Increase Traffic to your blog- Community Building-Social Bookmarking and Networking

There are a few things that you can do to increase traffic to your blog.

To achieve high volumes of visitors, readers and subscribers does take time, it won’t happen over night, but it’s not impossible. Even if you have great content you can’t expect readers to flock on your pages. Having good content is one thing however there is much more to it than just posting articles.

Even if you have the best product in the world, best value, good price etc. how can you expect that people will find out about it? You need to let people know about your blog, join or create a community around the topic of your blog before you increase you traffic.

To increase traffic information must flow freely.

To inform, educate, compel and attract readers you must increase the chances of being located.

Getting your blog listed in directories is one way;

Other great ways of increasing traffic are:

1. Social Networking, and

1. Social Bookmarking

1. Social networking

Myspace and Facebook (I think Facebook reached over 60 million users the other day), work fine in letting people know you have a blog and presenting them with the option of visiting. However, there are a few more services that I came across and seem to be friendlier towards the blogging crowd.

MyBlogLog

I have found that MyBlogLog is an excellent way for someone to start building, or become part of communities. There are countless communities on thousands of topics and it is really well set up. It has excellent real time features that allow you to find people interested in exactly the same things you are. You can keep track of all your statistics and communicate with other readers and bloggers.

Entrecard

Entrecard is the new advertising phenomenon that is geared entirely for bloggers. You place the card on your blog and other Entrecard members click on it to “drop their card”, and you as well as they, gain advertising credits. Once enough credits are collected you can use them towards advertising on other members’ blogs. As more visitors drop their entry card on your blog, the cost for advertising on your page increases and so do your visits. There is an argument to be made about the quality of the hits you get, but in the end the more people visit your page the more chances you will have to get a few good repeat visitors.

HubPages

HubPages is another interesting and well set up community based information portal. It differs from MyBlogLog in the sense that you can’t integrate your blog you but can post your articles as part of their system and link to it. It could qualify as a bookmarking service but I think it falls better under the networking class since it has enhanced community features. What HubPages excels at is that they allow members to post adds from google on their articles as well as affiliate links from Amazon and Ebay. You can follow the following link to a sample article I posted; an article from this blog My HubPage.

1. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a good way to increase traffic. The following services allow you to bookmark articles and have readers go through them, rate them or follow the links back to the source your blog. There are two kinds of social bookmarking sites.

Ones that require downloading a tool bar and ones that don’t.

The ones I found require downloading are StumbleUpon and Delicious.

Although I downloaded the bars I haven’t used them enough so I can’t say how well they work.

Then there is Digg and Furl that don’t require downloads and work fine.

Digg offers the option to install a rating button on your blog that allows readers to express that they “Digg” your articles. Doing so increases your articles popularity and is ranked better in their lists. A similar service is offered by PlugIm which seems to work like Digg but is smaller.

Forums

Forums can also be a great way to increase the inbound traffic to your blog. Replying to comments or posting your own comments with your URL (in your forum signature) can be a good way to attract readers on your page. The ones that I have come across recently, and created accounts for are: EarnersForum, Powelly, and Articleinfor.

Keep posting new topics, keep writing, and focus on the blogging community.

Increasing traffic to your blog is not difficult.