Increasing a blog’s traffic is an art. Many SEO experts claim that the key to success is diversifying your traffic sources. Search engines want to reward sites that attract organic traffic from other sources such as social networking sites, forums, and article directories. High traffic means more customers and more sales. While writing quality content will help you get traffic naturally, there are many other things you can do to promote your blog.
Here are some of the most popular sources of traffic for blogs:
Submit your Blog to Content Aggregators
If you update your blog with useful information regularly, then you should submit it to content aggregators like 9Rules.com and Alltop.com. These websites gather content from different online sources. Some of them take news stories and post them on one website, while others gather and distribute content to suit their customers’ needs. These sites can be an excellent traffic source if you can get your blog listed.
Use Feedburner
Feedburner is one of the most popular and widely used web feed management providers. This service hosts your feed and allows it to be viewed in any browser. You can link your feed to your social media accounts. Feedburner acts as a professional distribution and tracking assistant, as well as an RSS quality checker.
Add Graphics, Photos and Videos
YouTube and Flickr are great sources of traffic. Submit your videos, pictures, and illustrations to these sites. You can also use Wikimedia.org, Scribd.com, and Slideshare.net to get fresh, targeted traffic. By uploading and hosting media files, you can create another source of traffic for yourself via Image Search. Turn your posts into PDFs and submit them to document sharing sites.
Leave Comments on Blogs
One of the best ways to participate in the blogging community and get targeted traffic is leaving meaningful comments on other people’s blogs. Visit a new blog every once in a while and post comments regularly. Take the time to actually read the post and submit an interesting comment that adds value to that post. Blog commenting can help you increase traffic, get backlinks, and build long term, genuine and mutual relationships with other bloggers and website owners.
Write Content for Article Directories
Article directories are a good source of highly targeted traffic. Write engaging posts and publish them in these sites. Authors can usually include one or two links in the resource box. Conduct keyword research while writing your posts and provide compelling information that helps readers solve their problems.