4 Simple Ways To Get Your Blog Traffic And A Bit More Exposure

This is a guest post by Craig Sowerby from CraigSowerby.com.

Know matter what your purpose is with creating your sites or blogs if you do not have any traffic going to your squeeze pages, sales pages or even blogs; it’s like a little shop in a ghost town.

Content is King but it does not matter how good your content is, if it is not being looked at or read then what is the point.

You still have to market and promote your blogs and websites.

Having a blog is a great way to get your foot in the door of the Internet. But there is so many more elements to just posting content on to your blog. Just because you have a blog with some good content on it does not give you the right to have a mass of traffic that flood’s to your site.

Not only does your content have to be relevant to your readers you want your personality to run through your content, be just that bit different and entertain your audience. People will warm to the person behind the blog not the words they read on the screen.

Especially when you first start blogging, it just is not enough to post on your blog. You need to be getting more exposure and promoting like a rabbit on heat to get eyes reading your posts.

4 methods that I would like to share with you today are:

Guest Posting

So why would you even consider writing quality post for someone else’s blog.

Well if you put that same content on your own blog who would actually see it? Especially in the early days.

So writing a guest post is a sure way to get more exposure for you as well as your blog and products.

Why should any top blogs allow your post to be added to their well established blog?  Well if you don’t try then you will never know.  If at first you don’t succeed then keep trying.  Just because you did not get accepted on that particular blog then try another.

Talk to the blog owner or editorial team and find out what sort of material they would be interested in.  Sometimes they may have a dedicated post of rules and regulations of what is needed.  Read older posts and find a feel for what the blog publishes.  Check what the comments are discussing.  Sometimes the comment section can turn into a whole new post in it self.

Forum Marketing

Ok this is a bit old school. But if you are a member of a highly trafficked forum with in your niche.  You have all the traffic you could possible need.  All you need to do is siphon that traffic from the forum back to your blog. By using the signature file in your profile.  Having a line or two of text linking back to your blog or squeeze page

You will want to offer VALUE with in the community.  Contribute to other threads and help other marketers that have problems.  Become the person that people look for when they have a problem. When you help others then people will start talking about how you helped them out and people will start searching for you and wanting to know more about you.  They only need to look in your signature file to find more about you

Social Media

This is the new staying in.  The top 2 big hitters are Facebook and Twitter.  But there is a mass of social sites and it would take ages to list the lot.  Some other top social sites include Digg, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn…….. It really is a must to get your content out there and getting more eyeballs towards your blog. Your content has the potential to go viral.  If other members like what they see they can recommend it to their followers tweet it, like it stumble it.  So that one piece of content can be seen all over the net.

There are also a lot of Word press Plugins that can help automate a lot of this work.  Word press is now becoming the industry standard for most blogs and sites

  • Digg Digg – is one that I have only started using.  It is nice looking with a crisp clean finish.  You can add a load of the top social sites to appear making it easy for the reader to add to their social account
  • Sexy Bookmarks – I used this before using Digg Digg.  I personally think Digg Digg looks better as you see it on the page all the time.
  • Facebook Like – If you want to concentrate on Facebook then this a neat plugin will add the like button at the top or bottom of a page
  • Facebook Comment – This is even more exposure for your content through Facebook.  People can actually leave a comment using their Facebook account instead of the standard word press reply.  So it makes it even more interesting for people to check out your blog
  • Tweetmeme – For all the twitter maniacs.  Makes it simple to retweet and share post over at twitter.  This plugin and the Facebook like are within the Digg Digg and sexy bookmarks plugin.
  • OnlyWire – Will submit your content to all the social sites that you have created and add in the settings of the plugin

Content Syndication

Once you have posted your content onto your blog, why leave it there.  Get it out there to as many places as possible. You might say this is going to go against Google’s rules and your content will be penalized for duplicate content. But this is not about SEO, it’s about getting more exposure to your blog.  Ah the duplicate content rules.  There is so much noise about this subject.  Does it exist or is it just made up, so you buy spinning tools.

Here are my thoughts on duplicate content.  I am not saying this is true or set in stone it is just my thoughts, like Google’s algorithm nobody really knows what it is except of course Google

When there is a major news story do all the news and press release sites have each story spun to make it different from the original source?  That would be a lot of work before getting that exclusive news out to the masses.  Of course Google will rank original content more fairly but if you have the same content on thousands of websites. Then Google has to decide where to put them in order of relevancy and authority.

As I said this is not an article about SEO but getting more exposure to your blogs/sites so let’s not go off track here.  Want my take?  Duplicate content is fine for article marketing and building links, but do not use it on your main site or sites.

So once you have it posted to your blog start posting it to these other sites for a lot more exposure. Most of the time you are only submitting the Link, Title and short description anyway.

Blog Carnivals – A Blog Carnival is very similar to a magazine. It is a blogging community where other bloggers share their content for other’s to read. The articles can contain any type of subjects from all types of bloggers. So when submitting you need to make sure you submit it in the correct category.

If there is a carnival for a topic that interest you, start following it and you will see what other bloggers are talking about. You will then be able to share your content with like-minded bloggers

Blogging Communities – This is very similar to the social sites but dedicated to blogging. You will also have to take your time and interact with other bloggers like you do on the social site. Vote for other people’s content that you like and not just keep submitting your content as you will end up becoming a spammer and probably band. Now I am still testing to see which are better and others have been recommended to me.

  • Bloggerbase.com
  • Blogengage.com
  • Blokube.com
  • Serpd.com
  • Bizsugar.com
  • Bloginteract.com
  • Betternetwork.com
  • MMOSocialnetwork.com
  • BloggerDen.com
  • Community.bloggerluv.com

Another place to add your blog post is at imnewswatch.com. Of course this has to be more of a news story and no promotions, but just another place to get more traffic. Easy to come over as the news story is a new post on your blog.

I hope you enjoyed my guest post and you have learnt something new.  If you want to add more great tips and advice lets hear what you have to say in the comments below.

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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50 thoughts on “4 Simple Ways To Get Your Blog Traffic And A Bit More Exposure”

  1. Excellent suggestion on guest posting. It really is a win-win situation since the guest writer is being exposed to an entirely new audience while the guest blogee (the one hosting the article) is also receiving new traffic and links from the writer announcing that he or she is guest posting that day.

    Oy, there’s a run-on sentence for you.

    I also agree with Blog Carnivals. I use SimplyLinked but I wish I could figure out how to create a script that allows the participants to show a dynamic list of all of the other participants as well. Do you have any experience with that? SimplyLinked only offers one script for the person hosting the carnival.

    1. Hi Kelly,

      I have only really started utilizing guest posting. I am guest posting myself as you can see from here and I have also had a couple of guest post over my own blog. So it is very beneficial

      As with the blog carnivals, sorry I do not have any experience with a script that allows the participants to show a dynamic list of all of the other participants as well

    1. Hi Barry,

      Not everybody knows about everything, so I am sorry if this post did not enlighten you.

      It can depend on what niche you are in on to what traffic you go after. There are many paid ways to get traffic, but I know from personal experience and other marketers that many people who come online are looking to boost their income and do not have a lot of money to play with.

      Hence why I have listed free traffic methods, well apart from blog engage as that is a membership site with a cost of $29.99 going down to $1.99 depending on the membership level you want.

      Another paid traffic source is using you tube. Now you might say that uploading videos is free. Yes it is but it won’t be your video you are using. You are going to be paying for advertising space. Either on the video on in the description.

      First, go to YouTube and find popular videos on there that are related to your niche. By popular I mean a video that isn’t older than 1 year, has at least 50 000 views and gets at least 30 new comments every day.

      Find as many videos like this as you can and write down the URL for each video in a word file and save it for future reference.

      Then go through your list of potential videos and contact the owner of the videos. Explain you would like to pay a monthly fee to have an advert added to their video either by annotation or in the description. You can either pay monthly or track clicks and pay per click. If you are in a very popular niche and you have found very popular videos then your traffic will increase

  3. Hi Craig,

    Good points here. I agreed that if you want traffic on your blog or site then you have to expose it to as many people as you can so that you can derive targeted traffic and make your content go viral. Social Media is one of the most famous way to attract people now a days.

    1. Hi Priya,

      If you don’t get out there and do some work and your homework do not expect to get the results you want.

      There are so many plugins and add on’s for browser that helps making content go viral so easier. Just use the tools that are available to us

  4. Very good explanation, I occasionaly follow your posts. I’ll need to increase my commenting up one level, I guess. I write on 3-4 main topics on my blog (tech, computers, science, economy), plus on two languages, English and Macedonian. I am not sure how much would this affect my blog traffic in the future. I have modest traffic, but it is constantly increasing since I started back . This tells me that I am on the right path.

    By the way, Google returned this page as 7th result when I searched for “blog get traffic”. Very well. 😉

    1. Hey Rob,

      Thanks for the comment. Yes unfortunately you have to be active all the time or at least outsourcing some of the work to be keeping a constant flow of traffic.

  5. Speaking on guesting posting, it just reminded me how having guest posts not only outside of your blog but on your blog is all very important. Think about the posts that are on your blog… the writer of that blog post will likely reach out to his friends, and show off the post, thus creating even more exposure! Small things like that to add up over time.

    -Jean

    1. I agree, in my opinion guest posting it’s by far the best way to get traffic and exposure to your blog, additionally it helps develop relations with other bloggers on your niche which is more important than getting traffic on the long run.

      As you said allowing others to guest post in your blog it’s very important since guest bloggers will promote it by themselves and you will get even more traffic

  6. Damn I wish I read this when I was first starting out in IM. I really did think people would flock to my site…LOL. Boy does it take a lot of work but it pays off if you build / create quality stuff. Out of all of the methods you mention, I had the most success with guest posting. Look forward to catching more of your content.

    1. Hey Sam,

      Thanks for your kind words. Yeah it is quick funny and naive how we can easily be persuaded when we first come online and expect everything will just fall into place with out much work.

      But hey is that not what that sales letter just told me 5 minutes ago!!

      Guest posting is a great way to get more exposure. Just make sure you choose a good place to add your content

  7. Guest posting was one of the things that got traffic to my blog in my beginner blogger days. Another thing was publishing great hubs on hubpages.com

  8. I like this post. I’ve been blogging for over a year now, and getting a thousand visitors a day on average; but I still want more and more exposure. I will definitely try all your tips here. Thanks a lot.:-)

  9. Craig, I must say you have written a very well post describing about the ways possible to gain quality traffic to a blog. I haven’t still tried guest posting and the forum strategy yet and I guess I’m missing out something great. Thanks for the great list of blogging communities 🙂

  10. Wow lots of tips there, I use bizsugar and it provides a good way to submit your post with a little WordPress plugin on the actual post page. Still I’ve never been able to get that much traction with my posts, I guess that will come with time and as I interact more with the users.

    MyBlogGuest.com can be a useful way to find writers or find blogs to write on as well.

    1. Hey Dan,

      Thanks for the comment. And also the recommendation of MyBlogGuest.com. I will be checking that one out today!

      I used to use a similar plugin/software to add articles to a lot of directories. The only problem is that sometimes it would fail or not add the content correctly so you would have to go over and vet everything

      I was looking for something the same for blogging communities. But from testing I will be only using a handful and it is always good to interact anyway with other bloggers while you are there

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