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.

Photo by ukasz Strachanowski

Like the photo above, you really need to have positive energy, an explosion of traffic to get your mindset away from “failure” to “successful.” Often, it really isn’t that easy, but thousands have done it before you so, it is definitely possible.

We won’t get into each of the main methods, but instead focus on those that really work.

Search Engine Exposure

Getting good rankings within search engines is key for success in the beginning. Over time, it becomes equally important, as many sites can maintain 20%+ growth month-over-month simply by increasing their rankings. Without search engines, the average site with 100K visitors per month would drop to 75K or less, so you really have to market your blog through them.

The more content you publish, the more articles appear within the search engines. If you have one article, there isn’t a good chance that your blog will get good rankings unless that one article has been linked to thousands of times.

Change Your Habits

Publishing at the same time each day can certainly help your visitors know whether you’ve missed a day or two, but may not work in the long-term. Increasing the number of posts published can draw in new readers, increasing the chance that some of your most dedicated readers will visit more than once per day.

Publishing at various times throughout the day will draw in readers who may otherwise have missed your content in their feed reader, being consumed with dozens of other posts.

Finally, a good idea might to increase the number of comments that you reply to. This will show that you care about your readers’ thoughts, and can also spark new interest in your blog.

Promote, Promote Your Feed [and everything else]

Increasing readership is one of the keys to increasing traffic and breaking yourself away from any stagnant periods. Remember, although you might have 100,000 subscribers, only a fraction (10-25% at most) will click on each link you send out, and even less will read through the entire article. The more readers and followers you have, the more you will be able to capture some of the attention of these people.

On the flip side, having more readers and followers might not be a good thing. Some of these people are just following you or subscribing to you “because everyone else is.” These people may never check their Twitter feed, go into Google Reader, so you won’t see too much effect from them. However, they’re still valuable nonetheless.

Fresh, New Content

Branch away from your main blog focus and deliver something that everyone wants to read. Create a series of articles that can be useful for years to come. Writing news posts can be useful for frequent visitors, but not so much for those who visit your blog once a month.

Stop copying what everyone else is writing about, and create content that invites readers to click through to read more. You have to tie a title to the content, so this is also important to consider.

Branch Out

Many people are unwilling to do this step. They would rather keep all their content on their own site, but they are missing out on a great opportunity. Publish content to other sites, and you’ll see great increases in traffic. This will surely get yourself noticed. Having a single link posted within an article on a site that receives half a million visitors per month can easily break all single-day traffic records, and you’ll see lasting effects from this partnership.

Ask other bloggers to connect to you through a blogroll, as you won’t really see adverse search engine ranking effect as long as you do this modestly and focus on gaining high-quality links.

Conclusion – What other main points can you add to break yourself away from a length of stagnant traffic growth?