7 Simple Ways to Get Traffic to Your Business Blog

When I took this picture, it felt like I was the only person for miles. I couldn’t see anyone. I couldn’t hear anyone.

Of course, I knew that wasn’t the case. I was in a fairly popular State Park, and there were major highways or interstates less then 10 miles in each direction. And about 50 yards past the left edge of the frame, there is a road that winds its way through the park. But it still felt like there wasn’t anyone to be found within 100 miles. And I loved it.

It wasn’t lost on me, however, that blogging can feel that way too, sometimes. You write quality post after quality post, but it seems like traffic never finds its way to your site. You know they’re out there. You can find them easily with one click! But for some reason your blog feels like the lake in the picture above. But in this case, it doesn’t feel very nice.

Here, then, are some ways to increase the traffic to your site. They require a little bit of effort on your part…but not much. It’s like walking 50 yards to that road. And the payoff is definitely worth it.

1. Pay Attention to Your Titles
Your title is essentially the Headline of your post. And according to an old copywriting adage, “your headline is the ad for your ad.” This phrase was coined before the advent of the web, but it’s more true today than ever before, since many readers will find your post either through search engines or their RSS feed readers. Often, all they will see is the headline, so it needs to be engaging. It needs to arouse curiosity and promise that your post will be worth the time it takes to read.

2. Social Bookmarking
This is what really made the phrase “Web 2.0″ take off. Readers could share what they found interesting, and the community got to rate what they deemed important. These can be difficult to get a toehold in, but if your content is good and it catches on, then you could end up with tons of traffic.

3. Comments and Trackbacks.
IF you feel driven to comment on a post, and have something valuable to add, then participating in the conversation could earn you a decent amount traffic as people try to find out more about you. Even better, if you have enough to add to make your own post, then doing a trackback instead of a comment, to further the conversation, can get you even more traffic, and you can get a dialogue going with the author of the original post.

4. Article PR
You might have heard of article marketing, or using article submission directories to drive traffic to your site. Well, it works for PR, too. Create a short article or two that complement your post and submit them to the directories. I have yet to have this method fail to bring in significant traffic for myself, or for clients.

5. Build your own networks
According to the numbers, it’s likely that you are on Facebook or LinkedIn or MySpace. Actively cultivate these resources, and share your new posts with them as an update. One thing that social networks foster is “sharing.” You’d be surprised how much traffic you can get from your social networks. If you have 25 contacts, and 5 of those contacts have 100 contacts, then thats more than 500 people you could potentially reach. If 10% of those people have 100 contacts, that’s an additional 5000 people. If your content is worth sharing.

6. Tweet your posts.
I’m treating Twitter as a separate entity from your social networks, though some people like to lump it in. Here’s the thing: the easiest way to find like-minded people is to do a twitter search for a topic, read the tweets you find, and add the people you find interesting. The majority of them will add you back. You could easily build a list of 1000 or more people with just a little effort. Of course, twitter is all about conversation. If you ONLY tweet links to your new posts, you’ll be hit by a massive wave of “unfollows,” and you’re back to square one.

7. Share it with your own list.
If you’re building your own list, then you have an easy way to get recurring traffic. When you create a post that fits in with the theme of your list—or a certain segment of your list—then all you have to do is send them a brief message telling them about it. I wouldn’t to this with every post, or your likely to hit a point of diminishing returns (and people will start un-subscribing). But if you use it wisely, this could be a great way to bring in traffic.

These are just a few ways to draw traffic to your site. As you’ll notice, all require some sort of action on your part. With the exception of outsourcing [which I don't have a problem with...heck, as a freelance copywriter, it accounts for a decent portion of my income ;)], there are no methods I can think of for generating traffic that involve you sitting back and waiting for the traffic to show up on it’s own.

You can come up with plenty of other methods for driving traffic by asking yourself two questions when you start to get that lonely, isolated feeling:
1. Who is coming to my site, and where can I find more people like that? And…
2. Who is NOT coming to my site, and what can I do to get them to come?

PHOTO CREDIT: Source – yours truly ;)