This is a guest post by Rahul who blogs at MazaKaro. If you would like to write for ShoutMeLoud, read our guest posting guidelines.
I started blogging as a hobby and I didn’t imagine that I will get a huge traffic within three months of blogging. Lot of visitors ask questions to me about, how I am getting huge traffic to my blog. So I thought that I must mention all those steps through which I get more visitors. I know that these steps are not new but we forget every time that these are the only steps by which we can get huge traffic. I will start with a simple question.
Is your blog a successful blog?
If your answer is “Yes” then definitely you would be following various steps which makes your blog a successful blog. But if your answer is “No” then you must follow these steps to make your blog a successful blog.
1. Work on increasing Traffic
To make your blog a successful blog you must get huge traffic. Websites get traffic from
- Search engines (Work on SEO)
- Social networking sites (Work on Social Networking)
- Direct traffic (Do publicity of your blog)
- Traffic from other blogs (Do blog commenting)
- Traffic from directories (Do directory submission)
2. Work on SEO
You may use various SEO plugins to optimize your blog so that your blog must come in top of search engine results. But before using those plugins, collect information about how to use them. If you can spend money to bring your blog on top of search engine results then you may take services from SEO firms who will work on your keywords.
3. Post new information
If your blog will contain old content then you will get less visitors. If you will publish new articles at regular interval of time then your visitors will find new content to read and you will get more traffic.
4. Use premium theme
After using Genesis theme, I noticed a great increase in visitors count on my blog. Because search engine love uniqueness in your blog and if you will use premium theme then you are above those thousands of bloggers who are using common free themes. You may opt following premium themes
5. Promote your blog
For promoting your blog you can
- Do advertisement of your blog using Adwords
- Send requests to your friends
- Use twitter
- Use Facebook
Now read all above points and think about the steps you are following on your blog. If your steps’ count is more than above steps which I mentioned, then you are going in the right direction to make your blog a successful blog, but the only thing you need is patience.
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{ 51 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the tips, i was using these ways for getting traffic bcoz i considered it useless but i will try comment now.
You are welcome
Yeah these tips are really important to make a successful blog.
All steps given by you are beneficial.
Out of all tips above, I follow most of them..
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for the comment Sharat
Thanks for sharing these awesome tips for driving traffic Rahul. my blog is also a 3 months old blog but my blog is still getting 30 to 40 visitors a day. i think these tips will help me to drive traffic to my blog.
My blog is 1 month old. I am getting approx 150 Visitors daily.
I have tried nothing yet. No adword nor any other ads. Just followed few steps above.
Strange.. Your blog is 1 month old … with google adsense approved ….
In Google adsense policies, It requires atleast 6 months.
Is there any trick?
Brij @ There is no trick… there is luck !!! I have seen many webmasters getting their adsense approved through sites merely a few days old…just keep in mind that your site is well designed and is regularly updated and also is getting fair amount of traffic…After this just keep applying until you don’t get approved.
these tips are useful for starters, but has nothing new for well settled bloggers
I guess there is no special secrets for settled bloggers… It’s same for everyone.. no shortcuts
No Shrinidhi, imagine if you have 2,000 followers in twitter then you get some 100 visitors(approx)/day from twitter. If you would try hard to improve followers count to 20,000 then you would get 1000 visitors(approx)/day.
So there would be a lot of probability to improve your visitors count in the same manner if you would work on all social networking sites like facebook, digg, myspace etc. And on increasing your email subscribers. And improve your backlinks by posting article on directories to improve your Google PR and thus improving your search engine traffic.
You are completely wrong that these steps are only for starters. Follow these steps and I promise you that you would be able to become a successful blogger.
Nice information Rahul.
New and unique content will be the key to create a successful blog with huge traffic.
Thanks Dinesh
Yes, new and unique content always attract visitors.
Nice writeup Rahul…out of all the points you mentioned I think “new and unique content” is perhaps the most difficult and important aspect of getting traffic to your blog…
You are absolutely right kartik
new and unique content always attract visitors.
What works best for me is to communicate with people, and build a network of people who are interested in the same topics as me. They help me drive traffic to my blog (by sharing my posts, and recommending it to other people) and they comment and encourage me to continue with what I’m doing.
I have recently started with SEO, using Scribe, and so far I have seen amazing results… apx. 100 extra unique visitors a day.
I don’t publish my content on directories. At least not yet.
Hi Jens, thanks for the comment.
Yeah building network of people who has interest in your blog’s niche, is very important.
Yeah I’ll definitely try Scribe.
Try to submit your articles on directories, u’ll get lot of backlinks and traffic.
Any suggestions when it comes to directories? Is ezinearticles still #1?
Search “article submission directories” keyword in Google and check their page ranks and Alexa ranks. Choose only higher page rank and alexa rank directories for submission.
Yes ezinearticles is the most important article submission directory.
Hi Rahul,
Thank you for useful information. I agree with your points. And as you mentioned to have a premium template is very important if you want to set up a unique blog. However I have never heard that premium template could help to your SEO as well.
It would be great to hear more about this.
Thanks for your post.
Adam
Thank you Adam
Less people use premium templates because of their cost and thus if you will buy a premium template then your layout will be unique and search engines will rank your blog up than others coz of uniqueness.
Nice post!
Thanks for sharing this tips. I haven’t used adwords. Will try using it.
You are welcome
You may try adwords if you want targeted traffic. Just spend few dollars on few keywords of your choice/niche and get your blog’s link on google search engine.
Adwords is currently providing 1800 waiver for newbies:)
do try it out Nihar!!
those ads keep flashing all the time in many Google Adsense enabled sites!
Agree with you rahul first quality post then SEO and then Publishing post in social networks….
Thanks for the comment. You wrote one article on my blog. People really liked it. Write more articles on MazaKaro
I agee with you except one i.e Use premium theme. Theme should be neat & navigation friendly. For search engines it doesn’t matter whether it’s free or premium…
Yes, I agree with you.
It may increase your loading time, which is important for Google nowadays.
But as you said, search engines do not care whether premium or free themes. Still there are well running blogs with default wordpress themes.
Google reads content of the our blog which includes heading between tags, Content, keywords(tags) between tags, links, and it also reads html of our page to know whether you have copied your content from other blogs or not (means uniqueness) (this is important to rank your blog in search rankings.
So if you will use default free theme then more probability would be there of matching some percentage of HTML content of your blog with other blogs. So by using premium themes you are just reducing the probability.
Thats interesting information Rahul.
Thanks for that.
You are welcome Dinesh
I would like to disagree here. Google has nothing to do with the HTML of a theme. It is more concerned with the content!!
I don’t think Premium theme is necessary for a blog to become successful, I still agree with all other points. There are lot of successful blogs out there using free themes.
I explained my point in above reply
Nice share but you missed the unique and useful content issue…
I mentioned in point number 3 abhishek.
Btw thanks for the comment
I do all of these things listed here and the results are amazing… i am getting 24000+ visitors a month and my blog is about 4 months old.
Yes and I am getting 100K + traffic
Social Media is the next best platform of getting free traffic, so try to focus on social media websites like facebook, twitter and youtube.
You are absolutely right Bilal. Social media plays an important role in getting traffic.
Rahul:
Well done! thanks for the tips and the call to remember the basics!
Hi Lisa. Welcome
Thanks for your valuable comment.
Nice post. Funny you mention just telling friends. I has a blog going for a few months in an odd little niche that I didn’t think any of my buddies would be at all interested in. On a whim one day shot out an email to about 6 guys and got a huge result.
But in my case my friends only did initial work of doin publicity of my blog. And now see I am having Alexa rank below 50K
Great Post !
hmm…I see there is some discussion about the usage of premium themes. I see the point that rahul told, free themes may come with some unvalid HTML codes and hence used by so many, if the search engines check the uniqueness of your blog, it may match some % with some other blogs……
But popular premium themes like Thesis, freshlife etc is used by so many people and the same problem may happen if we use them too.
Still, usage of handy and easily customizable themes like Thesis can help you to make your blog more efficient. Also in terms of SEO too….
Yes, every where you can see same layout like ShoutMeLoud blog. All other bloggers just got impressed by harsh’s layout and wanted the same layout in their own blogs
Promotion and SEO are very important for a log to be successful.
SEO and promotion using social networks are keys to success.
@ Some tips about using adwords. Are you using it …. also possible gains
Kartik, you are totally right..
You will shock to here that my Adsense account got approved when my blog was having just one HTML page. That page was containing few useful links to various blogs. This incidence is 5 years old.