You have finally decided to create your blog. You set up your hosting and you bought that URL you have always wanted for your site. You have thought about your niche and you finally publish your first article.
You get all excited but after some time passes, you notice that there is no one going to your site and no one leaving any comments (or if there is, it’s very minimal). It is every new blogger’s dream to get traffic to their site, but getting the traffic you want might be a bit tricky.
When I started out with my personal site, I was a bit frustrated at first, but did not lose heart. I worked on it and found some extremely helpful solutions to getting traffic and loyal readers to my site. I intend to share with you here what I did and hope that you find these tips useful for your own site as well. There are several ways to get traffic to your site, some may be costly and others are free.
You might say that you have heard or read about this before, but I cannot stress enough the need to have the best content you can offer your readers. Share or offer original and varied content. Share information that will help others with real solutions, ones that are tried and tested by you, the author of the article.
You can boost your search engine ranking by focusing your content on keywords related to your topic. This is also calledSearch Engine Optimization. This will allow your website or blog to be searchable via the web. Use words that come naturally to people of all ages when looking for your type of site.
Just like in anything we do, when we want to be heard, we need to shout out and make sure to promote ourselves. The best way to get traffic is by promoting your blog or website. There are so many ways you can promote yourself. You can hold a contest or announce a giveaway, but make sure that the contest rules or mechanics are skewed to your reader’s interest.
1. Give constructive and useful comments on other blogs – When people see that you have useful things to share, then the chance of them going to your site to read more about you is higher.
We sometimes overlook the obvious, but there are simple things that we can do to bring people to our site. One great way is to add your site’s url on your email signature. Most emails, even the free ones, offer a signature file. Usually this feature is found under the heading of “options” in the email program. One note: Be sure to include the “http://” before the Web address so a link will be created for people who receive plain text emails as well as html.
Another way is to include your site’s url on your business cards. Simple, yes, but it will get the word out that you have a site that they can go to. Be creative and share a statement under your site’s url, make it something catchy. Last but not least, the most obvious thing you can do is tell others about it. I don’t think it would hurt sharing with your friends and coworkers that you have a blog that can help them with information they need!
Writing and maintaining a blog is no easy task. You put your heart and soul into writing the articles in hopes of being able to share your ideas and opinions to the masses. Doing the simple and yet important actions mentioned above to bring traffic to your site will definitely make it all worth your while. If you have other suggestions, please feel free to share them with us and to our readers.