Blogging can be a brutal business to enter if you don’t know what you are doing. You can write and write but never gain traction if you are blind to the proven techniques that others have used to gain real traffic to their blog. Below, you will find some tips and tricks that I have learned over the years from developing a high-ranking online marketing blog.
Optimize Your Site
Whether you use WordPress or another blogging platform, you need to optimize the site so it will rank high in the search engines, generally called search engine optimization (SEO). There are many plugins or hacks that are easy to incorporate on your blog, and you can find them simply by searching for SEO plugins on Google. Personally, I use All-in-One SEO, and that has helped boost my personal blog to #4 on Google for a term that has over 10 million results!
Keywords in Title
You want people to come to your site, but in order for that to happen, they need to find you in the search engines. If you are writing about topics people are not searching for, then your writing is in vain. However, if you are constantly writing about topics people want to read about, you will get a lot more visitors. But how do you know what they are searching for?
Google has a tool called the “External Keyword Tool”, and it is available for free for anyone to use. With that tool, you can see the exact phrases that people are searching for in your industry. When you write topics, make sure to use those phrases in your titles, since Google loves to see keywords in the title of your posts.
Pay Attention to Your Readers
You always need to listen to the people who are coming to your site. Read the comments and interact with people whenever they may comment on your articles. Another way to engage with your readers is to set up polls and surveys, and then offer a small incentive for them to fill it out. You can get valuable feedback from real readers by just offering a small gift under $10 a month.
Interact with Peers
Getting people to your site from the search engines is a great way to build traffic, but it is also a good thing to build a name for yourself among your peers. Consider joining industry forums and Facebook groups to start networking with others in the industry. Go to conferences or meet-ups to make some valuable connections as well. Also, you can comment on other blogs in your industry to get your name out there. Just remember to always add value to the conversion, and don’t just be there to spam your site.
Making Some Money
Writing is fun and almost therapeutic at times, but after you write about 50 articles, you probably will want to start to get paid for your hard work. There are many ways to monetize your site, from joining Google Adsense to placing banners from other sites on your blog. Also, a great way to make some extra money is by offering to review products or services for either money or free access to that service. I have personally received lots of requests for reviews and get access to a lot of amazing tools for free!
Blogging is fun and a great way to really brand yourself, and with these tips, you should really be able to go out and make a name for yourself in the industry. The biggest tip that I can offer you is to just have fun with it and write with some personality. People love to see personality when they are reading and will continue to come back for more if they like what they see.
WordPress and Joomla Hosting
@JulianaP16 on Twitter is a Pro-Blogger associate at InMotion Hosting, a company known for their cornerstone of US based Technical support pertaining to giving the best WordPress and Joomla Hosting. They offer hosting packages suitable for the start up blogger like Shared Hosting through to those experience with high volume traffic more likely to demand a VPS, Virtual Private Server or Dedicated Hosting Package.
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