When it comes to increasing blog traffic, a few practical steps make a big difference in readership:
1) Find out what your readers want to know.
Look at analytics for past articles and you may find that certain topics or content types hold greater appeal than others. You may also identify other factors that influence your audience, such as bulleted lists versus long-form paragraphs or a certain date or time of posting.
Also look at popular posts within popular industry blogs for inspiration on the types of topics your readers may similarly care about.
2) Craft the right headline.
The amount of traffic that can be generated by a carefully crafted headline is incredible. While it is vital to create a headline that accurately encapsulates the content of your post, you can also leverage little tricks that make a difference. Evocative words are often traffic triggers, as are numeric titles like “Seven Signs Your Customers Hate You.”
3) Seed your post.
Add your post to social voting sites in your industry. Also, submit your best posts to sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit to quickly boost blog traffic.
Stacking the deck in your favor to ensure your blog is seen and appreciated by the largest pool possible just makes sense. Quality writing trumps all these tips, but when that writing is enhanced by the tricks above, increased traffic should be your reward.
