16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up an email subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine.
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines.

6. Submit your blog to blog directories.
Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

Increase Blog Ranking

Every writer likes to believe what they are writing is reaching an audience. One way to get validation of readership is to receive heavy traffic on a blog. Repeat, loyal readers are a huge confidence booster for a blog writer. In order to gain these readers, the writer much promotes their blog to the right audience. They need to make sure their topics are interesting and satisfying. And they have to make the reader want to come back and read more at another time.

Here are 4 tips on how to increase the rank of your blog page:

1. Appeal to the masses. It is beneficial to your blog to write every day or at least every other day. The more often you update your posts, the more traffic you could receive. For instance, if you have ten people subscribed to your blog and you post articles once a day, those ten people would visit everyday. If you only post once a week, your blog will not get nearly as many hits from your regular readers. The less you write, the more opportunity there is for people to forget about your blog completely. Feed your readers on a regular basis and they will keep coming back for more.

2. Include key words and write for those that want to read your topics. When you started your blog, you had a reader in mind. If you write about technology, do not post random recipes or relationship advice. If you write about recipes and cooking, people that read regularly will not care about care maintenance. Key words help readers identify what your blog is all about. When you optimize the use of key words, your blog could even show up in search engines like Google. Make sure you insert the key word every 100 words in your blog, give or take a few words. That way when that phrase is typed in to Google, your page will jump onto the list.

Affiliate Marketing

There are various kinds of advertising and marketing plans for achieving success in business these days. Affiliate Marketing is one of them. Product selection, traffic creation and link building are the three basic steps of this kind of marketing. Affiliate marketing provides a nice income without much effort. It generates some capital which helps for other marketing methods. So it can be used to either add to your income or to be the life time commission holder.

Affiliate marketing is a kind of business which sets up a relationship with a service provider or merchant who gives you the opportunity to setup a link with the respective business. If he clicks on the link of your websites you will earn an amount all your life as a commission based on the amount of sale so Affiliate marketing is a gate to enter into the service provider site through your Website.

So Affiliate marketing is a drive to enter the service providers' site through your website. The service provider or the merchant pays you a commission when the visitors complete the necessary steps. The different Affiliated marketers may have different links, but they point to same website--that is merchant's website so the aim of affiliated marketing targets simply to drive as much targeted traffic a possible to his unique affiliated link. This is a kind of passive income as after initial effort of finding out your chosen market, building website and setting up your campaign, you will be able to continue to earn from this with nominal day to day input in your campaign.

Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Affiliate marketing is an elaborate job which can give you lots of big paychecks if you do it right. Many people aspire to get into this business but if you don't know the right way to do the job you'll be just like them, failures. So if you want to succeed, read on below for some tips on how affiliate marketing works:

Make your webpage unique for each product you want to market. It won't do you any good if you choose to lump them all together in one site, not neat and not user friendly, it's doubtful that you can attract any customers with these strategy. It is greatly advised that you take one webpage and use it to promote just one product. Make your webpage attractive, easy to follow and with links added at the right places; a webpage where when your viewers sees it they won't get bored and continue reading on your sites content until they get interested in the product you market and eventually buys it.

Add in some articles with lots of keywords about your product which will highlight it and draw in visitors and customers. Reviews about the product you promote should also be included, testimonials from users who've already tried the product is a good marketing strategy and will make your webpage more credible.

Be sensible to your readers, remember that they are potential customers and should be careful in dealing with them. Respond as quickly as possible to those who signed up on your website and if possible create an auto responding mail to get back at them immediately. With continuous contact with the interested customer a sale can be closed after messages. If you fail to close a deal with a potential customer then you will have to deal days with the regret of being incompetent in your marketing skills.