Twenty five steps to increase blog traffic

In blogging content is king and marketing is queen. If you write high quality original content and promote it then the result may be an increase in organic traffic, or not.  If it’s not easy to locate your content in search engines then there will be no increase in new traffic.  Thus, what determines success is two things:

• whether or not your content is found,  and
• whether or not the readers who do find it become subscribers.

Bloggers and their readers are co-creators of a  blog’s brand and that brand is ever evolving.   It’s important to invest time into finding the correct niche for your blog and formulating your goals.  It’s likewise just as important to examine your blog in terms of  growth models.

In the final analysis, all bloggers need to focus on creating relationships with other bloggers by leaving meaningful comments on their blogs, and by encouraging “organic” traffic that translates into a faithful blog readership for your own blog by responding to the comments you get.

Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is any traffic that comes to your site without being paid for. This includes people who visit via links in forums and blogs, traffic from search engines, traffic from word of mouth, or traffic from bookmarks. Organic traffic generally comes to a site naturally and is not driven by marketing campaigns.

Inorganic Traffic: Inorganic traffic is traffic that is pushed via marketing campaigns. Banner ads, search engine ads, etc generate inorganic traffic. Generally speaking this form of traffic is semi-immediate depending on how much you blanket the Web with your advertising and slowly dies out over time unless more money is spent to build a new marketing campaign.

There are 25 basic steps to take to increase traffic to your blog. Here are the steps:

1. Structure a reader and search engine blog;
2. In blogging content is king create unique, high quality content;
3. Learn basic SEO so you can use keywords effectively and apply basic SEO to your headlines,  blog and posts;
4. Make your blog posts look professional;
5. Create at least 4-6 pillar posts;
6. Select and link to appropriate anchor text;
7. Leave meaningful comments on related blogs;
8. Encourage comments on your own blog;
9. Develop relationships with other bloggers so you can build a blog readers’ community around your own blog;
10. Link and trackback to to authoritative posts other blogs you refer to in your own blog posts;
11. Link to authoritative sources in your posts;
12. Deep link to your earlier related posts in your new posts;
13. Assign appropriate categories and tag your posts with care;
14. Link to related authoritative blogs in your blogroll;
15. Provide RSS feeds for subscribers;
16. Having a well designed theme is important, evaluate your theme for effectiveness, and if required, create a new header,  make improvements or  replace your theme and reduce page loading time;
17. Avoid cluttering your blog with widgets that lack reader value;
18. Buy your own domain;
19. Verify your blog with the three big search engines.  Go to google.com “Webmaster Tools” and set up your account there.  Create a sitemap for your site and submit it to Google, Yahoo and MSN so search engines can find and index all your pages.  If you have a free hosted wordpress.com map then sitemaps are automatically created for you and the search engine verification process has been streamlined.  If you have a self hosted wordpress blog then there is a sitemap plugin that can auto-generate your sitemap whenever you update your site (and it auto-notifies Google for you);
20. Get organized, use an online to do list by developing a blogging workflow;
21. Join social networks and social media sites and use twitter, friendfeed and other other Free RSS directories to promote your blog posts;
22. Promote your blog through forums, online groups, and  selected directories;
23. Develop a social media time management strategy and stick to it;
24. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival or to article directories such as Ezine Articles, etc.
25. Become a guest blogger on sites with higher page rank than your own site.