Each visitor to your blog or website is a potential prospect, and any changes you make to the overall site design, usability, or quality of content on your blog can create or damage the customer-client relationship. You want to avoid turning visitors away because of a poorly-constructed site or presentation, and set your sights on finding ways to boost traffic.
Making yourself more discoverable is one part of “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) techniques, and can help you reach the top rankings of search engines so potential visitors can find you after a simple search.
[tag-tec]Increasing traffic[/tag-tec] to your site requires both a technical approach and some direct marketing. You’ll want to start by making sure you are hosting the blog or website on your own domain; this makes it much easier for search engines to find, and also makes your URL much more credible. You can then use the URL name itself to promote it, adding a ‘www’ tag to your postings, e-mail signatures, and other information that you share on the web.
The next step is to write good titles. Even people who are already subscribing to your blog may not actually click on the information you have written unless they are compelled to do so. Make sure your titles are on topic and describe the content you are posting. Using keywords in your titles makes it much easier for search engines to discover them as well, and you can use tools such as Overture and WordTracker to generate some keywords that work well with your site.
Another effective way to start generating traffic is to participate in discussion groups, forums, and even other blogs. Taking initiative with your own social networking can help you gain a steady audience very quickly; try participating in online communities related to your industry, or run some keyword searches yourself and find out what your prospects are talking about within your niche.
It’s likely that you’ll stumble across a few different discussion forums and groups, many of which that can get you instant traffic by clicking on your signature each time you participate.
You’ll always want to tag your content as often as possible, since many people run searches based on tags and keywords, larger sites including Digg, Technorati, and StumbleUpon use tags to sort all content published on the web, and you can reach a larger audience simply by breaking apart your content and submitting it to the appropriate categories.
Another simple and effective way to increase traffic is to simply write quality content; the more quality you provide for your readers, the higher the chances that your audience will link to you and share the information you are presenting to others. This is word-of-mouth marketing at its best, and you can create some very unique articles over time.
[tag]Visitor traffic[/tag] increases dramatically when your posts are submitted to larger directory sites and social bookmarking networks; think of ways that you can start developing some very unique articles, content, and posts. I teach more about this in my EasyTraffic Course.
Remember that original and media-rich content is in high demand! If you take the time to really create some original material, you will reap huge rewards. Prospects will flow to your site.
