Five Excellent Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

When you first start blogging, you need to fill your blog with plenty of good content. That is very important and it’s something you will continue to do for the life of the blog. After you have made several good posts, your next step is to start driving traffic to the blog. You need to do this so you actually have visitors to read your content. There’s no point in having a blog if nobody reads it. And hopefully you will make money from your readers and visitors.

You may have even found this post by searching for ways to make money blogging and the main thing you need in order to that (other than the blog itself) is lots of people visiting your blog. There are many good ways to drive traffic to your blog, and more keep coming out all the time as the internet evolves and new online properties are developed and expanded. But below we’ll share some of the most popular and easiest traffic generation methods, and they are all free…

1) Article marketing

Writing and submitting articles to directories (article marketing) is a powerful way to start driving targeted traffic to your blog. It’s also an excellent way to build up backlinks to help your blog rank higher in organic search results, which brings in even more visitors and more money. Basically all you do is write informative articles related to the topics of your blog and submit them to some of the countless online articles directories.

Every article you submit should contain a simple author “bio box” that includes a short business description and one or two links to your blog. Keep it fairly short and simple, you don’t need to put a lot in there. For example, it could be something like this… “For more useful tips about how to make money online check out my top ranked blog at https://www.gr1innovations.com and subscribe to get a free copy of my internet money tips report.”

Notice how I put one keyword anchored hyperlink and one regular link? I like to do it that way to help ensure I get at least one link from the article if other bloggers republish it on their blogs.

2) Guest posting

This is one of the best strategies available to drive traffic to your blog. The reasons are simple; you will get targeted visitors from the post itself to your blog as well as very high quality backlinks to help with your search engine rankings. In addition to that, you are doing a form of networking with other bloggers in your niche by writing for them, so it helps tremendously in making friends for future partnerships. They may also recommend you to their readers in other posts of theirs or link to your blog in their sidebar.

The strategy is fairly straightforward, just find blogs in the same/similar niches as yours, and check to see if they accept guest posts. Often times it will be obvious if they do because they will have a link on their home page to another page explaining their guest blogging rules and how to send the post. Other times it won’t be so obvious and you will need to contact the owner to ask if you can send them a guest post.

It’s important to write very high quality original posts that the blog owners want to publish and their visitors want to read. Become familiar with the content they have on their blog already so you are sure to write something that they like. Match the quality of their posts or even go above it to ensure you are up to their standards and set yourself apart from other people who might also be sending them guest posts.

3) Social media marketing

There is a seemingly unlimited supply of social networking and social bookmarking sites on the internet right now and more are being created all the time. Almost all of them are free and you can use them to drive traffic to your blog fairly easily. Some of the more popular social media sites include; Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Mixx, and LinkedIn. But there are many more that are very popular and work well for getting traffic to your blog.

Also, if you have a WordPress blog, there are several great plugins that you can install to make it very easy for your visitors (or yourself) to share your posts on social sites. A few of these popular plugins are Sociable, SexyBookmarks, Digg Digg, AddtoAny, Socialize, and several others. They all basically do the same thing and can be helpful for getting more traffic to your blog.

You can also use a free service such as socialmarker.com or onlywire.com to submit your posts to many of the top social bookmarking sites all at once. These can save a lot of time and make your social media marketing strategy much simpler.

4) Blog commenting

Interacting with owners and readers of other blogs via comments is a great way to start attracting attention to your own blog too. Visit popular blogs that are related to your niche and comment on their posts. Most blog comment forms allow you to include your name and a URL, so put your information in those fields.

Be sure to make your comments valuable and relevant to the post — don’t just spam your blog link everywhere, and don’t be a blatant self-promoter by writing something stupid like, “Great post, come visit my blog!” — Doing those things will get you nowhere and can actually do more harm than good. Read the entire post first then make an effort to share your thoughts and ideas, compliment others on theirs, agree or disagree with the content, and generally be a valued contributor.

5) Forums

Forums can be great places to interact with like-minded people on your topics of interest and the topics of your blog. Most forums allow you to include a signature that automatically appears below every post you make, which can (and should) contain a link to your blog. If you help and interact with other members and share good information, many of them will be interested enough to start visiting your blog.

There you have it, 5 excellent ways to drive traffic to your blog on a daily basis. Using these internet marketing methods regularly will bring lots of traffic to your blog and increase your profits if your intent is to make money blogging.