This is a guest post by Devesh from Blokube.com.
Getting traffic to any blog is one of the easiest things, all it takes – hard work and patience. Many bloggers build a beautiful website, write lots of high quality content on it but just can’t get traffic to it.
I’ve been blogging from almost 2 years now and as a blogger, traffic is an essential ingredient to your success, it is what can makes your blog successful.
In this post, I’m going to share all the techniques/tactics that I used to get traffic for my blog in my blogging career…
Blog Commenting
This is most common traffic generation technique and many of you already know about it. Take the time to leave a useful comment often enough, don’t just write “great post” or “thanks”. Now days almost every blog have commentLuv enabled, so don’t self-promote when leaving comments. Also, don’t stay on one blog, visit new blogs once in a while.
Guest Posting
It was recently that I started focusing guest posting more on, and I think it is a great way to get traffic, backlinks, building relationship with other bloggers and ultimately find new opportunities.
A great example of what guest blogging can do for you, is – Onibalusi Bamidele. He didn’t focus on all traffic generation tactics but only one – guest blogging. Oni took his blog from zero to a well-known blog now, with the help of guest posting.
Forums
Most of the bloggers have forgotten this traffic generation tactic but it is most effective method to get quality traffic and you can even build high quality backlinks. It is also one of the easiest way to get traffic. The reason it is easy is because forum guidelines are usually not that strict and it takes few minutes to post a reply or start a new thread.
Some of my favorite forums are – DigitalPoint & WarriorForum.
Social Media Sites
These days, who don’t use social media sites? It is not the easiest way to get traffic but the smartest way. You can drive thousands of visitors, leads by using social media sites. Social Media sites are built for genuine people who want to talk as humans and make connections with other bloggers.
- Twitter – One of the best ways to succeed on social media sites like Twitter is to get really involved. Don’t spam people with direct messages or squeeze page links. Try to share useful quality posts, quotes and relevant tweets.
- Facebook – Who don’t use Facebook these days. Almost every single person have an account there and some of them even have thousands of friends (I have 1000+ friends on FB). Facebook is sending me more than 200 visits every day. All I do is to share my post link on other Pages & groups and at the same time I try to connect with other members of those groups & pages.
- Google+ – It is just a month old and have already got 20 million users. That’s freaking awesome for a site that is still in beta & invitation based. Though, I’m not much active on google plus.
Social Bookmarking sites
Those are normal bookmarking sites & have the power to send thousands of visitors on your blog instantly but to get traffic like that you need to get involved, comment & vote on other bookmarks.
- Digg – A popular voting site, to get on front-page, focus more on submitting other (popular websites) content and vote on other people’s content.
- StumbleUpon – One of the thing I don’t like about SU is bounce rate – it has very low bounce rate and the users don’t stay for more than 30 second but still it is an effective way to get traffic.
Social ‘Blogmarking’ sites For Bloggers
I have to admit that I’ve stolen this word “Blogmarketing” from Alex Whalley 😀 ! Anyway, this is not new and many people know about it as “Social Bookmarking” or “Social voting site”. These days, there are some sites that are especially targeted for bloggers, marketers & sem.
- Blokube (disclaimer: I’m the owner of this site) – Designed to help you share and engage, Blokube is a site built by bloggers for bloggers. Blokube offers a place for bloggers to mastermind. To network. To exchange ideas and interact. Blokube is a community. You can learn more about Blokube here & how it works.
- Bizsugar – A Business Social blogmarking site for small business owners, managers, entrepreneurs etc. It is created by none other than Anita compbell, who is also running SmallBizTrends.
- BlogInteract – It has great sets of features including CommentLuv, groups & something that you won’t see on any other site. Unlike other sites, it is not running on Pligg or Hotaru platform, it is running on WordPress CMS
- Blogengage – Brian is a dedicated member of Blokube and someone whom I love to support any way I can. Blogengage now charges onetime fee for registration.
Use Videos
Videos are another great way to drive hundreds of thousands of visitors.The quickest way to get started is with your blog. Read this article on how to turn articles into video in about 5 minutes.
YouTube is a great resource to get started with sharing videos, read more about it here.
Build Quality Backlinks
Building quality links is very effective way to get traffic through search engines, here I’m going to share some methods that I’ve used to build links:
- Article Marketing Is Dead – Just a few weeks back, James shared a great post about how he feels that article marketing is dead and what you should do now to build quality backlinks.
- Social Bookmarking/Blogmarking sites – are simplest & easiest way to build backlinks.
- Hold A Contest – Run a contest on your blog like Sushant Risodkar is doing here at SmartBloggerz.
- Press Releases – It is widely use method to build quality links and drive tons of traffic. The most popular press releases website is prweb.com.
- Create a Freebie – It can be a template, plugin, module, graphics, e-book or anything that you can give away for free to your blog readers. How about giving away few of your Best WordPress Themes for free ?
Fiverr
A site to get anything done in just 5 bucks, you can hire someone to do forum posting, social bookmarking submissions, Facebook likes, retweets & google+. There are so many things that you can get done in just $5.
Ending It…
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Do you have anything to add? I would love to hear your suggestions on how to get traffic to your blog in the below comments.
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Devesh,
I thinbk you hit every good point for getting traffic. When you boil it down to its basics it isn’t hard. Time consuming yes…hard …no.
Write great stuff, get out there and meet new people by commenting and social media and do all the steps you listed here.
Not easy…but simple!
Hey Steve,
Glad you to see you here buddy.
Yeah, doing all these things are not easy but simple. I think i won’t use commenting for promoting a startup like Blokube ;).
Thanks for stopping by and commenting here. Much Appreciated.
I prefer blog commenting and forums. It’s pretty easy to make traffic once you made good relationship with the blogger, but always give quality and relative comments always. I’m not aware with the other techniques so I don’t know how it works, I will research about it later. Thanks for the list!
Hi Marvin,
Commenting & forum posting are the simplest methods to get traffic. I highly recommend you to try guest posting & social blogmarking sites.
Anyways, Thanks for the comment.
I’ve been blogging for almost 1 year now, but I was still at the lowest rank. I will do the other mechanism to increase traffic on my Blog. I’m just ignoring the social media before, but since you’ve stated that social media can really help us, I’ll try it right now! I will be back to review some of your guidelines. My genuinely thank you for helping me out.
Hey Karla,
You should give a try to social blogging communities & guest posting in your industry.
Thanks for the comment.
Devesh, this is an outstanding article on how to get traffic to your blog, one of the best I’ve read so far. I have never heard of some of the sites you suggested like blokube and bloginteract, I will defitnetly visit them. As a relatively new blogger who enjoys blogging very much, but does not get the kind of traffic needed to succeed the way I hope to, this article is quite hopeful.
Hi Madison,
Glad you liked it. I’ve been using Blokube & BlogInteract and both the sites are great source for getting quality traffic.
Thanks for stopping by.
Great write up Devesh, just starting again on commenting strategy after quitting it some time back. But I’m still using bookmarking strategy which is less time consuming after the initial set up. And I like social media strategy too.Thanks for sharing this useful info Devesh.
Hey Rammesh,
I used only one strategy that was Blog commenting to promote my blog in the beginning.
Yes, Bookmarking sites are less time consuming and can send quality traffic. At the same time you can get a quality backlink.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting here.
In the way of getting traffic to your blog first of all you need to grasp and understand that the Internet is a big place. Several billion web-pages, and often with very little time available to the end-user, they’ll use several techniques to find what they’re looking for.
Nicole, that is why it is important to be unique in content and product. Since we have several billion pages people are so chosy and pickly. Some research said that you have less than 3 seconds to grab your visitors attention. If you fail to impress, you will end up losing them.
Hi Devesh,
Excellent tips you got here. What do you think of exchanging links with other sites or bloggers? It could also give us some linkjuice, right? I’m interested to know your opinion. 🙂
Hey Alex,
Glad you liked the tips too.
I think exchanging links is great way to get traffic & linkjuice. Now days, many people don’t use it but it is still a very effective strategy.
I use to promote my own blog networks & sites.
Thanks for stopping by, Alex.
First thing I did to market my website was to link it to social networking sites. That alone brought a lot of traffic but I know it’s not good enough! Hope I can muster the courage to ask bloggers if they need guest posts. I’d like to take that as my next step.
Hey Una,
Yeah, social networking sites can send you good traffic but you need to be active on those sites.
Guest Posting isn’t a hard task, you should give it a try. May be try it with my blog – Technshare.com.
Anyways, Thanks for the comment.
This is a very nice list of steps for increasing traffic. I love the fact you even left links to resources to use. I’m a huge fan of Fiverr but I would offer a note of caution when it comes to paying for blog submissions. When done improperly they can do more harm than good. Great post!
Hey Brian,
Glad to see you here. Thanks for the info regarding the blog submissions on Fiverr.
Thanks for stopping by, Brian.
That is a very nice guide for getting traffic, Devesh. I agree about blog commenting being on the top of the list. It is one of the best ways as long as the comments are meaningful and contribute to the topic being discussed, like you said. I am primarily focusing on commenting at the moment but also looking at trying the forums soon as well as social media.
-Jean
Hey Jean,
Exactly, that is what blog commenting is all about – Leaving meaningful comments and contribute to the topic.
Thanks for stopping by.