PROMOTING VISITORS TO YOUR BLOG(Driving Traffic) AND VISITOR COUNT

 By Kwami Ahiabenu, II

 

Recently, one of my students sent me an interesting email with this question: how can he promote his blog that is drive traffic to it and secondly how can he count visitors to his blog. Good question because creating a blog is very easy but becoming a well read and influential blogger is a different ball game. But you  can achieve this objective if you work hard at it.

 

Driving traffic to your blog, is very possible and every blogger is encouraged to promote his and her blog to its intended audience

Broadly speaking there is a number of ways to promote your blog, namely using off line means, use of appropriate online promotion tools and quality of your content (posts)

 

1. OFFLINE Promotion

Though your blog is located in the virtual world, you can always use offline means to drive traffic to it

1.       Put your blog address on your card or complementary card, that is in addition to your telephone, fax, address, email, your blog address should be found on your card

2.        When published hard copy articles remember to add your blog address at the end of the article

3.        If you have the chance of doing public speaking remember to ask your audience to visit your blog at the end of your speech. This also true for lecturers and teachers, encourage your students or learners to visit your blog

4.        In meetings, do not feel sly to share your blog with participants if appropriate

5.        If you are can afford, you can place an ad in your local newspaper, or on the television or the radio

6.       What about a big billboard with your blog address ?

 

 

2. ONLINE Promotion

There is no doubt that the Internet is your best bet in driving traffic to your blog. The good news is that the Internet offers you thousand and one tools to help you promote your blog:

1.       Add your blog address to your email signature in additional to your contact details

2.        You can send email to your email contact list and invite relevant contacts to visit your blog. In addition to your contact list you can also capture email address of visitors to your blog by asking them to subscribe to your blog.

3.         You can post your blog address to relevant online mailing list or discussion boards

4.        Build links to your blogs. Exchanging links are great ways of promoting your blog ask your fellow bloggers to set links to your blog.

5.        Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines through search engine optimisation   and submit your blog to search engines as well. Submit your blog and RSS feed to directories as well

6.        The use of keywords is crucial to promoting traffic to your blog. Use appropriate keywords in the title of your post, in the body of your post and in the achor text of links inthe body of your posts. Most blog service would allow you to add tags to your blog, adding tags help visitors find your blog when they are searching for your blog. So for each post make use you add tags

7.        Create your own online community who are interested in your blog

8.         Make use of Ping your blog services such as Ping O Matic  which basically  a service which update your blog to different search engines when your blog is updated.

9.        Make use of Social marketing in promoting your blog sites such as  Digg or Bumpzee, Stumbleupon, etc comes to mind 

10.    Join blogging networks such as  LinkedIn Bloggers, 9rules, Blogrush

 

3. CONTENT IS THE KING.

At end of the day, people would visit your blog if the content is relevant to them since CONTENT IS THE KING.

In this direction:

1.       Write Posts that your audience will want to read. First you need to be clear about your audience, who are you writing for? Once you know your audience, make sure your posts are going to be relevant to their needs. There is no point in writing about pets if you blog is about knowledge management.

2.        Edit your blog post into articles and submit them to article directories

3.        Your posts should be topical and it should be very current

4.        Do not be afraid to write about controversial topics, it can help drive visitors to your blog

5.        Your blog should have a clear cut focus and it should attempt to reach out to specific community of practice or special interest topics

 

 

To read more about promoting traffic to your site and sustaining it, see 99 ways to promote your blog for free ,  promoting your blog from blogger and how to promote your blog .

 

How do you measure visitor to your blog?

After working hard to drive traffic to your site, you actually need to measure or count visitors to your site, where they are coming from, who are repeat visitors, which posts they read and how long they stay at your blog. Thus you basically need to count visitors to your blog in order to find out if your strategy of promoting visitors to your site is working. Take a quick read at website statistics article to find out more about web basis of measurement.

There are a number of services which count visitors to your blogs and you can sign up for this service by going through a simple registration and activation process.

See a selection of some visitor count services: 

1.       http://www.clustrmaps.com/

2.        http://www.hit-counter-download.com/

3.        http://www.statcounter.com/

4.        http://www.freestatscounter.com/

5.         http://www.maploco.com/view.php?id=695306

 

Ends