5 Steps To a Blockbuster Blog – Part 1

So you’ve got a blog. You know what you’re writing about and how often you’re going to be posting. Now all you need is traffic, right?

You’ve got the content, you just need more readers and comments.

In this series of posts, I’m going to cover some really quick, easy and effective strategies for increasing the traffic to (and ultimately, the success of) your blog.

Follow these steps and you’ll be a blockbuster blogger in no time!

Particpating in Forums to Expand Your BLOG Traffic

One of the most tried and true methods for increasing traffic to your blog is to actively participate in forums that are of interest to customers and prospective customers in your market niche.

So let’s get started.

First, you need to do a little homework. Don’t worry; it’s not as bad as the stuff you hated in High School!

You’ll be investigating the relevant forums for your business market. A good place to start is www.big-boards.com.

You need to note down some important information about each forum you find here, so create a spreadsheet with columns for:

• the forum’s URL
• its primary focus
• its total posts
• its total members

A good estimate of the traffic statistics for each forum can be found by looking the website’s address up on www.alexa.com.

Using the information you’ve gathered, decide which forums to visit regularly.

TIP: It’s MUCH better to visit and participate regularly in a few forums rather than spread yourself thin over several forms.

Create a signature file to add to the bottom of each of your posts on the forum. This signature will direct readers of your forum posts to your blog. It needs to be intriguing enough to motivate readers to follow the link, but not so “hypey” that you look like a scammer!

Most forums specify the number of lines and the colors you can use in your signature… often something like 5 lines of text and a link to your blog.

Try to make your signature a bit different… a bit more useful than the average signature! For example, highlight

• the title and topic of your latest blog post
• your blog’s title, objective and / or slogan
• Your USP – The Unique Selling Proposition that sets you apart from the other people on the forum with similar expertise

Once you’ve chosen the forums you want to participate in, you need to build your reputation in that forum. The only genuine way to do this is to consistently provide high quality content.

Ask intriguing questions or provide good useful responses in your forum posts. You need to consistently give readers information they find valuable – e.g. identify and solve a common problem you know they are likely to be dealing with.

Once you have spent time posting to forums and building your reputation there, you should be beginning to see your blog traffic increasing. Best of all, these people should be really INTERESTED in your content, because it’s an extension of what you’ve been posting about on the forums. This means more engaged readers and more interaction (comments, etc)

TIP: Did you know that more comments and interaction on a blog will increase your Google search engine ranking? Google recognizes that if people are commenting, then the content must be worth reading… and it increases your site’s “authority” accordingly.

Ninja Tip: If you post about more “controversial” topics you’re likely to gather more comments. Right now, Google doesn’t distinguish between “positive” and “negative” comments… so any comment is a bonus! Don’t go crazy posting hateful stuff, obviously, but the more comments you can gather – good or bad – the quicker your site will zoom up the search engines, which will lead to more traffic in the long-run.

Give your forum posting a couple of weeks and then look at your website stats to see where people are coming to your site from.

You should see the forums in your “referring sites” section, and you can directly see how much traffic you’re getting from each one.

Find out the forums that aren’t getting you much traffic. These ones probably aren’t a good investment of your time, so you can reduce your posting on these sites.

Don’t worry if the numbers look small to start with. As you become more of an “authority” on the best forums, the more people will click on your signature links.

Also, don’t forget that each person that clicks through can become a life-long reader! People won’t click on your signature link every time they see it, but they might click through and then come back to your site every day from their bookmarks or your newsletter/feed.

In the next part of the series, we’re going to look at how to leverage the content you write on your blog to easily get you completely new streams of traffic!

Tagged as: Blog, seo, traffic