Building traffic is really like building a cartoon snowball – if you can get it rolling, you can soon turn it into a fully blown avalanche. As such, those early visitors are actually worth far more than just their own presence, building a couple of extra readers now could gain you 10 or 20 visitors later – it’s all about making the most of every visitor you get.
So for all of you who are still getting started and want to accelerate your progress, here is my guide to going viral and starting your very own avalanche (of blog traffic):
Rule 1: Titles matter
There is plenty written about writing good headlines, in fact here is a post by Tim Ferris which actually inspired me to write this post: Blogging by Numbers: How to Create Headlines That Get Retweeted.
If you want your blog posts to go viral, headlines are probably actually more important than even your content. Content is what builds repeat visitors, so don’t let that slip, but you need to write titles that grab your readers.
The main things to remember are that you need to write headlines that get clicks, not only will this directly increase the number of visitors that come into your site, but it will massively increase your chances of being linked to by other bloggers / webmasters.
Rule 2: Commenting not just for the traffic boost
Commenting on other blogs isn’t exactly a radical new idea, but there are better reasons to do it than just for the odd extra visitor. People who read comments are often people who leave them. If you do plenty of commenting, you are likely to gain a few comments yourself, and when you are starting out, getting the first few comments really helps to start building your community.
As an added bonus, I often find that the most prolific commentors are also bloggers themselves, so again, a good title and some good comments often leads to a link or two. Commenting can be helpful for SEO, but it’s more about community and networking.
Rule 3: Rub other bloggers ego’s
The best types of links are the ones you get when people decide to link to you purely because they think their visitors will enjoy the content. But it is often difficult to get these links because many bloggers are reluctant to give up “link juice”.
A great way to encourage a blogger to link to you though, is to write a post about them. Find the best blogs in your niche and tell your readers about them, big them up a bit. Then just send the bloggers a little note to say that you have written a post about them.
It won’t work every time, but it can work very well. What blogger wouldn’t want to send their readers to a blog post about how great they are? Use a good headline and do some commenting to make sure the bloggers notice you.
Rule 4: Write guest posts
No list would be complete without guest posting, a lot of bloggers do it very half heartedly though. When you are getting started, building a lot of links is essential.
I will sometimes spend a week focusing on guest posting. I will write 10 – 15 posts in batch, then I will go out and offer them to bloggers. I don’t always target the very best blogs, but I will target reasonably good ones. Remember, today’s up and coming blogs might be tomorrows top flight blogs.
If you do this at least 1 week per month, you will very quickly have 50+ links coming in to your site. It is a lot of work, but if you want to get traffic fast, this is the way to go. Just remember that every post you write has to be top notch, you are building a brand for yourself when you guest post. If you can’t ensure that every guest post you write is excellent quality then maybe you should just stick to article marketing.
Rule 5: Plug the holes
Once you start getting a little bit of traffic, you want to make absolutely sure that you keep it. This means getting some analytics set up (check out Google analytics).
In particular, I am interested in how people navigate my site. If I notice one page gets a lot of visits I will make sure it is as good as it can be. And in particular, my top landing pages are the most important; these need to be constantly improved and re-worked so that every new visitor stays a little while at least.
I also look for the pages with the highest rate of exits (pages which people view immediately before leaving my site) I will try to improve the navigation on these pages and encourage people to stay just a bit longer.
What else can you do?
Well that’s my list for now. What have I missed? How do you boost your traffic? Leave a comment and tell the world what strategies work best for you… You never know who might find their way to your site.
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