When I was at IZEA Fest a few weeks ago, there were a few presentations that I really liked. Brian Clark from Copy Blogger talked about how to build traffic to your blog, and more importantly, how Copy Blogger drives traffic to their blog. Clark is a pretty laid-back guy, he’s a bit monotone, but he knows his stuff. He gave three keys to building traffic to your blog.
Create Viral Content
Create content that has potential to go viral. Create content that you would want to read and read to the end. Copy Blogger is very strategic about what topics they write, and how they write them. How much time do you put into thinking about what to write? Put it to this test: “Would I want to read this?”. If not, then nobody else probably wants to read it either. Creating content that has the potential to viral means that it must be good enough for someone to share it with their friends. I’ve found that people love lists and they love “How-To” posts. The funny thing is that I often find myself wanting to write more abstract and opinionative articles rather than more technical articles. But the truth is that most search engine visitors are looking for information, not my opinion.
Clark also talked about the importance of writing great headlines and knowing your audience. Write headlines that capture attention, but don’t make them misleading. You’ll piss off readers if you write a headline that has nothing to do with what you are writing about.
Social Networking
One line that struck me from his presentation was this: Focus on one medium and own it.
It’s so easy to spread ourselves thin across the social networking universe. There are literally hundreds maybe thousands of networks looking to grab people and suck them into their network. But being a part of 100 social networks with no depth is much less effective than being a social giant on Twitter or Facebook. Copy Blogger chose Twitter, and Clark said that Twitter recently became their number one referring site for traffic to their blog. This is something that I will seriously consider, and I think that I will try to focus on Twitter to build traffic to this blog, since my personal Twitter account is efolgate and the name of this blog is my name. Facebook is a good source of traffic as well, but I like to keep it more for networking with friends and other professionals.
Search Engine Optimization
This is obviously important when trying to build traffic to your blog, because search engine traffic should be ultimately be your #1 source of traffic to your blog. Crawl-ability is first. You must have good code. WordPress is generally SEO friendly, but a custom theme could hinder Google from crawling your site. As you can tell, I FREAKING RECOMMEND the Thesis Theme. It has great structure, especially for search engine optimization and it’s highly customizable. If SEO confuses you, paying for a consultant might pay you back in the long-run. SEO is definitely the technical side of driving traffic to your site. It’s a lot easier to understand Twitter than it is your robots.txt file and error codes. Again, I can’t stress enough the importance of choosing a blog theme that already has great structure and features built for sound search engine optimization techniques. For Instance, Thesis has a one-click option to control if your tag, archive, and category pages are indexed by Google. For SEO purposes, it’s a good practice to have search engines index either tags or categories, but not both. That features allows less tech-savvy bloggers to control an SEO feature without messing with the robots.txt file.
Also, make sure that Copy Blogger is on your RSS feed list. It’s a great resource for bloggers looking to build a brand, build traffic, and ultimately earn an income from blogging.
