Feb
Three Ways To Attract Traffic To Your Blog
It can be disheartening to invest your time setting up a blog and posting regularly to and then have no one come read your words of wisdom. If you have this problem, don’t despair. There are three things you can do to build traffic to your blog. These techniques are easy to implement and will add just a few minutes to the time it takes you to complete your blogging routine each time.
The three techniques I am talking about are: pinging, tagging and bookmarking. Let’s look at each one.
Pinging
You should get into the habit of pinging every time you post new information on your blog. It is quick and easy to do and it is a fast way to get some extra publicity - and traffic - for your blog.
When you ping you are sending out a signal to a blog tracking service informing it that that you have posted some new content on your blog. The tracking service will then crawl your blog to look for the new content and add it to the blog tracking site. It will also automatically inform subscribers that new content has been posted to a particular blog. Pinging is a great way to get your blog registered quickly on search engines because the search engines feed off the information that is provided by blog tracking sites.
If your blog platform is Blogger.com or Typepad.com your blog post will be automatically pinged. However, you will not be able to add to the list of ping services that are used by these two platforms. If you want to ping to multiple services in order to reach a bigger audience then you will have to do so manually, or use a submission service such as Feedping.com/.
If you have set up a WordPress blog on your own domain you will be able to automate the process of pinging to numerous sites. Wordpress offers a default list of sites that allow you to add many more services to the list and have WordPress automatically ping them every time you update your blog post. You can add to your Wordpress ping list by going to Control Panel, then Options, then Writing.
Tagging
Get into the habit of adding tag words to the foot of your blog posts. Tags are simply basic keyword terms that will help people find your blogpost on social bookmarking sites and search engines as well is on the blog platform itself. If you want to find why tags are important, check out the tag links on http://technorati.com/tag/.
Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking
Web 2.0 is a generic term to describe websites that allow visitors to contribute and/or modify information on the website. Typical examples of Web 2.0 sites are blogs that allow comments, social bookmarking and social news sites such as Reddit.com, Digg.com, Propeller.com and Stumbleupon.com, and sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Whenever you post fresh content on your blog, be sure to submit your post to several social bookmarking sites. Many blog platforms allow you to do this by adding a button widgets from the various social networking sites which you can then simply click on to submit your blog post. Another option is to see if the social networking service gives you the option of placing a button to speed up the submission process.
Just by doing these three things you will stand a much better chance of getting your blog posts noticed on the net and of attracting a stream of targeted traffic to your blog.