It’s easy to start a blog but the hardest part of blogging is driving traffic effectively to that blog. Many new bloggers find it almost impossible to get visitors to read their stuffs, getting less than a hundred page views daily and abandoning their blog out of frustration. Without a meaningful traffic, a blog is almost as good as useless and that is this is one of the main reasons some blogs never get to see the light of the day. New bloggers are often faced with the challenge of getting traffic and increasing their blog’s daily page views. Well, if you’re a new blogger, you ought to know that all the so called “big blogs” you see today started with zero visitors but finally made it. Are you wondering how? I started this blog and somehow managed to get a fairly good traffic…if I did, you too definitely can. According to alexa, this blog is currently listed in the top 100,000 most popular sites in the world all within the frame of a year.
There are certain ways to drive visitors to that new blog of yours and I’m going to try to list here how I started. All the tips here definitely worked for me and they should work for you too if properly implemented.
1. Social Networking
This really helped me a great deal in the early days of my blog and I must tell you, the first handful of visitors I got was from Facebook. I use twitter a lot less though but it can also be a great source of traffic if properly used. You can’t separate blog traffic from social networking and I think you need to add people with similar interests as friends who would read and appreciate your ideas each time you share link to your new blog post. Also you should have a fully function fan page. You can get free facebook fans in several ways – inviting your friends, showing the badge on your blog and so on.
2. Web Forums
This is used less by bloggers but if you’re new to blogging, you definitely need it. Using popular web forums is one of the quickest and most effective ways to drive traffic to your blog. You should register in two or three popular web forums and be active there. Post interesting topics in those forums and use your blog as reference once in a while but do not spam. Imagine the traffic you’ll be driving to your blog with a topic that gets up to 1,000 page views in just a day. You should also include your site link in your forum signature as people will definitely check your site when they find your forum post interesting. I got quite some traffic from Nairaland forum and some other international forums when I started out.
3. Blogging Communities
Blogcatalog was the bomb back in 2009, it was a major source of traffic for me back then because I was very active there. I’m not sure it still works like it used to but there are other blogging communites you can join to drive traffic to your blog. You can join linkreferral, yousaytoo, technorati and some other blogging communities. I used them a lot less these days but you can google out the best of them or ask around.
You’re a new blogger so don’t expect your guest post to be accepted on problogger.net but you can still find a popular blog to write for. Writing for a well known blog is a way of exposing your blog which stands to get lots of real traffic if your guest post suddenly goes viral. I normally check out guest authors’ sites each time I read piece of their writing on other blogs.
5. Blog Directories
I don’t believe in directories that much but you can still drive a handful of traffic to your blog from there. Submitting your blog to directories doesn’t only get you some traffic, it’s also a way of building your backlinks which is pertinent to search engine ranking.
6. Commenting on Popular Blogs
Being a regular commentator on popular blogs can drive one or two people to your blog daily and increase your popularity in the process but this is not the major reason I included it, I included it because it’s a way of building your backlinks also just like the blog directory thing I mentioned earlier.
7. Submitting Articles to Directories
Trust me, you can get thousands of people trooping in to your site by just writing a couple of articles and submitting them to ezine, scribd and the rest of them. More often than not, articles from these directories do come up in search results when properly written. Including your site in the byline and referring to one or two of your blog posts is an ideal way to drive traffic to your blog and some people might even be kind enough to include those backlinks when they use your articles on their blogs.
8. Social Bookmarking
I haven’t been using them much lately but a fellow blogger I know personally wrote a post on the power of stumbleupon and digg, making me realize I’ve been missing out alternative ways to increase my blog’s traffic.
9. Optimize your Blog for Google Search
This is probably the most important of all. Google is the biggest source of traffic in the world for any site and this is a fact. Submit your site to major search engines including google, bing, yahoo and the rest of them. Also, be sure your link building and other search engine optimization techniques are properly implemented. You will even find other sources of traffic negligible when google finally starts driving real visitors to your blog. Optimizing your site for search engine is a long time process though, but it definitely pays at the long run as you will be increasing your alexa traffic rank and google page rank at the same time.
10. Read Like Crazy
Yes, you heard me right, read like crazy. I know you’re probably a good reader by reading through this boring piece right till the end but you need to read more like it. Get different ideas from probloggers, read every ebook on blogging you can lay your hands on, subscribe to newsletters based on blogging tips, driving traffic effectively to your blog and SEO.
Thanks Don, The 10 tips above are vital for any blogger that need to get traffic to there website. These tips need to be taken seriously because they form the basis of your traffic.
If you do them all with a very good SEO, you should expect your blog to get the required traffic.
Thanks Don Caprio. Your articles are very insightful and informative. I will definitely be implementing some of the techniques I don’t already use in the near future.
You’re welcome, Khary and thanks for dropping by
What I use among of these tips are social bookmarking, social media, and guest blogger. That three alone really works in driving traffic to my website.
Great and useful post dude.I think article submission is a good way to build more backlinks and to get more traffic.If you do it perfectly It will give more than you expect.When I searching for article submission sites I have found some good quality article submission sites.check this also.it will be useful
Top 10 article submission sites
Hi there. I was actually trying to find your post about moving from blogger to wordpress {found it through a google search last week and thought it looked like a huge help}, but I keep being directed to this post. Is the other one still available?
Thanks!
Linsey
I wasn’t even aware of that error! Thanks for notifying me, Linsey. I checked what went wrong and realized it was a mistake on my part. Here is the permalink – http://www.doncaprio.com/2011/12/moving-your-blog-from-blogger-to-wordpress-without-losing-traffic-and-seo.html
Just glancing over your website’s seo results on yahoo + google backlinks, one can only conclude that your approach indeed has results:
http://domof.com/www.doncaprio.com.html
Also the other search engines seem to be fond of your content. Keep up the good work.
nice piece of stuff there. Applaudise
@Don, you indeed nailed it there. you’ve got the point and basics. Thanks for your time on this and the good write up.
I have applied for google adsense many times but always it disapproves. I have your all posts related to adsense but i cant switch to custom domain as i have no money. so you plz help me.
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You should give your blog some time to grow if its new. Also, posts relating to hacking and cracking may prevent you from getting accepted into the program.
Twitter: augustusvibe
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Thanks for this post, they are very useful to me, as i have just launch a new blog.
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You’re much welcom. All the best!
Twitter: enairablog
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Thanks doncaprio, is always fun reading your blog…This tricks will really pull lots of traffic to a blog
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Glad you found them useful. thanks for dropping by
Best Tricks For New Bloggers…
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Twitter: ColocationUSA
says:
Great tips Don. Some of those tips have worked really well for me. Another basic tip would be to install the Alexa rank tool bar in your browser and encourage those who you interact with to do the same. Webmasters are notorious as they always include their Alexa link within their e-signature. There are many pros and cons to Alexa’s ranking system. We’ve created a short list of common Alexa myths. Let us know what you think:http://www.colocationamerica.com/blog/secrets-to-a-better-alexa-ranking.htm
I cheked your site and I must say that’s a pretty awesome post. I left a comment
Thanks for dropping by, James.
Twitter: ColocationUSA
says:
Thank you Don! We really dig your site too. -Best,
James
Twitter: boffill
says:
Thanks for this very wonderful post. I already have an old blog and I’m still having trouble driving traffic to my blog. Problem is I can’t get online all the time so no time to update. ANyway, thank you for this article, it’s a must read for all new bloggers.
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Twitter: dawatech
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what a selfishless blogger, good one bro
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Thanks a bunch for this wonderful post.
Twitter: thescript102
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awesome tips thanks for sharing
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Twitter: ireptoba
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thanks for these tips. its really helpful to me
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Twitter: JamiuOloyede
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@Don, thanks for sharing these ten tips on how to drive visitors effectively to a new blog. It is very useful. Driving traffic to a new blog is very important apart from SEO. Thanks for sharing.
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