5 Blogging Tips That Help Drive Traffic To Your Site

If you are a good writer, have you thought about becoming a blogger!

The great thing about blogging is that you can select any topic that you want and preferably have experience in, and create your own blog for free. Not only that, but blogging is a great way of making money by writing good quality articles and write ups that people want to read.

But before you get carried away, making a blog and writing a couple of articles will not suffice, you need to spend time attracting readers and building traffic to your blog. There are plenty of ways to do this, but many of you just starting out will want quick and cost effective methods to get you going.

The following are the top five blogging tips which help to drive traffic to your blog. Let’s look on these five tips:

1. Write Regular, Good Quality Posts

One of the best tips that you need to abide by, is to write high quality, useful content on a regular basis. This is the first step in building your blog’s readership. Make sure you come up with something meaningful for your readers and contribute on a regular basis to retain their interest and help them stay loyal to you. Not only that, but posting on a regular basis, with new and interesting content, helps to make your blog SEO friendly.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you are planning to make money with your blog, you need to make sure that your site is properly optimized for the search engines by using SEO techniques. This helps to increase the number of hits to your blog, and generally make your site more visible on the popular search engines.

Many bloggers understand the significance of SEO, however, some end up spending a huge amount of money on some expensive tool that they really don’t need. Remember, SEO can be implemented easily without investing much. If fact, there are some free SEO tools provided by Google that are very useful. You can try the Google AdWords keyword tool to research specific keywords to include in your articles and help improve your SEO ranking.

3. Use The Power Of Blog Comments

Blog comments are one of the best ways to help increase traffic to your blog.

Firstly, you need to be replying to peoples comments that are left on your site to help make your readers feel valued and open up a two way communication. This helps to improve reader loyalty and grow a community around your website that people want to be a part of.

Secondly, commenting on other peoples blogs can help to drive new traffic back to your own site. When you leave a comment on someones site, you can leave a link to your blog’s URL (backlink) which people can click on. Many of the visitors will read your comments and if they find it valuable or helpful in some way, they can simply visit your blog through the link that you left. This is why it’s SO important to make sure you leave a meaningful/interesting comment.

4. Create An Attractive Site

Blogs are primarily valued on quality content rather than any visual aspect, however, if you use proper visual themes and images, you can add value to your site and make it more appealing to visitors.

You don’t necessarily need to pay for a premium WordPress theme, but try out a good quality theme from hundreds of the free themes that are available online. Try to find one that shows off your content in the maximum way possible to your visitors. Think about how they interact with your articles, is it easy to find relevant posts, is everything easy to read, etc. Failure to think about this can put off a lot of people viewing your site, which ultimately can result in you loosing money!

Also, think of including good quality images in your blog posts. There are plenty of copyright free images that can be found on sites like iStockPhoto or Flickr. Just remember to give the image owners proper credit and a link to the original source.

5. Use RSS Feeds

RSS feeds can be an effective way getting people back to your blog. Set up an RSS feed button on your blog and let people sign up to receive regular updates about your website. This way, they will always be up to date with what is happening on your site.

Blogging can be a great way of making money online, provided you can produce good quality content on a regular basis. All you need to do is to select a topic of your expertise and start writing. But to be truly successful, you need market your site to attract new readers and drive traffic.

So, what do you think? What other tips would you advise new bloggers to follow to help them attract more traffic? Please leave your comments below.