Monday, April 12, 2010

How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

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by C. Patrick Schulze

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With the emergence of self-publishing as a viable form of authorship, it behooves the writer to learn how to market his work for maximum success. One of the initial steps you should consider is blogging. Once that marketing piece is in place, you then need to drive readers to your blog.

Here are some basic steps you can take to do just that.

Publish regularly. You should author articles and post them to your blog as often as possible, but no less than once a week.

Learn how to title your articles. Determine what terms and phrases people use to find information on the Internet and use those to title what you write. I first started with Google Adwords and then began to keep a database of those terms and words people use to find my blog. Can you guess what the number one phrase is?

Populate your blog posts with subscription options. Most of us are aware of the RSS feeds but you might also consider an email subscription service like Feedburner.

Try some article marketing. Think about writing article for sites like EZine or Scribd.com and others. As long as you place a link to your blog in the article, it’ll drive traffic to your blog.

Offer to guest post for other bloggers. Just this past Friday Elizabeth S. Craig was kind enough to allow me to guest post. Of course, she’s posting on my site in just a few days. These reciprocal arrangements encourage people to read both blogs so it builds readers for each party.

Consider if you should place a link under your email signature. Now everyone who sees your emails will be exposed to your blog. And you never know who knows whom.

Link your posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other social networking sites to which you subscribe. As long as they serve your target market, it’ll help build your blog.

You may wish to add a button that allows your reader to retweet your posts. This encourages their followers to find you. I’m been remiss with this but will pick it up this week.

Read other blogs within your market and comment on them. People do tend to read article comments and everyone who does will see the link to your blog.

Build an email list of people who visit and comment. Send an email announcement to each of these people whenever you have a new article posted.

You might also implement share buttons on your blog posts. If you allow your readers to connect with you on various social networking sites, it’ll generate word of mouth advertising for you. One person did this for me on Stumbleupon and I received more than four thousand hits in one day, by far my best day relative to hits.

If this is a topic that holds interest for you, keep an eye out for this blog as I’ll be doing more on this subject soon.

So, what are your favorite tools to drive readers to your blog?

Until we speak again, you know I wish for you only best-sellers.

C. Patrick Schulze
Author of the emerging novel, “Born to be Brothers.”

4 comments:

  1. This is a topic which has fascintated me since I began my blog Sept of 2009 (about 7 months ago)--I have posted several times about it in conjunction with a Monday series I do sometimes called Blog Boggled. On March 27 I reached 200 followers and to celebrate I put forth the Blogging From A to Z April Challenge. Within a few days some 80 people joined in to participate and I don't know how many others are following our progress. So far, since March 29th, my following has increased by 74. I am going to be writing about this in a future post on my site--probably May 3 when I do a recap on the challenge.
    I encourage you to check out the link to the challenge and perhaps some of my other posts during the month of April. Also, as a side note, participants in the challenge have increased their following by 5 to 50 followers depending on how active they have been in the challenge and following the advice I have been giving during the challenge.
    I will link to your post today on my future post.
    Lee
    Blogging From A to Z April Challenge

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  2. C. Patrick SchulzeApril 14, 2010 at 7:02 AM

    Arlee, I checked out your link and think I'll tweet that to see if it won't help you a bit more.

    Great idea.

    Patrick

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  3. Thanks for this. I know i don't post on my blog nearly as often i should but often i can't think of what to say or when i do have something to blog about, i don't think of blogging about it. Does this make any sense?

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  4. Patrick, I found your blog through Arlee Bird and was one of his A-Z Challengers. That exercise made a big difference - I went from 40 to 96 followers in one month. Now I need to implement some of your suggetions as well.

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