You have got your business blog set up and you have started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?
Like any Web site you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.
1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates, and so on.
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine. See a tutorial at our Web site.
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Do not write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-Matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.
5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines.
6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on MasterNewMedia.org.
Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a virtual assistant to do it for you.
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your Web site.
9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.
10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, and so on.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures, and flyers.
12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary -- although some define it as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of Web sites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as "feeds") may be read using aggregators or news readers. RSS feeds may show only headlines or both headlines and summaries. To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, check out the RSS Specifications Web site.
13. Post often to keep encouraging your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks. Also, include links to other blogs, articles, and Web sites in your posts.
14. Use TrackBack links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. TrackBack links send a message from your server to the other blog's server letting it know you have posted a comment referring to its blog. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.
15. Write articles to post around the Web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author information box (See an example below).
16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. Ten minutes a day can help increase your traffic because new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.
Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter from Site Meter.
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