Improving Your Blog’s Traffic

As professional bloggers since 2000 when we launched Lovetripper.com, our romantic travel blog, we’ve spent a LOT of time figuring out ways to improve traffic to our blogs. In a nutshell, you can’t expect to make money unless you have traffic. If it’s targeted traffic, you don’t necessarily have to have huge numbers but you do need good, consistent numbers before you can expect to make money. Don’t make the mistake of feeling like “build it and they will come”…you have to get out and get that traffic!

• Fresh Content. Fresh articles and photos bring blog visitors back. You can alternate between long and short posts (even something super short like a Wordless Wednesday post that’s primarily a photo) but make sure you have something new when return visitors arrive. How often should you post? That will depend a lot on your time and your traffic numbers. Our DogTipper.com site is updated at least half a dozen times every DAY but that’s our most frequent posting. We update CatTipper one to two times daily then Lovetripper and Texas Tripper about an average of three times a week.

• Article Marketing and Guest Blogging. Especially when your blog is new, it’s important to build the reputation of your blog within its niche. Create content not only for your blog but also to be submitted to article directories, using the resource box to advertise your blog so people can find you.

• Social Networking. Social networking sites are traffic options that weren’t available to us when we first started blogging but ones that we use–a lot– these days. So you don’t spend all your time managing your social networking sites, start with just a couple of accounts at first and grow them, interacting with the community you build.  We’ve built large communities for our DogTipper site on Facebook and on Twitter and both are important traffic sources for us. Be sure to interconnect all your accounts so visitors to your blog can subscribe to your Facebook or Twitter updates.

• SEO Marketing. Without trying to stay ahead of the latest search engine tweaks (because you won’t), be sure to write content that utilizes keywords in a natural way. Use keywords no more than a few times in your posts so your post doesn’t look like it has been written for a search engine rather than a reader. On the other hand, be sure that the words you’d like a searcher to come in on are in the article. If you want someone searching for “low cost dog treat recipes” to come to a page on your site, make sure those exact words are in your post, not just “cheap treat recipes”.