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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Hi Dev,
Great traffic guide here.
No matter what strategies you choose from here, consistency is important. Everything works when you practice it often enough and effectively.
I use very often social media(Facebook and Twitter mostly), blog comments and social bookmarking sites. Guest posting is also an awesome way to drive traffic and build your brand:)
Thanks for sharing your strategies with us. You are everywhere in the blogosphere:)
Keep up the great work,
Radu
Dev,
Commenting was one of the first methods that I used to bring traffic to my blog and I found it to be very effective, it still is!
I’ve used most of the methods that you have recommended, I still need to get into the video making. I think it would be a fun way to bring some variety (and new traffic!) to my site!
Thanks,
Stacy
Great and concise article Dev! I’ve found forums are a fantastic platform to network and connect through. The main thing I would add is writing quality content. Though you absolutely must get out there and connect with other bloggers through commenting, guest posting, etc, it’s vital that when you generate that traffic, you KEEP that traffic. The higher quality your content is, the more aware others will become of your site. The better the content, the more “shares” each of your articles will receive, generating more traffic.
Hey Dev,
You’ve made some very important points here. One problem people have is that that they keep looking for the “next best thing” and miss out on obvious opportunities”.
I still use Warrior Forum and I can say they send very useful traffic. People here are interested in internet marketing, blogging… so they stay longer than others from Twitter and the most of the others.
Have a lovely day and good luck with the contest.
Emmanuel Olonade
Excellent summary of some of the best methods of traffic generation. They all work well – but personally. commenting is my favourite technique.
Apart from getting traffic, you get the opportunity to interact with other successful bloggers and form relationships which may be mutually beneficial. It is also a whole lot of fun!
Great post Devesh,
You’ve more or less covered all the core strategies for blog traffic generation here.
Have to confess I find the whole converting posts to videos daunting although I really do need to get around to that sometime.
The other one that I’ve seen working wonders for several of my blogging friends is Guest Blogging, although I want to get my own blog structure to a higher level of ‘completion’ before I go hard at that…
Well done mate, Thanks for an excellent post.
Hey Devesh,
Although I have used all of these methods, I think article marketing has worked the best for me. Of course that doesn’t mean, I dont do other methods, I still do, but artcile marketing is my first choice. Not only it gets you one way quality baclinks, with good articles, you can also attract traffic.
Hey Dev,
Excellent post! I use all of these strategies on a daily basis, as much as possible. Although, I haven’t spent much time on forums lately, which I should. I agree that forums can get you some of the best traffic, because anyone who comes to your site from a forum, has already read what you have written in the forum and has decided to visit your site based on that. So they already have an idea of what your site is about and where your expertise lies.
I think the most important thing any of us can do is to learn and use one strategy, until we master it and automate it, if possible. Then move on to the next. This way you won’t suffer from the dreaded “Information Overload” which plagues many bloggers and IM’ers today.
Thanks for sharing your strategies with us Dev and have a good one!
OMG!! Where do you start? All of this is quite overwhelming, you have such a good grasp on things in your opinion what should i start on to make the best use of my promotional efforts? Thanks for opening my eyes to a much bigger world of marketing your site.
One best way to get traffic to your site is setting up mini nets forming it a link wheel. Just like the wheel, the hub is your main site/mother site. After which, you can make the first level mini-nets as your second level mother sites. The more the links, the more google will recognize it. Always remember, Quality is best than Quantity..