Driving Traffic to Your Blog

I blog twice per week, sometimes more. I'd like to get as many people as possible reading and commenting on the VR blog each time I post, but realistically, all of you are busy running businesses. I know, I am too. So how do you get people to visit your blog?

I'll use VerticalResponse as the example. We offer a few ways users can learn about our new posts.

1. Visitors can sign up using FeedBurner - They can sign up to get automatically notified immediately when there is a new post.

2. Visitors can sign up using an opt-in Form - Use the form code VerticalResponse or another provider outputs and place it on your blog. Then you'll be able to collect your addresses and email to them at your leisure. (This will be an integrated feature for VR, look for it to be introduced as a Typepad widget soon!)

3. RSS - Users can use RSS to get a live updated feed of a blog. I use Pheeder, but there are many readers on the market.

4. Mass Email Marketing - You've collected email addresses for many years outside of your blog and want to drive these people to it. This works wonders for us here at VR since most of our email addresses sign up through a different mechanism.

In our case 99% of our users are on our list in-house. Furthermore most of our small businesses are not using RSS, at least not yet. So what can we do? Email is a wonderful tool we use to notify you all every two weeks to check out our new posts. The result? We get more than 10 TIMES the amount of traffic to the blog.

So there is a real need for using email marketing to announce you have new blog posts. People like to get information in many different ways so make sure you offer as many as possible.

How do you drive traffic? Feel free to comment!

Comments

[Kenny Adeleke]

The most important to do is to "ping" your blog by announcing new article or post to your blog. They are free sites: www.pigomatic.com and another one I don't remember right now. This particular one will release a pres release to your blog through yahoo and 21 other search engines that might earn you up to 1,000,000 hits.
Cheers.
Kenny Adeleke

[jeff]

5. Read other blogs within your field, blogs that interest you, and blogs from businesses with which you interact. Make meaningful comments on posts on those blogs. It is very important that they be meaningful! Here are a couple examples of non-meaningful comments:

"Great post dude! Thanks!"

"Great post! Buy my widget!"

By making useful comments and being part of a meaningful discussion, readers will find your blog and want to read it. Just be sure you have interesting and/or entertaining content waiting for them when they get there!

One other thing: be sure that your blog address appears with your comment by signing with the link. For most blogs, mousing over the commenters name (try it now with 'jeff' below) will reveal a link to the blog that can be clicked. (The VR blog allows you to enter your URL and it works this way.)

hope you find this post to be meaningful! - j