Did you know that there are certain easy ways to improve your blogs traffic and popularity on the internet? But unfortunately many bloggers overlook these points and leave money on the table. Though these points are absolutely rudimentary in nature they are highly powerful techniques to improve your blog’s traffic and revenue in the long run.
1. Display RSS Subscription Button
Placing an attractive and easy to spot RSS (Really Simple Syndication) subscription button on your blog is the first thing that you must do as a blogger. It must be placed on the top right corner of your blog as well as after each post, if possible. If your reader finds your blog interesting and useful he will most likely subscribe to your RSS feed. Once he is subscribed, he might become a repeating visitor to your blog when you publish new posts. If you provide useful content to him, he might even go that extra mile and share your blog posts on Social Media networks like Facebook and Twitter. To retain your RSS subscribers, it is very important to post informative and helpful posts on a regular basis, once in two days or at least once in week. RSS is the simplest and easiest way to reach out to your readers.
2. Display Email Subscription Button or Link
Apart from the RSS button, you must also provide an email subscription option for your readers to subscribe to your posts, because some readers might not know what an RSS feed is or how to use it, so it is a good idea to provide an email subscription option via a button or a link. The email subscription button also must be easy to find and placed on the top right corner of your blog as well as after each post. Once your reader subscribes to your posts via email, he/she will receive it directly in their inbox once you publish a new post.
If you want to track and analyze your RSS and Email subscribers Google’s Feedburner service is the best.
3. Display Social Media Subscriptions Buttons
You must also provide the buttons or links for your readers to subscribe to your social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace etc which can double or triple your blogs traffic and exposure.
It is better to use an all in one subscription widget instead of placing individual links and buttons for each service separately. It will be both easier for your reader as well as make your blog look more professional and clean.
4. Create Facebook Page and Google Plus Page
Having your blog’s Facebook page is a great way to drive in extra targeted traffic to your blog. You can easily embed the page widget on to your blog to promote it. If your visitors find your blog interesting they will definitely click on the “Like” button and become a fan of your page. In order to retain and grow your Facebook fans you must engage them by posting interesting and relevant stuff regularly on to your page so that they will read it and share it with their friends and their friends to their friends which ultimately brings in viral traffic to your page and blog, as well as more fans on the way.
Google Plus might not get anywhere near to Facebook in terms of popularity, but it is surely picking up momentum, so why wait? Join the Google Plus band wagon and get benefited from it by creating your Google Plus business page for your blog for extra traffic and exposure.
5. Incorporate Social Sharing Buttons with Analytics
You must incorporate an easy to use social sharing service for your posts that also provides analytical data for you. So if your readers find them helpful and want to share it with their friends they can easily do it without any hassle. You can place the social sharing buttons either before or after the post, but the best place is after the post.
The analytics data is important because it will tell you the number of shares of each post on various networks, it’s viral lift, geography of audience and a host of other analytical details that will help you improve your blog in the future.
Addthis is a good service that provides you with neat and easy social buttons along with the analytics feature. If you have a WordPress blog then you can use their plugin or else you can use their embed code on your website.
6. Display Related Posts
It’s a good blogging practice to display the related posts after each post. This has it’s SEO benefit as it helps in improving the user engagement by giving him/her a reason to spend more time on your blog reading the related posts. The related posts are either pulled out based on the Categories or with the help of tags that you provide for each post, so it is vitally important to categorize your post as well to tag them with the most relevant keywords. Check 5 Ways To Show Related Posts On Your Blog.
7. Display Categories
Every WordPress theme has a Category widget that you can use on your blog’s sidebar. If you are using a Blogger blog you must add a label (same as category) to each post and then add the Label widget to your blog to display all the posts under different labels. Displaying the categories widget is also a good SEO practice and blogging practice which allows the users to find all the posts under a given category.
8. Displaying Calendar and Archive
Displaying the Calendar and/or Archive widget is another blogging best practice which also has it’s SEO benefit as your visitor can filter out posts from a particular date, month or year.
9. Add a Post Footer
Having a post footer space will not only allow you to acknowledge your readers but also gives you an opportunity to solicit them to subscribe or share your post. You can utilize this space for advertising by placing your affiliate or AdSense ads. In short, it is up to you how you use the post footer space which can be easily customized as per your creativity and needs. Post footers are pretty easy to incorporate as plug-in if you are on WordPress or Blogger platforms and can greatly improve your blog’s user experience, ad revenue and subscriptions.
10. Provide an option to convert your Post to a PDF File
Some of your visitors might want to take a print of your blog posts or download it as a PDF file for future reference, so it is a good idea to give that option on every post. This can be achieved by coding or by just installing the relevant plugin.
Summary
The bottom line is that you must not under estimate any simple feature of your blogging platform, because you never know it’s potential unless you start using it. So make the maximum out of every basic feature of your blog to improve your subscribers, traffic and revenue.
You may also check out my earlier post – 19 Free Interesting WordPress Plugins You Can Try – for finding the appropriate WordPress plug-ins relevant to the techniques discussed in this post as well as other interesting ones for enhancing your WordPress blog as a whole.
Thank you for stopping by and reading my post! Happy Blogging!
This article is written by Deepak Eapen. He has been into Internet Marketing/blogging/SEO for the past 2 years and owns multiple blogs and websites in different niches.
Displaying categories and related posts on the below of every post lets the visitors easy to navigate to other pages. Thus it decreases the bounce rate and increases the number of page views.
Great content!
Among the mentioned tips, Social media sharing increase the blog traffic and increases the exposure to all other users. And displaying related post at the footer of the post increases the number of page views on the site.
Mostly i recommend on the related post and the social sharing for getting the traffic.
6, 7 and 8 works best for reducing your bounce rate.
Yet another useful post with crucial blogging tips 🙂
Really worth 😉
When the word "exposure" or "traffic" comes up, the first thing that comes to my head is "social media". According to research, most people who are online are mostly on social media sites. Having said that, being there would greatly increase our chances of getting people coming in to our blogs and sites. And participating in them will just add more to it.
Yes, It's all correctly said here! I admire the work of the author!! Points discussed here are must for providing exposure to a blog!
Well, Now we are not seasonal blogger and these tricks are not not new to use still they are useful and bring a lots of traffic to our website. New tricks include, convert these post into slide slow , audio and video.
Well, I don't think audio, video and slideshows are that new and there are even more innovative techniques than that, that smart marketers use. There are no limits for innovation, it all depends on a marketer's creativity and cannot be spoon fed. And I am very sure there are many "raw greenhorns" or seasonal bloggers as you said, out there who would benefit from this post, it's for them, may be not for "seasoned" bloggers like you. Still thank you for the comment Rakesh !
Some quality content found here (especially that girl picture 🙂 ) , have to bookmark this.
Oh poor thing, then you haven't seen any real hot babe on the internet if you are bookmarking this post just for the girl 😀 Shoot me a mail i will give you the links.. 🙂
to be honest..if i hadn't seen megan fox i wouldn't have read this article fully..hehehe..gud post deepak! 😀
Heh heh, i liked it, good one Gautam 😀 Megan saved me 🙂
A FB Fan Page can be very helpful. I came to know about the benefits of using a fan page after I came across the fan page of some bloggers, it was an amazing experience which inspired me to create one.
I like this Article……… helpful for a new blogger………..
Thanks for sharing. I understand displaying the Archive widget but why Displaying Calendar. Displaying the Archive is better i guess.
ONLINE EXPOSURE AND DISPLAY RSS ARE REALLY IMPORTANT WHEN IT COMES TO BLOG TRAFFIC , YOUR POST IS VERY INTERESTING , THANKS
This is the article which can give good importance to your online marketing with lot of options.
very Nice post…. these all steps are must in the success of a website
hot girl attract me too read this article
Very true, 😀 Pradeep ! why the hot girl for my post?