How To Get Traffic and Readers to Your Blog

There is a simple way to get people to comment on your blog: ask.

At the end of each post, ask people what they thought of the information, if they have any similar stories or information to add, or better yet, ask a "poll" type related question that can help spark a conversation.

In addition to this, make sure to add a funny or interesting graphic at the bottom of each post, that encourages comments. An example of a graphic that I made and use is below.

Note that you can automatically have your graphic pop in after each blog post, without needing to manually add it each time. To do this, simply go to the "theme editor" in your wordpress blog dashboard from the "design" option, and add code into the single post file (single.php). The code you want to add, after the line of code:

<?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this entry &raquo;</p>'); ?> 

is the code for your image location, which will be something like:

<img src="http://www.yoursite.com/wp-content/uploads/Your_Image.gif" />

After that, I also put a link to my comment policy as well.

The second way to encourage comments is to actually reward readers for commenting, which can be achieved by "dofollowing".

As a quick explanation, when blogs started becoming popular around 2003 to 2004 or so, blog comment spam also became popular (go figure!). Spammers would have automated programs go and place irrelevant comments with links back to their websites. This would add many links pointed to their sites, which would make the search engines value them more highly, and help artificially boost traffic.

To counteract this, google came out with a new attribute called "nofollow" to add to links in 2005, to indicate a link that should NOT be given any weight by the search engines. Many blog software platforms, such as wordpress, automatically set all comment links to nofollow once this was available. This helped with comment spam, but also somewhat discouraged legitimate participation as well, as links now only matter for human traffic, not search engine rankings.

To then counter THIS, a "dofollow" movement has begun with bloggers. The idea here is that you strip off the nofollow tag on comments, sometimes after certain criteria are met like posting x number of comments or waiting x number of days after a comment has been made, in order to again encourage participation.

Doing this is simple. Simply add in the Dofollow Plugin called Lucia's Linky Love, and set your options. Add in a comment policy that defines what people should and should not do. And, be sure to include the fact that you dofollow in the text/graphic that encourages people to comment, so that they know the benefit they will be getting when they comment.

Of course, some people will comment just to participate, but adding in encouragement for others to also participate will help to increase the overall comments that you get and keep the conversation going.

A way to get more visitors to your blog is to join some blogging communities and participating in discussions there.

The two largest communities to join are MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. You'll definitely want to join both of those, and advertise that in your sidebar. I have a description page of my blog at BlogCatalog that is appearing in the top 3 pages of google results for one of my keywords, so that is an added bonus. You can see the description of my online mlm blog here, which will be an example of what you can get when you join that community.

Adding a couple community widgets to your sidebar can also help in this process. I use a "recent discussions" widget from BlogCatalog and a "recent visitors" widget from MyBlogLog. I also use the SezWho Widget, which gives information about commentors in the sidebar. You can see examples of all of that at the bottom of the left sidebar directly at my Online MLM Blueprint Blog.

Finally, some other blogging groups to join are places like bloghology.org. Do some market research into your niche to find other specific communities that you can join and participate in, to generate more visitors and make more friends along the way as you do. Another option is to join "groups" within general social networks, as in FaceBook or MySpace, that are related to your blog topic. Ning.com is another place to look into as well. It is a "make your own" social network site, that has many separate groups to join and participate in. And, of course be sure to be listed in some "dofollow" blog directories.

The more involved you are, and the more you participate in discussions, the more traffic you will get to your own blog. Don't spread yourself too thin and try to have a presense in 20 places though. Start with a couple popular places and a couple niche communities, and develop friends, contacts, and traffic from those locations.

You need a way to communicate to people once they leave, to send your message out periodically and remind them that you are there, in order to get repeat visitors who become regular readers who become contributors who become friends who become business partners.

The main technologies to use to do this are: auto-responders, RSS blog feeds, and comments subscriptions. Bookmarking is a fall-back, but in that case you can't initiate or communicate with them, you just have to hope they come back on their own.

For more details about that, I actually include that information at my How to Monetize Your Blog page, near the bottom.

And, in case you missed the other blog topics, you can find what you are looking for here:

• How to Set Up Your Blog (buy domain name, get hosting, choose wordpress blogging software and how to initialize your blog)
• How to Modify the Template
• Which Widgets to use, and how to set them up
• How to Make your Blog SEO-friendly
• And how to Monetize your Blog

I hope you've found this series on setting up your blog to be extremely useful. If there are questions that you have that were not answered here, please ask me about them in the comment section below, and I'll do my best to answer.