by John Eberhard
Most people would like to have more traffic to their web site. So it should be good news to everyone that you can do something right now to drive more traffic to your site. And it’s free.
Here is how posting to your blog drives traffic. Every time you post something, you send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines via www.pingomatic.com. If your blog is a Wordpress blog, it does this automatically. If you have a blog on Typepad, Posterous, Blogger, or Blinkweb, you have to do it manually.
You fill in the name of your blog and the blog address. You don’t need to fill in the RSS address. Then check all of the blog search engines in the bottom left block. Then send the pings.
Once that ping goes out your new blog post will be indexed, or included, in all the blog search engines. So people who are searching for the topic you are writing on will see the listing for your blog post, click on it and come to your blog. So it makes sense to spend some time figuring out what the popular keywords are that people are searching for in your industry. Then include those in your blog posts.
I employ this strategy and write one article per week, and my blogs produce more traffic to my site than any other source.
So I’ve Got Traffic – Now What?
If your blog is located on your regular web site and has the same navigational structure, now people will wander around your site and see your product or service offerings.
If your blog is on a separate web address from your main web site, then you need to have sidebars on the blog and include various links to your products and services back on your main site.
If you are selling things like books, put a picture and link to the book in the sidebar of the blog. If you have any free reports or white papers that you are offering, put a picture of the cover and link to the free offer in the sidebar of your blog.
If you have a free email newsletter, put a form right there in the blog sidebar that allows them to sign up.
In other words, provide links and enticements that will lead them back to your main site and especially that will entice them to either buy something or at least give you their name and email address.
You can see how I’ve done this on one of my blogs:
http://www.realwebmarketingblog.com/
What to Post?
Some people start a blog and then get bogged down in trying to write long articles for the blog, and so they never post anything. Here are some tips that will get you posting on your blog.
Articles: The general length for an article to post on a blog is 400 words or more. But there is no hard rule on this. The article should be something that is informative and not just a plug for your services.
Shorter Content: You don’t have to write 400 words. You can post a comment about something that is 50 or 100 words or even less.
Link and Comment: You can link to some other content on the web that you found informative or interesting, and add a comment about it.
Video: You can post a video in your blog so that the video appears right in the blog and can play right there. YouTube provides embed code for this. You can post a video about your company and services, but you can also post a video about anything else that is of interest.
Note that any of these posts, even the shorter ones, will end up in the blog search engines, if, of course, you send pings to them via Wordpress or via Pingomatic.
One caution is that if the blog is for your business, all your posts should be related to your business and your industry. Keep it consistent. Don’t post one day about affordable solar panels, and the next day about your dog. Save the stuff on your dog for Facebook.
Good luck with your blogging.
Targeting blogging platforms is a good idea. As we all know, blogging is the place in the internet where internet users usually spend their time. If you want to drive traffic then why not target this blogging platforms where many internet users visit. Blogging is part of SEO link building strategy though.
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