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…
I hope you enjoyed reading, if so you can help a friend read this post by sharing with love. So use the easy share buttons below to ReTweet, LIKE on Facebook, stumble it, etc.
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.
This post is a part of SmartBloggerz’s guest blogging contest where you can win cash prizes for earning the most points. Help this guest author win this contest by commenting and sharing this post using the buttons below.
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Hi Devesh, Good luck in the contest. I agree with most of these tips. You can also start an audio podcast to drive traffic to your blog too.
Hey Ileane,
I’m so glad to see you here. Thanks for stopping by and commenting here.
Using social media tools to build relationships can go a long way in enhancing and spreading your business from its current state. This post contains lot of useful tips about driving traffic using social media. I learned many new things from your blog! Thanks for sharing this details with us.
Hey Laura,
Glad you liked this post. Thanks for stopping by and commenting here.
Is it safe to say that in a nutshell, it’s all about networking? The more people you know through commenting or participating in forums, the better chance you have of your posts being shared. It takes time but when done right, I believe that anyone can grow their network to such a size that would bring in thousands of traffic per day.
Off topic: Is it just me or is the social media integration feature by CommentLuv Premium not displaying right. The choices are overlapping.
Hey Noel,
Yeah, it is all about networking with other bloggers & marketers. It takes a lot of efforts & time but when done right, it can drive awesome results.
Thanks for the comment.
Edit:
Off topic: Is it just me or is the social media integration feature by CommentLuv Premium not displaying right? The choices are overlapping.
Sorry about that. 😀
yup, I’m aware about it. still working to fix that. 🙂
You make quite a few excellent points here, and I think one of the best is that forums are a GREAT place to pick up new traffic.
I’ve noticed that most folks give forums a pass assuming that the major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are enough. But there are soooo many folks that don’t even bother with those sites yet flock to forums.
Definitely something more people should be grooming for the traffic push.
Allison Duncan
Blog commenting is a great link building strategy and the clickthroughs that you get from it is just a bonus.
It’s all very well to be creating links using CommentLuv but it doesn’t mean that those links will carry any credence with Google since they may not necessarily crawl those links.
To get Google to crawl your links, it’s a good idea to save your comment links into a notepad file and use a service like Pingfarm to tell Google about your new links.
These is one of those link that i would share with my VA. If she starts to implement i believe my blog will explode. The amount of traffic I’ll get would be big. I can’t wait to start implementing. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Dev,
A really cool post. Too many people think blog commenting is about building backlinks by just inserting simple one sentences for the comments.
Another strategy which I would recommend is interviewing an expert in your niche. It could be an audio or a written one.
With this interview you can leverage off the expert’s name and generate more traffic to your blog. Since you’re promoting for the expert, he or she will inform their list about it too. (More traffic for you).
It will also benefit your search engine traffic as well, as people will search for the expert’s name and come across your blog post.
And of course, there’s the benefit of building a relationship with that expert and becoming friends (even more traffic if you can create a product together or promote each other’s blogs).
Great post Devesh.
Hey Dev, wonderful post for sure. I need to ramp it up a bit I think and also think outside the box.
Do you really think “article marketing is dead?”
I think traffic is as a result on as you say hard work, consistency and just spreading yourself around.
Haven’t done forums yet. I don’t know what scares me about them… but there is a definite brain blockage.
I will go on over and have a snoop.
Thanks Dev
Jayne
Traffic is the main focus of every blogger, obviously whether you are doing it for passion or money all you want is visitor who can atleast read what you want to convey. Great share these things could be really helpful