How to drive traffic into your blog

If one of your blogging goal is to make money online, you need traffic. Traffic brings money. The visitors bring you money just like how fans make the Hollywood actors and actresses earn their million dollar salary. Basically, in Google Analytics, there are three main sources of blog traffic - the search engines, referrals and direct traffic.

Search engines

To drive traffic into your blog through search engines, you need to optimize your post. Bear in mind that you have to write for your audience, not for search engines. Your posts must be original and well written so search engines will give it more value. Also, your posts much be informative so that people who drive into your blog through search engines would not be disappointed. Optimize your title, meta description and meta keywords to fully drive traffic into your blog from search engines.

By adding your site in my.yahoo and google reader, these search engines index your post. So encourage your visitors to subscribe in your RSS feed. Ping your blog after you published a new post.

Referrals

There are a lot of referral sources to drive traffic into your blogs. Forums, comments, social medias and ad campaigns just to name a few. The key is to create a lot of quality backlinks into your site. The following can be done to drive traffic into your blogs through referrals

  • On forums, include in your signature link the keyword and URL to your blog
  • In some forums, you could buy signature links from other members. Buy links on members who posts often
  • When a forum has a review section, grab this opportunity and ask members to review your sites
  • Comment on other blogs (as always) Make it a good one and impressive
  • Take advantage of social networking sites such as MySpace.
  • Drive traffic into your blog through social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble Upon
  • Make good quality posts of course so people would recommend your site to others
  • Sign up with Entrecard
  • Link love!
  • Buy ad space
  • Adwords campaign
  • Register your blog in directories like dmoz.org

Direct traffic

We all know that writing good quality, informative and fun posts makes readers to go back to your site for more. Also, do not flock your sites with ads and stay away from pop up ads. It’s really annoying. Have a well designed and unique theme.

Now that you know on how to drive traffic into your blog, the real challenge is how to keep them. I made a case study on the quality of traffic sources, it’s a good reader, better check it out! You’ll learn more on how to drive traffic into your blog and keep them!

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

24 Responses to “How to drive traffic into your blog”

  1. eric says:

    and don’t forget offline promotion too!

    and by the way Riyanne, I’ve found a new solution to drive a traffic into your blog at the same time, you’ll be paid for it too!

    i’m really excited to announce it here, because this company launched their services last week (Nov.2,2008). i don’t want to be tagged as a spammer, so just browse the article on my blog. it’s actually like Entrecard with Pay :)

    [Reply]

    Riyanne Reply:

    Maybe you could guest post about it here!

    [Reply]

  2. Dennis Edell says:

    Good stuff! Most people seem to think direct traffic is the best…I would say referral because that’s the stuff that’s gonna go viral.

    Dennis Edells last blog post..Are You Able To Focus & Take Action? A 5-Step Plan That WORKS.

    [Reply]

    Riyanne Reply:

    I think you are right too. Before, i was not interested with the referral traffics. But when I start to explore on different blog niches, my thoughts with referral traffics has changed

    [Reply]

  3. I also prefer referral traffic than anything else. It’s stable and there are many ways to get referral traffic. With search engine traffic, webmasters will need to work with SEO, and with direct traffic, it’s a continuos effort to get people back.

    Sly from SlyVisions dot Coms last blog post..Answers To Your Questions

    [Reply]

    Riyanne Reply:

    I agree, it’s so hard to work on SEO

    [Reply]

  4. anshul says:

    All the ways you wrote are the mosts important. But i can suggest two more ways.

    One is the conducting contests and that in entrecard are too famous.

    Second you can make adobe reader copies of your work and start distributing it. IF its hit it will spread your name too.

    anshuls last blog post..Create Three Column in Blogger Footer

    [Reply]

    Riyanne Reply:

    Your second suggestion is so good. Do you have any ideas/ways to distribute pdfs?

    [Reply]

  5. ceblogger says:

    it’s the search engines that gave me traffic lately. sometimes, i have some visitors brought by stumbleupon.

    [Reply]

    Riyanne Reply:

    Good for you if you are getting traffics from search engines!

    [Reply]

  6. Reyn says:

    Thanks for the tips. Surprisingly for me, I really didn’t want to much traffic in my blog since at first I just wrote for my friends and didn’t really care if other people could read it. However, Google and other search engine ranks my site for some really weird keywords and I get visitors from all over the world now XD

    [Reply]

  7. lvs says:

    I agree the most with the commenting part. As bloggers we must visit others blogs and leave comments. Comments drive the blogging community and add more excitement.

    I am not sure how much ads work. Do you think it works from your experience?

    lvss last blog post..The Search Has Just Begun

    [Reply]

  8. Jan Alvin says:

    Hi Riyanne!

    Thanks for joining me in your contest. If you want any free premium themes for your you could just contact me because meron akong mga walang bayad na theme. Ipapamahagi ko na lang sayo kung gusto mo.

    Jan Alvins last blog post..Watch Madagascar 2: Escape To Africa Movie Online Free

    [Reply]

    Riyanne Reply:

    Sure thing! I would like that! :D

    [Reply]

  9. chethan says:

    Yea true a nice article, but apart from all these social networking sites like stumble upon and digg are big sources for traffic

    chethans last blog post..Looking for sponsors for a contest

    [Reply]

  10. reyna elena says:

    thank you for visiting my site! ateng! i really appreciate it!

    there’s one Manila blogger who wrote something about the other side of having so much traffic on your site, nakalimutan ko who, but in any case, it did happened to me too. i am having so much traffic but is costing me more. ganun. hahaha think about it. hehehe

    [Reply]

  11. reviewe says:

    the ways that i m using are
    entrecard,stumbleupon,digg,feedburner, thats it ,do i need anything more???

    [Reply]

  12. John says:

    My three greatest sources of traffic are Stumbleupon, Reddit and Digg.

    Johns last blog post..Malham Tarn, Yorkshire Dales

    [Reply]

  13. Steve says:

    I get most of my traffic from Reddit, which makes sense since a good portion of my blog entries are programming related — seems to be a very popular content type there.

    Digg and Stumbleupon are only small blips on the referral radar according to my Google Analytics. Oh well…I keep trying to use them, but so far no luck.

    [Reply]

    Riyanne Reply:

    Congratulations on your traffic from Reddit. I’m having my luck with StumbleUpon with 28% bounce rate. Great, isn’t it

    [Reply]

  14. chodirin says:

    many ways how to drive traffic on our web/blog. i agree with your idea.

    chodirins last blog post..OpenOffice 3.0 Ready to challenge Microsoft Office

    [Reply]

  15. ronald says:

    great….I agree. ty very much appreciated post

    [Reply]

  16. Yeah, I still have to try some offline promos myself… maybe buying car sticks or newspaper advertising ?

    I’ve tried online classifieds but with poor results. Got a bunch of spam e-mails replies… :(

    [Reply]

  17. Great idea to focus on referrals. Many people focus on direct traffic and it was nice to read an article that focused on referrals. Thanks for the information!

    [Reply]

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