5 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Blog

In this short article, we're going to talk about what might be your best friend or your worst enemy: traffic! I'm going to briefly discuss several ways that you can redirect traffic to your blog, and we'll review each of these ways in more detail in future tips.

Before we start, I want to remind you of an important concept related to traffic: you don't push traffic, you don't drive traffic, you don't pull traffic -- you redirect it. You can't force it to go where you want -- you find the source and you alter its path so that it meanders to your destination.

SEED YOUR BLOG PROPERLY: Traffic starts with content, so the best thing that you can do to redirect and KEEP traffic is provide your readers with exceptional content.

POST NEARLY EVERY DAY: You must post frequently if you want to create a six-figure blog. After six months, you'll begin to notice declines in your levels of traffic that correlate directly to pauses in your posting frequency. As a side benefit, if you post frequently and update your XML sitemap after every post, you'll soon see Google visiting your site within 1 hour of any updates you make. It really CAN be that simple.

BEST: Use an aged domain; GOOD: Use your own domain. You really must use your own domain name. It is a highly effective way to begin future-proofing your blog. You should also be using a quality platform like Wordpress. This is not to disparage other platforms, but Wordpress just happens to offer better features and performance, and will be around for the long haul.

Ideally, your own domain is also an aged domain; i.e. your domain has been registered for several years. I have some anecdotal evidence that shows that Google lets blogs out of the sandbox faster and backlinks are counted more quickly when using an aged domain.

WRITE FOR BEGINNERS: whatever your niche, be sure to include posts for newcomers to the niche, and use your keyword analysis tool to make sure that you're serving all new readers, e.g. "Your-niche 101," "Your-niche newbie," "Your-niche beginner guide," etc. Beginners make up the majority of readers and are hungry for your information. They are the most likely to become long-term subscribers.

BLATANT RSS FEED ICON: make your RSS feed icon big and bold so that it absolutely, positively cannot be missed. End each post with words similar to "for more blah blah, be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed." Sometimes that's all it takes.

USE KEYWORD RESEARCH to effectively target your blog posts. Yes, keywords are THAT important. You should use keyword tools to help determine your niche, to help determine your content, to help determine your blog post titles, and to determine the keywords that must appear within each post.

If anyone tells you that keywords aren't important, then they don't properly understand keywords, because keywords are nothing more than the objective, underlying measures of various markets.