Top Traffic Ideas for Your Blog

There are so many talks about the importance of driving targeted traffic to your site and build a list of highly responsive prospects. You can find 10’s of various tactics and strategies to do so. But HOW do you apply those tactics and strategies to your business when it comes to the practice? How you get massive traffic and build a list of responsive subscribers on a daily basis?

An online presence is important these days for whatever enterprise you engage in. To connect with a wide variety of people there is no bigger forum than the Internet. If you are looking for a way to show off your expertise and also make a little money while doing it, consider starting a blog.

You can build a blog for free and begin posting content right away. But, what good is that content, if no one is reading it?! Here are a few ideas to bring in the traffic your blog needs to survive.

Of all the successful blogs on the Internet, hundreds more have failed. Running a blog is like running a business website. Unless you are willing to put the time in and treat it seriously, you won’t be blogging long.

That is not to say that the failed bloggers weren’t serious about blogging. Mostly, new bloggers aren’t prepared for the work that goes into creating a successful blog. Just building the blog doesn’t mean that people will necessary come to you. You pursue the audience and give them a reason to see what you have to say.

1. Fresh Content – no one wants to visit a blog day after day and see the same posts. Update your blog content at least twice a week. This will be easier if you write several posts ahead of time and upload them at the appropriate times.

2. Article Marketing – the niche you’ve chosen for your blog is one that interests you. If it is interesting you will spend more time doing it. Create content not only for your blog but also to be submitted to article directories. Use the resource box to advertise your blog so people can find you.

Additionally, you can submit your articles to popular authority sites in your market. For Internet marketing niche, sites like Entrepreneur, About, Associate Programs and even popular blogs like Site Fling are places to submit articles.
You see by submitting your articles at these places you’ll have less competition and you can drive more traffic to your site when you have much lesser other articles to compete.

3. Social Bookmarking – submitting posts to social bookmarking sites allows members of those sites to track you back to your blog. And which networks can benefit your business the most? Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Propeller, DIIGO (instead of Furl), I like FaceBook, Squidoo,and Twitter of course. Aren’t you using yet? You just have too!

4. Viral Marketing – this is where you spread the word about your blog. Talk to friends, family and even strangers. Give out business cards that have your blog address on them.

5. Use RSS Feeds – RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Readers can subscribe to your feed and get email updates when new content is posted. It is an easy way for them to keep up with your blog without spending all day online.

6. Submit Blog to Search Engines – doing this allows your blog to be ranked. Google and Yahoo! are two of the most popular search engines you want to crawl your blog pages. It doesn’t guarantee top ranking, though. You’ll have to do a little more work for that. It takes time but at the same time it can drive a flood of targeted visitors to your primary business. The ways you can leverage blogs is the real beauty that I like more then anything – use it to tag and ping, you can easily bookmark them, easily integrate with RSS and best of all – Blogs work great for search engine optimization.

7. Joining Forums – The problem with many people when it comes to forums is they don’t have a system. You as a blogger you are a budding entrepreneur. Right now you are marketing yourself to find traffic and then profit. Become a member of business forums, work at home forums and others to meet new people and share ideas. You can add a link to your blog in the signature line so others can find you. How you can make it work for you? Google for relevant to your niche authority forums and create a list of at least 5 of them. Now you have to submit to them religiously almost every day. Do the math — you have a list of 5 forums, and you are submitting 5 posts to each of them every day – mans 25 fresh links to your site every day that bring you a steady flow of new sign-ups each day. Here is ONE more traffic streams that you can use to build your list.

8. Commenting other blogs – show your appreciation to those who visit you by also posting comments on their blogs. It is a kindness that shows others you are not just out to advertise your blog alone. Add links to your blog in your comments.

9. SEO Marketing – whatever you write, use relevant keywords. Keyword density between three and ten percent is good for getting higher page rankings in search engines. Base your keywords on a research you do to find the most popular words used in search engines for your niche.

Using any of these ideas will start the traffic moving in your direction. It takes time but you will build the readership you want.

10. List builders – this typically work like this: when you sign up for the exchange, you agree to promote to thousands of other members with an email promotion, but in exchange, you’ll receive emails from other members as well.
Powerful networks that really work are List Joe, The List Auction, Viral URL and the new Viral Ads Unleashed system. I have personally used and still using ViralURL, List Joe and The List Auction and add new subscribers to my account every day. And that just by sending email promotion once in every 3.This services work great and if you aren’t using them yet you have to give them a shut. Top list builders online that I recommend:

http://www.listjoe.com
http://www.thelistauction.com
http://www.viralurl.com
http://www.viraladsunleashed.com

11. Video Marketing – this is a highly scalable strategy to get targeted traffic to your site. The only hard part is preparing the decent quality video clip. Once you master video creation, you can easily promote it using automated tools. The most popular ones are: Tube Mogul and Hey Spread and the best part is, they can submit your videos automatically to more than a dozen of the most popular video sharing websites online.
Can you imagine the impact of a short 3 to 5 minute video clip created every week and submitted to more than a dozen of video sharing sites on weekly basis? Only this source can give you enough fresh subscribers on demand.

12. Craigslist – Are you already using Craigslist.org? the popularity of the site is still growing immensely because of usability. In fact, in 2008, Craigslist’s popularity grew by 87%. Seems like more people are looking online either for bargains or to look for jobs or business opportunities. The meaning is that Craigslist is a more then fertile ground for marketers to tap into. I personally didn’t used it as much as I would like, but trust me this is definitely something that you have to put on your to-do list.

http://www.craigslist.com

13. Banner exchanges – One of my favorite banner ad exchange website is Ad Brite. The publishers and advertisers work there to sell and buy their ads. I’m using this service to advertise my and it brings every never ending flow of leads to my list. The service is less competitive then AdWords but try and see how effective it is.

http://www.adbrite.com

Hot tip: all-text banner ads are getting the highest click-through rates so use them wisely.

14. Buy Leads – I know many marketers used this services to quickly build lists of 10,000’s of leads. And if you’re looking for a reliable service to buy leads, you must look no further than Get Subscribers. From my experience, every dollar you spend with them you get a lot back in return. They provide highly responsive leads that you immediately can leverage. The system is based on one of the best autoresponder companies online. So, leads you get are real and very high quality. I highly recommend checking them out…

http://www.getsubscribers.com

IMPORTANT: Don’t you forget to test the different sources of traffic to discover which are the most effective tactics for your business.