Nowadays it seems that everyone is having a blog, but many have no idea how to drive traffic to blog. I hope today’s discussion can shed some light to bloggers who are struggling to drive traffic to their blogs.
From time to time, I get people asking me if they should advertise their blog to get traffic. My advice is always ‘No’. If you have a new blog, remember, advertising it is not the way to get traffic. There are some exceptional cases of course. But in most cases, advertising is not a good traffic source for blogs. (Blog plays a different role in advertising. I may discuss this next time.)
Have you heard of gurus saying that blogging is a way to get traffic?
Yet bloggers are scratching their heads wondering how to drive traffic to blog.
Shouldn’t blogging generate traffic? If so, why do you need to drive traffic to your blog? Shouldn’t you just keep blogging and your blog should generate traffic on its own?
Well, you know things are not that simple.
A new blog is capable of generating traffic on its own ONLY IF it’s optimized for search engine. Else, you’ll have to think of ways to drive traffic to the blog and that can be tedious and even frustrating to some.
In my opinion, if you were to start a blog, it must be optimized for search engine. That’s the laziest way to drive traffic to your blog.
How do you build a search engine optimized blog?
There are just two things you need to do.
1) Write search engine optimized posts
Most bloggers simply blog whatever they like to say. You can do that if you are Paris Hilton. If not, you’re not likely to attract people to read what you’re writing.
A ‘purpose-driven’ blogger will do careful keyword research and optimize his article for search engines before posting it to his blog. Almost every blog post is his arrow that aims to shoot down the top position in the search results.
2) Build backlinks
The objective of a blogger should be to turn his blog into an authority site.
My definition of an authority site is one with a high PageRank. To get a high PageRank, you have to get many backlinks to your blog.
The game of search engine optimization is unfair. Authority sites receive more attention and better rankings from the search engines. You can write very good content but if your blog has no backlink, you’re not likely to get much attention.
Link building is boring and tedious. And you won’t see the return immediately. But it is necessary.
Did I say ‘necessary’?
Besides the normal ways of getting backlinks, such as submitting articles, press release, forum marketing etc, there is an innovative way that you should explore if you are serious.
It’s to create a free online application that people are interested to link to. If you don’t know how to create one, you can always get a freelancer to do it. But you need to come out with the idea.
For example, in the blog industry, many bloggers create free Wordpress plugins. Useful plugins get lots of recommendations from other bloggers and thus backlinks.
Final comments
Building a blog that can drive traffic on autopilot takes time and effort. In the meantime, you should look for other ways to drive traffic to your blog. The way I recommend is to build a list. You can easily build a list through advertising and offering something for free. Then you can send this list to read your blog.
This is the beginning stage, when you have to actively drive traffic to your blog. If you keep following the two steps above, your blog will eventually get traffic from the search engine automatically. This is when your blog can become your faithful and passive traffic generator. This process can take 3 to 6 months, depending on how hard you work.
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