Driving Traffic to Your Blog: 5 Tips to Try Now

Internet marketing is huge right now, as is the concept of driving Internet traffic. Everybody is jumping on board, and with good reason! If you have a website, you need to be on at least the first two pages of search results. If you’re not, you might as well be on page 1,000. Just because you have a website does not mean that people are seeing it. Having a successful website takes a lot of work and there are many things you can do to drive traffic to it.

1.  Learn About HTML

When I first started writing on my blog, it took a lot of research and commitment from my end. When I was a kid, I used Live Journal (remember that?)  but blogging is quite a bit different. There are so many codes you have to learn if you want to do your own designing and even writing in HTML takes practice. I had to learn as I went by reading other people’s blogs and also taking classes on how to work in HTML. Learning all that took a lot of time, but it was worth it.

2.  Utilize Social Media

After learning about blogging, the next thing I had to do was figure out how to market my site. If you have an amazing product, but you don’t advertise it, how is anyone going to find it? So I started signing up on a lot of social media sites. Building all that was very hard since I started with no readers at all! So I started from scratch. I have seen the most results from using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and StumbleUpon. Of course I see results from others as well, but those are my top traffic referrals.

3.  Begin Advertising with Local Businesses

With my social media presence established, I began working on local business marketing. By that, I mean I went around to my local businesses and asked for advertising in exchange for marketing them on my site. I still do this, and so far it has really worked! I also have a car decal on the back of my van so even when I’m driving around, I’m advertising.

 

4.  Make Your Site Relevant and Easy to Navigate

This tip not only works for online businesses, but also blogs. Bloggers must have their relevant information in their description if they want to be in search results. If you are a dentist in Denver, make sure your site contains information about all things dentistry, where you’re located, and what services you offer. No one wants to read your five paragraph autobiography, so skip the information about your dogs and hobbies. Dogs, model airplanes, and hiking have nothing to do with dentistry. Search engine crawlers want to see that all the content in your website is related to your industry.

You also need to make sure that keywords are placed in appropriate places. If the service you offer and the city you’re in aren’t mentioned anywhere, you’re not going to show up in searches. The words Denver and dentist should be placed in plain sight on the first page of your website and a couple times on each page. This will help the search engines more easily see what your website is about.

There’s no need to have a six or seven page website. If the searcher is having difficulty finding the information they need quickly, they’ll bounce right out of your website and you’ve lost a potential reader. Have a page that briefly gives information about yourself, your services, a FAQ page, and maybe one more page such a photo gallery. Keep it simple and easy.

5.  Hire an Internet Marketing Company 

Hiring a good – make that great – internet marketing company is certainly a plus when you want to increase traffic to your website and business. A lot of SEO and SEM companies offer everything you need to have a successful website. SEM companies can revamp your website, post blogs for you, create YouTube videos, and do all the keyword and search engine marketing research for you. Even bloggers have hired marketing companies to give their blogs a facelift or even a kick-start! A little research will prove that there are plenty of affordable options.

Driving traffic to your blog isn’t simple…it takes time and effort.  But practicing diligence in the areas of design, social media, search relevancy, and marketing can provide you with the boost that it needs…and the traffic that you desire.

Katherine Bartlett, writer at Our Whiskey Lullaby, owns ten parrots and home-schools her daughter daily. She has been blogging since 2010 and has turned her site into an LLC as a professional business. She also runs The Pet Connection and The Jewish Moms Network where she hosts brand campaigns for brands and bloggers.  Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.