7 Effective Ways to Get Quality Traffic to Your Blog

Having been blogging for quite sometime now, I have come to see lots of blogs. I have seen blogs come and go and I have seen blogs skyrocket to high success almost overnight. One major thing I could discover from those blogs going into oblivion is that they lack traffic.

As a blogger, traffic is an essential ingredient to your success, it is what can make or mar you. The type of traffic you get can determine a lot about you, it can determine how successful you will be, it can discover how much money you will make and it can discover the type of brand you can have.

Many bloggers build a beautiful website, write lots of high quality content on it but just can’t get traffic to it.

This post will be talking about how to get quality traffic to your blog, I would not be talking about foolish traffic tactics such as traffic exchange and banner exchange, I will be talking about high quality traffic techniques only.

1. Write Great Content: Why on earth will you want traffic if all you do on your blog is to ramble and fumble, all you do is write about yourself and the likes.

In order to get and keep getting quality traffic to your blog, you need to write great and valuable content that will impact and change the lives of your readers.

Your blog post might be a resource post that is linking to other posts and tools, it can be a case study that will tell your readers about your observation, and it might be a freebie post that will tell your readers about high quality free offers from the web, what is most important is that you write high quality valuable posts that will have a great effect on your readers – that can change their lives forever.

2. Build Your List: I intentionally made this the second. Ask Jonathan Beebe and he will tell you that repeat traffic is the best type of traffic you can ever have.

Survey has shown that people buy product upon 5-9 successful contacts. The more familiar someone is to you, the easier it will be to buy from you.

It is very important to have a mailing list, because of many reasons. Your list will serve as a place where you can easily contact the same people over and over again.

Having a mailing list also brings about quality traffic because the readers will be in a comfortable state and the email is highly targeted at them they will be more inclined to respond to your offer.

A small list might not seem effective but having a big list can begin to send tons of traffic to your blog.

You can give a free incentive to people to join your list, a Good example is My free book and Dev’s atomic backlinking ebook.

It is also very important to keep sending important offers to your list regularly (an Ideal period is once in a week) because this makes them familiar with you and also makes them used to your emails.

3. Guest Posting: I have been so used to this method and I will tell you this is the third guest post I am writing when I wrote this guest post (June 19, 2010).

Guest posting is a very effective method for getting traffic to your blog. Aside guest posting helping you get direct traffic to your blog, it helps you build relationship with other bloggers and also get many high quality links. For example, Dev is my buddy and His Blog is the second single blog highest traffic referral to my blog – it has sent me over 200 visitors this month. I got to know Dev through my guest posts and we have even created a new blog together (about wordpress tutorials).

Guest posting also helps you easily rank for highly competitive keywords. And we all know that the truth about SEO is that the more old your inbound links are (links pointing to your blog), the more value it has. If you could get many high quality backlinks from many different blogs, you can easily skyrocket your search engine traffic in a very short period of time.

I have written a guest post that sent me thousands visitors in one day and Dev also has.

Ask Dev, He will tell you Guest posting is his highest traffic source.

4. Social Networking: I so much hate this before (except twitter), but I must tell you this is the new wave of the online media.

When I am talking about Social Networking, I mean the use of twitter, facebook and the likes.

This might not appeal to you but I can tell you that you are missing it if you are not using social networks like twitter and facebook.

One great benefit of social networking is that it helps you build your brand, and you know how a brand can affect the success of a blogger.

Twitter is one of the highest traffic source to my blog and I will be giving facebook a trial soon.

5. Blogging Communities: Blogging communities such as Blog Engage and MMO Social Network are really great, especially for beginners. If you want more quality traffic and comments on your blog then I will better advice you to give them a trial.

I have not been using them for sometime now due to me being very busy and also doing some tests (I am intentionally not using them – just to compare traffic changes).

When i was still using them, blog engage was my highest traffic source while mmo social network is among the first 5.

Another great advantage of blogging communities is that they give you more than traffic, they give you more awareness.

These communities are mostly frequented by bloggers which means you get more targeted people who will in turn read your “great post” and then link to it on their own blogs.

6. Blog Commenting: If you know me well, you probably don’t see me comments on blogs except replying to comments on my guest posts. My not commenting on blogs is intentional, why? I want to be self dependent.

I want a strategy that does not rely on me to do anything. Blog commenting is really great but to get the best of it, you must be really consistent and ready to do it always.

I know some people who get tons of traffic to their blog as a result of using this method only, but like many successful bloggers, I would advice you not to put all your eggs in one basket.

Blog commenting also helps you get on the radar of other bloggers and can send you great traffic, I have had a blogger link to a post of mine as a result of me commenting on his blog and i have also gained lots of loyal readers as a result of my comments.

7. Search Engine Optimization: Other than Guest Posting, Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to get high quality traffic to your blog.

Those coming from search engines will be more committed and dedicated and many of them will eventually end up buying your products because they are in need and that is why they came.

Someone searching for “nikon camera 2009″ will most likely buy the product from you if you are selling it other than a random visitor.

When optimizing your blog for search engines, it is very important to take some things into consideration.

Some of it includes:

1. On page factors
2. Off page factors
3. URL canonicalization
4. Linking factor

I would not be able to explain search engine optimization in details here because it is a very long post on its own but you can read my post on it (wordpress seo).

Sometimes, setting a challenge for yourself might just be what you need, you can decide to take one of the above methods and then go out of the box with it: an example of such was when I set a challenge to write 21 guest posts in one week. You might also want to give making 1000 comments a week a trial (please don’t comment to tell me it is impossible).

Getting traffic is no rocket science and I hope this post really helped you. Why not do yourself good by getting my free ebook on How to build a better website.

Tagged as: blog commenting, Great content, guest posting, quality traffic, social networking