Skyrocketing Your Blog’s Traffic

Blogs can be quite challenging to operate. Some blogs will never see success, while others grow rather quickly. Although most techniques apply to all blogs, you have to keep in mind that each blog may have a unique audience, and unless you promote them to your audience, you won’t be able to see or realize the success you want.

Throughout the span of a blog’s life, you’ll have high and low points in traffic. Surely, every blog or business experiences this, but there can often be quite dramatic differences – 10,000 visitors one day and 800 the next. How can you ensure that you break free of these “stagnant” periods? In this post, I’ll be covering some of the best ways.

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Think of Comments as Reactions

Leaving comments on other blogs is extremely important for all bloggers. If you don’t, the only way others will find you is through search engines and other blogs that may link to you. By providing your thoughts on other blogs, you are sharing in the conversation and letting others know what you think.

Comment Tags

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Before long, we have come to realize that comments are often more than just the thoughts of someone who has visited our blog. They are left by people who really want to help you grow, and they are encouraged by sharing their thoughts.

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My Favorite Twitter Clients

Twitter has become a BIG part of all of our blogs. Even though you may not use the service, I can almost guarantee you that you are seeing benefits from it. As long as you have any of the ShareThis/AddThis/etc. plugins integrated, people can easily share your posts through the popular service.

While many people choose to use the online interface, I have a few of my favorite Twitter clients, and the reasons behind using them. I use multiple clients, as I manage multiple accounts, but there are more reasons behind the choices.

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3 Ways to Bring Outside Ideas to Your Blog

There are times when you want more than just your own thoughts on your blog. For some, they don’t want to stay near their computer all the time, some want some time to just get away, and some have other reasons that they can’t blog.

During these cases, it is a good time to invite some outside opinion to your blog. Doing this will give a fresh perspective to your readers, and they’ll quickly see that you are really blogging to be professional. A significant number of the larger blogs have multiple authors, with a structure permitting them to publish a dozen or more articles each day.

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Myths About Using Keywords

Keywords were all the rage ten years ago. Simply hide a bunch of keywords in the meta tags area of your site, and you were guaranteed to get great results overnight. Times have changed – this really doesn’t work anymore.

Content is more important than these keywords, and as you write articles for your readers, you will naturally see more visitors coming to your site. Anyone who looks at the keywords users have searched for appear somewhere in their content, and the most popular keywords tend to be what their blog is focused about.

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Why You Shouldn’t Care About Your Visitors

You are often told to listen to your readers, the people who are helping you succeed, but rarely do blog authors do this. If they did, they would quit blogging, and go onto do something that they aren’t forced to change due to a relatively small group of people.

Listening to Your Readers

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You are the only author and the sole owner of your blog (unless you are blogging for someone else or within a network). It is up to you to create a successful blog – without the help of anyone else. Sure, promotion will help in this process by your readers, but this shouldn’t be relied on to meet your goals.

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Plugins and Themes to Introduce or Maintain Your Blog

I couldn’t find any posts that rounded up plugins to bring your blog into maintenance mode or to welcome readers to your site before it has officially been launched. Well, I’ve collected some of the best plugins and themes (there may certainly be others available), but these will help you if you are a WordPress user and need to take your blog offline for a temporary period of time.

!Wartungsmodus

This plugin adds a maintenance page to your blog that does one thing – lets your visitors know that your blog is down for maintenance. You can control who has access to your site during this time, and you can also specify URLs that have access to the site. A countdown can also be implemented.

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Common Traffic Terms Demystified

You’ve likely seen the terms bounce rate, return visitor, and page views hundreds of times if you are a blogger or looking into starting your first blog. Those terms are commonly used, and often confused.

Common Traffic Terms Demystified

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This post will sort all the definitions out, making it easy to tell the difference between them. After you’ve read through the post, please let us know whether you enjoyed it, or if we may have missed a term.

Note: There may be small differences between what others will tell you, but these are the standards used by many traffic analytics suites.

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