Low-Cost Ways To Increase Blog Traffic

In this article I will outline the various ways to increase blog traffic. Some methods are low-cost - meaning you pay with time and effort (I don't believe anything is truly "free") & other methods are available at a cost of financial resources. Whether or not you chose to use low-cost methods or use a set monthly financial budget to increase traffic to your blog, you must keep in mind the following tip:

There are 2 things you absolutely have to do: 1) Produce Content and 2) Market Your Content

When producing and marketing content online, it is important to remain consistent with your blogging and traffic generation strategies over time in order to keep the momentum of traffic flowing to your site on a regular basis.

Producing Content To Increase Blog Traffic

Without content, it's unlikely you will have any viewers coming to your blog. Your blog is the perfect place to produce content to share with others and showcase your skills/knowledge in your specific area of expertise. You can either produce this content yourself if you like doing so or have someone produce the content for you. The content that you produce doesn't necessarily have to be in the form of an article so don't worry if you aren't the best writer. Here are a few types of content you can add to your blog:

• Videos
• Audios (ex. podcasts, mp3, etc.)
• Written documents (ex. articles, whitepapers, pdf, etc.)
• Software demos
• Images

Produce content on blog platforms that are simple for new bloggers to use and to design. The platform where you create your blog should also be ranking high on alexa.com and in the search engines themselves to increase likelihood you get more traffic to your blog

Marketing Content To Increase Blog Traffic

Producing content alone is not enough to bring traffic to your site and this is why your blog content must be marketed using 1 or many tactics to get you content and message in front of your target audience. Keeping your target audience in mind, market your content in places where they are looking for the solution you provide in your content. Place a hyperlink back to your blog so they can easily find your blog and what it offers. Here is a following list of "free"/low-cost ways to increase traffic (visitors) coming to your blog each and every day. Search Engines

• Those looking for solutions use search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) to find information
• Optimize your site by making slight changes to it in order to help search engines find your blog and pull it to the front of search engine results page

Tribes

• Build a network - Join forces with other interesting bloggers or people in your niche who are open to reciprocating the sharing of each others blog content as well as participating in each other's blog community by commenting on one another's blog.

Social Media Marketing/Online Social Network

• Social media is a great way to not only build and share with a community of targeted fans but also a very good way to build authority and credibility in you area of expertise
• Use tribes to build a community online of bloggers/readers/followers who share your content across the top heavily trafficked social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Google+, and your niche social network site

Social Bookmarking

• organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online vs. your local computer in order to access them from any computer as well as share them with others
• social bookmarking sites use an organizational strategy known as tagging. Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, using keywords enabling users to describe and organize their bookmarks
• Social bookmarking provides backlinks to the websites that are bookmarked
• You can use tribes to build a network of other social bookmarking users you want to share bookmarks with, or you can use the built-in RSS feed to share your bookmarks with anyone on the Web.

Guest Blogging

• Creating content on the blog of another blogger related to your niche is a great way to increase blog traffic.
• Guest post on blogs that have established authority and already receiving high levels of traffic.
• You can also increase traffic to your website once you become established by introducing guest bloggers to your website.

Email Marketing

• Build a list of email subscribers so that when you update your blog with new content you have regular viewers.

Forum Marketing

• Join a forum related to your niche where you can learn and contribute to the community. Many forums allow placing a link back to your blog that forum members can check out if they are interested in learning more from you.

Now that you have an idea of how to get a surge of visitors to your blog, remember to create and market your blog content on a consistent basis. Without a regular pattern over time, you miss out on repeat loyal visitors who will eventually become fans, customers, or potential clients. This is one important ingredient in strong and profitable blogs use that continually increase blog traffic.