How I Will Increase Traffic to My Blog

Last night’s coaching webinar with Alex Jeffreys was all about driving targeted traffic to your blog. Traffic, or visitors as people who arrived at your website used to be referred to before the internet became trendy, is the lifeblood of any online business. If nobody visits your website then there is no interaction, no relationships are formed and ultimately no sales are made. Without visitors to read what you are putting out there, a blog may as well not exist.

Alex is keen to see everyone who is participating on his coaching program to increase the traffic to their blog and to make it more interesting, he is offering a $1,000 bounty to the student who accumulates the most traffic across a two-week period.

Before getting into how I am going to promote my blog, I want to show you where I am at today in terms of traffic. At the start of July, 2009 you can see my traffic numbers were not that great:

Apart from a blip on 15 July where I had a huge spike of traffic, I had been attracting less than 100 unique visitors every day to my blog.

But, the second half of the month saw an improvement and the last 10 days have all seen well over 100 unique visitors per day. At the time of writing this post I have had 29 visitors, but I see no reason why I won’t get over the 100 mark again today.

So, where is the traffic coming from? One word – Twitter. As you can see below Twitter is sending me around close to 50% of all the visitors who come to my blog.

I am getting a lot of “direct traffic” which I assume is people typing my url straight into the address bar of their web browser and it’s no surprise a percentage of traffic is coming from the Alex Jeffreys’ coaching forum, where I am quite active.

What is encouraging, however, is I am now getting search engine traffic, notably for people searching specifically for my name and this blog. This wasn’t happening at the start of July so my efforts so far to get my brand recognised are having at least a small, positive effect.

I don’t think I have made a bad start to this blog but this is really only the beginning. At the end of the two week competition period I want to at least double the number of daily visitors who come to my blog, between 200-300 uniques.

One of the rules in the competition is I have to write about how I am driving the traffic to my blog. To start off this series of traffic related posts, here are 10 methods I will use to promote my blog over the next fortnight and beyond:

• Twitter. So far, Twitter is my main source of traffic so I will try and get even more from it. I will tweet some of my better, more “timeless” blog posts at regular intervals to try and pick up some new visitors but will have to be careful I don’t overdo it.

• Blog Commenting. This has proved successful so far in getting traffic to my blog and I have found commenting on other people’s blogs also sees the number of comments I get here increase dramatically. I will continue to comment on other coaching student’s blogs regularly but also widen my net further and comment on some of the more popular internet marketing blogs out there.

• Forums. The coaching forum has provided me with plenty of traffic as more and more students get to grips with their blogs and become active in the community. I will continue to post there as much as I can to help people out but I will also turn my attention to the Warrior Forum which is a huge community of both up-and-coming and more experienced internet marketers. If I can add value there thenm I should see a steady flow of traffic arriving at my blog.

• Social Bookmarking. This is something I have experienced success with in the past but have not really done it yet with this blog. I will submit my better posts to some of the bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and Delicious and hope they strike a chord with the people who use them. If one of my blog posts takes off, I could get tens of thousands of unique visitors as it goes viral.

• Podcasting. This is something quite new to me but I have enjoyed doing it so far. I will produce regular, short podcast updates of what I am doing on Audio Boo and mention my blog within my recordings. The website may not drive a huge amount of traffic but hey, if it’s good enough for Tony Blackburn, then it’s good enough for me! I also want to get together on Skype with other students on the course for a weekly “brainstorming” session which can be recorded and submitted to other podcasting websites.

• Video. This is something I know I have to do more of but at the moment I am guilty of procrastination. I need to start producing videos and syndicating them around the various hubs, such as Youtube. Not only will the videos generate traffic but also valuable backlinks which will help my search engine rankings.

• Search Engine Optimisation. Most of the above activities will see my rankings in the search engines improve and I just need to keep adding quality content to this blog to make it more of an “authority” site. At the moment, I do not show up for my name “David Walker” until page three of Google UK and that needs to improve especially as some traffic has started trickling through via a “David Walker” search term.

• JV Giveaways. I have started experimenting with JV Giveaways and it has already had a positive effect on growing my mailing list. When someone joins my list and downloads my ebook, they should find their way to my blog via the links contained within in.

• Facebook. I am not really doing a lot in terms of promotion with Facebook, but I have added a link to my blog on my profile page and will link out to my latest blog post on my status updates. The traffic numbers will not be huge but every little helps. In time, as my brand grows and when I feel it is justifiable, I will create a “fan page” for my blog on there which should generate further buzz and traffic.

• My Email List. I have worked hard on attracting people to my mailing list and they are all interested in what I have to say. I can create an automated RSS Newsletter to send out to them every time a new post appears on the blog or after a set number of new posts have gone live. This kind of repeat custom will drive a lot of traffic back to my blog over time as my list gets bigger.

I am going to give this a real go over the next couple of weeks because while it would be nice to win the $1,000 it is also a good incentive to step the traffic promotion efforts up a notch and get even more people aware of what I am trying to achieve here.

If anyone has additional methods they are going to use to promote their blogs or has any improvements on what I have written about here, please leave your comments below!