Monday, November 24, 2008

How A Blog Can Increase Visitors

By Theo McLanahan

If you are looking for a way to drive traffic to your website, look to your blog. Blogs are an excellent way to communicate with your target market and invite them to visit your site. Here are some tips you can use to blog for traffic.

Post on your blog regularly; at least 3 times a week. By updating your blog on a regular basis, you are giving your readers a reason to keep referring back to your blog. If you are providing timely and informative posts, your readers will see you as an expert in your field.

Your visitors will come to your blog looking for answers to their questions. A regular posting schedule also help to develop your relationship with your customers. They'll get to "know you" and trust you.

By installing a feed burner onto your blog, you will make it easier to keep in contact with your customers. Your readers will be able to subscribe to your blog and choose to have new posts delivered right to their email or computer's homepage. There are several services to choose from, and you can get a basic service for free. Setting up the service is easy; you simply install a small piece of HTML code onto your blog.

It's also a good idea to have a "blogroll" on your blog site. This is basically a list of related blogs that you feel will help your readers. When you link to other blogs this way, they will see it and often will link back to your blog. This can help to widen your audience by reaching readers on other blogs. Just make sure the blogs you link to are related to the subject of yours.

One of the best, and easiest, ways to drive traffic to your website through your blog is to link back to your site as you post. Each time you put a new article on your site, you can write a "teaser" post containing an excerpt of the article and include a "read more" link to the page on your site that features the complete text.

Also include links to older articles that become timely again. For instance, you may have put up an article on your site in the summer that explains how to keep kids occupied by creating costumes. When Halloween comes around, don't forget to link back to that article. You may also want to include links to your opt-in pages or pages.

As you start practicing these strategies check your page stats and see how many visitors are coming to your site through links placed on your blog. You will get a better idea of what is working and will be able to increase traffic even further.

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