3 Extremely Effective (No-Cost) Ways To Generate More Blog Traffic

“If you build it, they will come.”
No.
They won’t.
UNLESS… you help them FIND you.
Just because your blog exists and you’ve told your mom about it (and she’s told your Aunt Sue; and they both think it’s so cute that you’re doing this… this… what did you call it again??), doesn’t mean that anyone else is aware that it exists.
Yes, it’s “accessible” to MILLIONS of people, but if you don’t draw your targeted audience to your URL, you and your content are going to be pretty lonely.
Blog traffic doesn’t just happen.
It has to be led.
Here are 3 extremely effective, no-cost ways of building blog traffic:
BLOG COMMENTING
I’ve read numerous books and articles on traffic building and most included blog commenting. But, until now, I didn’t believe it was as powerful as people claimed it to be. Up until 4 weeks ago, I was just a lurker. I never commented on the content I read.
But I wanted to see if blog commenting would actually work to drive traffic. So I started.
And now I’m a BIG believer.
To date, blog commenting has accounted for 7.06% of my new traffic. What’s more, these visitors stay on the site for an average of 12:58 minutes each session and read (or at least look at) an average of 7.18 pages.
Several have even subscribed to my weekly updates.
This shows me that they are high-quality traffic. The exact audience I am writing for-the type of folks I want to stick around. And probably will.
My time investment each week on blog commenting? About 45 minutes total (5-10 minutes per post, per day). As of now, I post comments at three sites. They’re all writing-related and they all receive excellent traffic.
What’s also attractive about this is that as long as the posts are online (which is years in most cases), readers who see my comments will always have the option to link back to my site.
There are also some SEO (search engine optimization) benefits to blog commenting.
A few things worth noting: Make sure when commenting that you always have something specific to say about the post. NEVER just spam a blog’s comment area with “Great post!” Or “Right on!” That’ll lead others to think you’re a spammer. (And uncool.) It certainly won’t earn you any friends… or the respect of other blog owners. (Your peers.)
Also, make sure that after you write your comment, that you re-read and ensure there are no typos. After all, you’re a highly-respected writer now.
ARTICLE MARKETING
Article marketing is POWERFUL. It’s also my second favorite as far as traffic building tactics go.
Article marketing usually consists of a writer submitting her articles to a directory that webmasters visit in order to find free content for their sites.
When webmasters like your articles and publish one or more on their websites, your byline, a blurb about you, your company and a link to your website is always included.
So whenever someone visits their site and reads your article, there’s a possibility that they’ll take notice of this information and click through to your blog. (This is called a back link.)
One of the beauties of this is that your back link will then appear on these sites indefinitely. Most times, for several years. So years from now, that article that took you two hours to write will STILL bring you new traffic!
Out of the 114 sources that have brought traffic to WritersBreak.com in the past 4 weeks, almost 100 of those sources were the direct result of article marketing and account for roughly 20% of this month’s new traffic.
Now you see why I’m such a fan?
GUEST BLOGGING
I mention this one last, although I think it’s probably the most effective no-cost way for building traffic. It’s more time-consuming than the first two, but definitely worth the time.
Find highly trafficked sites in your niche that you respect and would like to write for. Then find out if they take guest bloggers or contributing writers.
If they do, read their guidelines and take some time to study the type of content that they publish.
What type of voice do they prefer? What seems to be the typical length of their posts? Which types of posts seem to elicit the most comments or shares via social media?
As with article marketing, your guest post (with a back link to your site included), will be available for people to read for years to come.
The main difference between two is that when submitting to article directories, my experience has been that mostly small to medium sites have picked up my content. This is okay, because a lot of them use my content and the numbers add up pretty quickly.
But with guest posting, you’re going to first ensure that the sites you’re writing for have large audiences.
Another big difference is that most times, these sites only accept original content. So when I mentioned that this is more time-consuming than blog commenting or article marketing, it’s because you’re going to have to spend several hours on researching and writing this one original piece that you’ll be unable to use elsewhere.
But because these sites have such large followings, it’s going to be well worth your time.
There are three blogs that I’ve studied that I want to guest blog for, and the largest one gets over 1,000,000 page views per month.
Say 3% of this audience reads my post and clicks through to my page. That’s 30,000 targeted visitors. Not a bad number. Especially when considering that the post probably only took me a day or two to research and write… and will continue to bring traffic for years to come.