More visitors to your Blog

Posted by Blogger Tools on Dec - 31 - 2007

When you post a new article on your blog at least once per week, you don’t have to worry that much about getting visitors once your site has an established presence in the search engines. All it takes is to frequently write some unique and quality blog posts, and then the searchengines would automatically send you a ton of traffic for free. And besides that, most blogging systems have features included that enables your site to syndicate it’s content through RSS and pinging services.

But in case you are in need of more readers for your blog, there are plenty of ways to realize that. It’s called Blog Promotion, and it doesn’t necessarily have to cost any money. Below I have pointed out three of the easiest free methods for getting more visitors to your blog.

1. Utilize the potential of content syndication
Like I mentioned above, most blog platforms have syndication tools integrated that will allow you to distribute your content over the web, and with systems such as wordpress you can define a custom list of ping services that will be notified automatically each time when you add new content to your blog. In an instance, a link with a description of your newest blog post could appear anywhere on the web to surfers who use the particular content networks that you’ve pinged.

By default, wordpress has added a limited number of update services to the ping list, including Technorati and Ping-O-Matic. The list can be found under the Options » Writing Tab of the administration panel. It is recommended to manually add at least the more important services, like Google Blogsearch. But many more can be added! There is a comprehensive list of English blog pinging services available on the wordpress codex site.

TIP: It is recommended to make use of the wordpress Optional Excerpt feature, if you don’t want your original post content – or parts of it – to be syndicated through these networks. Many networks redistribute their content which means that other webmasters could easily display your work on their websites using RSS parsers. Using optional Excerpts will prevent your post content from being copied via the RSS source, because it allows you to specify a different feed description for your articles.

2. Gaining more exposure with the PingBack feature.
PingBack is a weblog feature meant to link related blog posts from different authors together. It works like this: If you include a link in one of your articles to another blog post that has pingback enabled, then the author of that blog would get a notification in the form of a pingback, and would have to approve it as if it was a comment. When approved, a link with description of your post would be automatically included as a comment, and the pingback is completed. This could ultimately drive more blog readers to your site.

3. Submitting to Blog Directories
Submitting your site to Blog Directories is usually free, however in some cases you are required to link back to them somewhere on your site or in a post. But let me briefly explain how submitting to Blog Directories could benefit your weblog. First of all, your listing would of course generate some degree traffic for your blog. But also, a relevant link is seen by the search engines as a recommendation, a “vote” if you will, for your site. By gaining more “votes”, your rankings in the search results of these engines would improve, which could mean they would send you even more traffic.

I will end this post with a long list of blog directories to which you may submit your link for free. I will keep this list updated so be sure to visit back once in a while. Furthermore I wish you all the best for the new year!