How To Drive Traffic to Your Blog
One of the questions I get from my clients, friends, and
students is “How do you get people to care about your product or issue and how
do you get to leave a comment or read your blog.”
Many social marketing experts have already blogged about it,
suggesting up to 21 tactics to build social presence online. Let’s review the
top 5.
1. Write
well and write about something useful for the reader.
2. Use
Wordpress because of its built-in tools that facilitate sharing of information
and SEO.
3. Build
a network by commenting on other’s people blogs.
4. Post
often and at specific times during the day/week.
5. Track
and monitor your posts using analytical tools.
Nothing new and yet for many individuals these methods do
not seem to work. I decided to test some of these suggestions on my personal
blog to see what it really takes to drive traffic and increase readership on my
personal blog.
The first distinction is that each case and individual is
different. If you are just blogging as a hobby most likely you will have limited
time to devote to your blog, thus you might find difficult to implement any of
the suggestions above. What you need to do is take some time to test and figure
out what works and does not for you and your blog.
I have several blogs and social media presence, but I don’t
treat them equally. My food blog at www.gincoolette.com
is purely for fun. I don’t care about creating an online presence. This is
important also for you as a blogger – set your goals from the beginning. What
is that you want to achieve and how?
My fashion blog at www.fashionfrugals.wordpress.com was
born 10 days ago out of a frustration of seeing crappy fashion blogs and
Facebook pages. This is the blog I decided to test most of the strategies on
how to increase readership and online presence.
My social media blog was born out of passion for what I do
as a job – understanding and measuring the impact of social media in
influencing people’s behavior. It’s not only what I practiced as a young
professional but new emerging communication technologies were the subject of my
dissertation while pursuing a PhD in Communication at Florida State University.
So what you will expect from the next posts is a test,
analysis, and suggestions on how to effectively utilize social media, starting
with your blog. I hope to add to the current flow of information that at times
I find useful and others useless.
