Tag Archives | Programming Skills

How to Build Your Traffic on a Blog

How to Build Your Traffic on a Blog

Blogs have become a webmasters best friend and it’s allowing everyone with or without programming skills to create very appealing websites. With the content management system so flawless on WordPress and so many different themes that you can choose from, a lot of the work is already done for you. Most people had to design there websites by scratch which limited them in the amount of time they had to build the traffic on their websites. With blogging you’ll have lots of time to build the traffic on your blog and it will be one of the main projects of making your blog successful.

Traffic doesn’t magically appear, well it could I suppose but if you want targeted traffic then it’s going to take time and work too accomplish. The first thing you need to do as a blogger is make sure you have added a nice amount of content onto the blog, you should also be posting new content on a daily basis in the beginning so that people can see you’re adding new content regularly. A lot of people will just leave the blog if they notice that there hasn’t been much activity going on, and this is what you’re trying to avoid. You want the traffic to stay on your blog and come back in the future so you need to offer lots of great content to do this successfully.

Once you have the content generation down to a science then you need to work on the actual building of the traffic. This will consist of building links in high traffic areas and also in areas that will help increase your search engine rankings. Traffic from the search engines is the most targeted and valuable traffic that you can get for your blog and you should be focusing on ranking for keywords that will bring you traffic. It’s not easy to take over search engine rankings and you’ll need to do a lot of link building in order to take over your competition, but in time it’s definitely possible.

There are also some other traffic generation methods that you should look at for your blog which consist of social bookmarking, article marketing and traffic trading. Sometimes trading traffic isn’t the best choice, but it’s an option so always keep it in mind because you’ll never know when it could work out for your blog. Social bookmarking and article marketing are both ways to increase your traffic and also increase your search engine rankings, so doing these two things are very important. The traffic you get isn’t the best, but it all helps and the backlinks you build from doing it will also help you get traffic from the search engines.

Your blog traffic is always at risk, which means if you decide to stop posting for some reason then over time you might lose all of your traffic. People go back to blogs because they like what you’ve written in the past and want to see what else you have to say, but if you don’t post then people will quickly stop coming. A blog takes constant work, and even though you might like the idea today in a week you may have changed your mind which is what most webmasters do. If you’re in it for the long haul though then you’ll find it takes at least three months before you notice any steady traffic from your blog.

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My Top 7 WordPress Plugins

My Top 7 WordPress Plugins

WordPress is just so popular not because it’s free (sure, that’s one reason) but because it is so robust and has so much functionality. WordPress plugins allow you to do just about anything with your blog! Below is a list of my 7 top WordPress plugins, what they do, and why you need them. While there are some plugins you need to pay for, all of these plugins are totally free.

1. Advertising Manager Advertising Manager allows you to easily monetize your blog by placing contextual ads from different advertising networks. Some of these networks include Google AdSense, Yahoo!PN, adBrite and Commission Junction.

2. Akismet Spam comments are a BIG problem. The reason for this is because there are clever people that misuse their programming skills to come up with ways to spider the Internet for blogs and leave comments on them automatically. One of my blogs gets over 50 spam comments every single day! Having to wade through these spam comments in search for the good ones would be a huge waste of time. Fortunately, Akismet will automatically trash the spam comments for you.

3. All in One SEO Pack If you could only have one plugin, this would be it. All in One SEO Pack helps you to make your blog SEO-friendly. Why would you want to do that? The more the search engines (e.g. Google) like your blog, the better you’ll rank and the more free, targeted traffic you’ll get.

4. DoFollow There are two types of links; dofollow and nofollow. Google will not credit nofollow backlinks when ranking a website. WordPress comments links are, by default, set up as nofollow links. The DoFollow plugin changes the comments links attribute to dofollow thus encouraging more visitors to leave comments on your blog.

5. Facebook Like The more you can integrate your blog with Facebook, the better. This plugin puts a Facebook ‘like’ button on every post and when visitors ‘like’ your posts, their Facebook friends will see it and you’ll get more, free traffic! Facebook traffic can be very viral. This is a powerful plugin that you definitely want to have on your blog.

6. Google XML Sitemaps This plugin auto-generates a sitemap for your blog and keeps it up to date. Google loves sitemaps.

7. Pretty Link Lite If you need to shorten a long link (to make it look prettier) or if you have an affiliate link you want to hide, this is the plugin for you.

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