than if the growth were linear.
The downside of exponential growth in blog traffic is that it means that when you're starting out, the growth rate for your blog is going to be pretty slow. For example, if you start with a blog with only 100 visitors per month, 100 hours of work might only increase that to 50 visitors per month -- meaning you won't have much to show for your work right away. However, the key here is that you have to keep trying because the rewards will come, especially when you start to experience the type of insane, run away growth that comes on the back end of your blog. Many bloggers give up just when their blog is on the brink of exploding in terms of the traffic.
2. Use Social Media effectively: The second thing you should do is to make sure that you're using social media effectively to promote your blog. This process has basically two parts: posting your blog entries to social media and making sure that lots of people see those posts.
For the first part, you can use a service like Onlywire to send out each post to a variety of social media services, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Reddit, and more. If you have a large following on Twitter account, you also want to use Tweet Random to tweet out old copies of your blog posts so that your previous work doesn't go to waste.
I've already written one article about how to get lots of followers for Twitter and the other social media services. Basically, the method I follow is: a) follow lots of people and b) unfollow anyone who doesn't follow you back. There are some more tips I explain in the article above, including which internet services to use to easily follow and unfollow from Twitter, but this is the basic idea.
3. Use lots of pictures, videos, and interactive features in your posts: People often forget that the best blog posts have a variety of pictures, videos, songs, and interactive features (such as polls or games) to reinforce the text. Your readers don't just want information; they also want to be entertained. You should make every effort to put lots of pictures, videos, and interactive applets into your posts so that your blog will stick out in the minds of readers and keep them coming back for more.
4. Use basic SEO: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that the largest commercial websites can spend millions of dollars per year to perfect. However, you can make significant improvements to your blog's ranking in a search engine by making small, free changes to your posts.
First, always make sure to include 4-7 search tags in the body of your posts. These tags should be geared around terms that people would look for if they were searching for the information you have in your article. Also, if you can do a little keyword research and try to target keywords that are popular but not too popular (like "Twitter" or "Google"), the results will be even better.
Second, make sure that you repeat your targeted keywords often throughout the body of your post. Since this article is about getting 1000+ visitors to your blog, I need to make sure that I keep repeating the phrase "1000+ visitors" or "blog" frequently enough that the search engines catch on to what my post is about. Obviously, you don't want to go too overboard with this idea and repeat "1000+ visitors" every five words, but even repeating the term as frequently as 10 -15 times in a given post couldn't hurt.
Third, make sure that you organize your posts into lists. Lists are not only easier for people to read, they're easier for search engines to understand as well.
Fourth, make sure that you have a catchy and relevant title to your post with as many targeted keyworkds in it as possible. Search engines place a lot of emphasis on the title of a blog post in ranking the post, and you should always make your titles as specific and relevant as possible.
5. Post frequently: Often bloggers will get stuck in the mindset that they should make one long, epic masterpiece of a post per month. If you're writing your blog for posterity, I guess this is a good strategy to follow. However, if you're writing your blog to attract visitors, you may want to rethink this idea.
In general, a blog post should be 300-2000 words. Anything longer than 2000 words should be broken up into multiple posts.
Summary: Using these strategies should help you to get your blog traffic flowing. Even though it may seem like an ambitious goal, 1,000 visitors per day on a blog is a goal that is both realistic and attainable with hard work and efficient strategies.
