How to Generate Traffic To Your Blog

With the growing interest in blogging as a means of online promotion and branding, a lot of marketers are starting blogs to promote their opinions, products, books and services.

But a blog is like a website. "Write and they will come" isn't exactly a magic formula to bring in traffic by the boatload. If you need to promote your website in order to build traffic to it, you need to promote your blog as well.

Write posts that people will want to read. This should be common sense, but many marketers tend to forget that their readers are real people and that you need to use the principles of online copywriting to make your headlines and copy interesting to your readers. If you write posts that people enjoy reading, they will reward you by returning to your blog regularly.

One of the most important things you can do to keep a steady flow of traffic going to your blog, is to update it on a regular basis. Ideally, it's best if you update your blog at least 2 or 3 times a week, and even better if you can do it daily. There are a couple of advantages to this; one is that you will gain a following of readers who will continually return to your blog, and two is that you will be feeding the search engines, thus, maintaining your ranking.

Invite your readers to connect with you on StumbleUpon and Facebook. You can never ever have too many friends on SU and Facebook. Inviting existing readers to find you on these services with a post should take less than 20 minutes.

Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines. Make sure your blog URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for; Use your primary keywords in the title of your post; Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post; Use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts.

Subscribe to the feeds of your industry’s major players. That way, you won’t miss important news releases. When news breaks in your industry, there will be a lot of extra traffic searching for information on the event. Adding your thoughts will almost always generate extra traffic. Subscribing to the feeds of your industry’s top sites should take no more than 15 minutes.

There are many different ways to market your blog and gain more visitors which will eventually allow you to make money through blog-based affiliate marketing. The key to making money through affiliate programs or other forms of advertising is traffic, which is simply the sheer number of visitors who arrive at your blog daily. In terms of affiliate marketing, the more visitors you have, the more opportunities or capacity you will have to recommend or successively promote any products, services or websites.