Driving Your Blog's Traffic Through the Roof 4: Advertising

A great way to get traffic coming into your blog is by linking to other blogs in hopes that they will link to yours. Find other bloggers who have similar content or themes and contact them directly, ask them if they mind you linking to their blog. Put a link up on your main page and name drop their blog and articles in some of your own writing. What this will hopefully do is encourage them to return the favor, and do the same for you. This generates "new traffic." Viewers that enjoy similar blogs may become attached to yours, and tell their friends.

Start visiting blogs who write over similar topics. Read the articles, comment on them. Offer intelligent feedback, not just "good work" but detailed criticisms. Tell them why it was good, or what could have been improved upon. Make sure and leave a link to your blog at the end of every post, don't push them to view it, because if they enjoyed your post, they will check out your blog.

Writing a weekly newsletter to your subscribers will encourage them to visit often and tell friends. In the newsletter, don't include full articles, but samples that will beckon your audience to want more, thus going to your blog. I would advise Zookoda, they offer a hosting service for newsletters, best of all, its free! Zookoda allows people to subscribe to your newsletter and you get detailed information about click counts and subscriber demographics.

Cross promote other blogs. Talk about blogs you enjoy reading. Have those bloggers write an article for your blog, then write an article for theirs. This will keep fresh viewers coming in and plugging your blog.

Submit your blog to search engines. Also keep linking to your blog every time you post, on myspace, facebook, other blogs and on social bookmarking sites. Search engines work in a way that not only do they find relevance to keywords from the actual search, but also the number of pages linking to the blog. So the more your link to it, the higher up on the list it will appear. Don't annoy people though, because if you put your link up everywhere, some search engines might see this as spam and ignore your site!

Use Facebook, MySpace, Furl, Twitter, and Flickr to your advantage. Link into your blog from these social sites. Tell people when you have a new post. Keep the traffic visiting each one and they will frequent your blog. Email your friends and family, have them email some people.

Most importantly, keep your advertisements tasteful. Don't put flashing banners up all over your page. Let your viewers know what is a paid advertisement and what isn't, this will show them that you care about them reading your article and not just clicking your links.

Summary

• Link to other blogs.
• Post on other blogs.
• Write for other blogs.
• Include your link after every post.
• Submit to search engines.
• Use social networking sites to your advantage.
• Keep your advertisements tasteful.

Follow these tips to drive traffic to your blog through advertisement and make sure to view my other 3 articles on keeping your blog looking good and easy to navigate. Happy Blogging!