Web Site Traffic – Driving Visitors to your Blog

It definitely takes a lot of time and effort to craft the perfect blog post. You must research your keywords, develop the perfect headline, craft a compelling opening sentence, create perfect subheads, design a visually appealing layout. Once your post is finally written, it would be easy to breath a sigh of relief, hit the publish button, and sick back and relax.

But once your post is published, you’re only half-way done. Now it’s time to drive traffic and entice readers to your blog. For many small business owners, this task is even harder than actually constructing the blog.

If you’ve ever been stumped over ways to bring reader readers to your blog post, I have a few tips to get you started.

The most obvious way to get started is with the audience you already have:

Take Advantage of Your Newsletter

You should be inviting your newsletter readers to your blog in each and every issue. It’s super easy to simply say, “Don’t forget to visit my blog” and include a simple text link to your blog’s home page.

But you’ll get more traffic if your invitations are a little more enticing. You can find a few of your blog posts that relate to the topic of your current newsletter and create a “For More Information” widget that you include in each newsletter issue. Within the widget, you simply link to your blog posts that relate to your newsletter topic.

Another great way to entice your newsletter readers to your blog is to get them started reading the post within your newsletter itself. Include three or four sentences of your post within your newsletter with a “read more” link to the rest of the post. Within the newsletter, I like to cut the post off in the middle of a sentence. That way, the reader has to click through in order to complete the thought.

Take Advantage of Your On-Site Links

Once you’ve drawn your newsletter reader to your first blog post, you can easily entice her to read other posts by linking your related posts back and forth between each other. As an aside, this can also be helpful to your search engine optimization program. In my own blog, I like to include a list of related posts at the end of each post. But I also have keywords and keyword phrases that I link back and forth to certain posts or pages on my site. If you have a particularly important or timely post, you might want to highlight it at the top of your side bar or at the end of each post.

Take Advantage of Your Previous Posts

If you had a post in the past that was extremely popular, why not take advantage of that in order to drive more traffic? Create a follow up to the original post, or write a “part 2” article. Usually, you can create multiple follow up posts out of one single post simply by expanding on each idea presented. For instance, this post that you’re reading now can be turned into three follow up posts. One would focus on driving blog readers from your newsletter, one would discuss the proper techniques for creating internal links and one would explore various ways of turning one post into multiple posts.

You can easily use these three techniques to drive your current following to your new blog post and encourage your readers to read more of your blog. None of them are very time consuming, and sine they don’t really require much technical knowledge, you can begin implementing them right away.