Ten Simple Blogging Tips to Increase Your Traffic

Are you satisfied with your blog traffic? Do you know hot to increase it?

I was reading some of the posts on Inbound Marketers – For Marketing Professionals (a group of which I’m a member on Linked In) and saw a post by one of our members, Erin Smith that resonated with me. She  put together a practical list of top 10 Simple Blogging Tricks (that will jump-start traffic to your business). I am happy to say I do some of these things already, but there are certainly tips I can start using today! Here is the list:

1. Install the Onlywire plug-in and submit all your blog posts to social media bookmarks, your readers will be able to use this button as well.

- I’ve been using Onlywire for a while now, and am very impressed with the ease of use and performance.

2. Put up a video with you introducing them to your blog and say thanks for visiting, this is what you’re going to get out of my blog.

- Ok, I need to do this. Maybe once I have a good hair day!

3. Don’t pitch with every blog post, post content that will actually benefit others.

- I would like to think I’m doing this!

4. Insert a visible opt-in form that appears on every page. My intro video also invites them to opt-in and tell them what they’ll get if they do.

I have one of those. Look on the right column – you can sign up to receive notifications of my posts, and/or sign up for the RSS feed.

5. Put the Retweet and Facebook share plug-ins on your posts. The more you create a social buzz with your content, the more Google looks at it.

As I don’t (yet) use WordPress.org (that allows plug-ins), I rely on the ‘add-this’ tool and the other built-in buttons provided by WordPress (looks like they’re expanding their ‘share’ buttons pretty frequently).

6. You personally can share your new blog posts on Twitter and Facebook

Yep – I share… ;D

7. Make a video about your post on Youtube and link it back to your blog.

Hmm – good idea.. again. I hope I have a good hair day tomorrow! Oh, and you can subscribe to my YouTube channel here

8. Use an article submitter to blast out your post to hundreds of article directories. The more “hooks” you have out there the more people are going to be “caught.”

I haven’t found a submitter I like, so if anyone has any recommendations, please let me know. In the meantime, I do use Ezinearticles and Squidoo.

9. Make sure you have a keyword in mind and have that keyword in the title, description, tags, body, and anchor text (the text that you click on in a link)

I do try doing this, but I’m not as diligent about this as I could or should be…

10. Make a Squidoo and a Hubpage with links back to your original post on your blog.

Yep – on my todo list