Have them flock to your blog...

Unless you have just discovered the Buzz Baiting Blog, you probably have noticed that a lot of posts are about attracting visitors to your site and generating traffic for your blog. There is good reason for all of this hullabaloo about traffic — it is REALLY important!

A lot of the stuff we suggest here for generating traffic is pretty easy, but some of it is a bit more advanced. If you are just getting started, or if you need to bump up your visitor count in a hurry there are some easy peasy things you can do. The following are five quick tips on how to easily generate blog traffic that are perfect for even the beginning blogger.

1.) Post on GOOD days. Some days bring more traffic than others, and Saturday is not that day. On the weekends, your readers and potential readers are out and about and too busy to browse blogs. Weekdays are best, and look at your analytics to recognize days that are best for your blog.

2.) Stick keywords in your URL. You can help to drive traffic to your blog through search results, and a great way to boost your SEO is to alter your URLs. Not only should you insert keywords into your title, but you should do what you can to get those keywords in the URL too! If you have great posts that aren’t getting the traffic, you may want to change these old post URLs to start bringing in more visitors.

3.) Quick! Create a link cluster. If you don’t know what a link cluster is, don’t let the name trick you; we are referring to a cluster of links in and not a cluster out. Take the top long tail, low competition keyword from a post and then edit about 10 other posts to include that keyword as anchor text and link it to the first post. This is a sure way to boost SEO and blog traffic.

4.) Watch what you write. Even if you manage to stay within your niche, you want to make sure that you are providing VALUABLE content. If you say stuff that readers can get anywhere, why would they need to visit your site?! Give pertinent, helpful or entertaining content that visitors will not only enjoy once, but they will want to come back for it again and again. Give readers what they want and they will come back; they may want to read about you and your dog and your new boyfriend, but the odds are great that they do not.

5.) Put images in your posts. This is about more than making your posts look pretty! If you add images (and title, tag, and caption them correctly) you can see a real boost in traffic. These images you insert in your blog can end up indexed by search engines, and like with your other SEO efforts, inserting images could lead to your pictures or illustrations ending up at the top of image results. By adding images to your posts, they will look more stylish to all the extra eyes that find them.

They aren't magic...

It doesn’t matter why you blog; you want to see heavy traffic. You put your words, ideas, images, etcetera out there because you want people to take notice. You need visitors, and no matter how much traffic you have, you want more! The following are six tricks that will get more visitors to your blog:

1.) Answer questions.

Take time to answer questions on topics that you are knowledgeable in on sites such as Yahoo! Answers. Answer high ranking or featured questions without many quality responses. This isn’t a new tactic, but it keeps coming up because it works. When you answer questions, leave a link back to your blog. If you are an overachiever, whip up a quick post that answers the question and leave a link to it in your reply.

2.) Share your content.

When you think of content that goes viral, it usually starts to build buzz because the person who created it shared it. You want your posts to get that kind of attention, you need to share them. Put links to your posts on social networking sites, bookmarking services, email to friends and family, and almost anywhere and everywhere you can.

3.) Use SEO.

Search engine optimization is what helps your blog posts end up toward the top of search results. There are many elements to SEO, but keywords could be the most vital and are the easiest to get started with. Select keywords that people who may be interested in your content would naturally search for, and then sprinkle these throughout your post. Use the Google Keyword tool to help you find effective low competition keywords that will help to deliver the best results.

4.) Pay attention to analytics.

Google Analytics and similar tools are very valuable when it comes to bringing more visitors. When you sit down to craft a new post, check out your old analytics. See which posts were the most popular and try to replicate them. There are many factors that could drive traffic from the time of day you post to topic; whatever it is that seems to draw in the most visitors to your site according to the statistics, keep doing it.

5.) Write guest posts.

Writing guest posts means more work for you, but it also means more visitors to your blog. Reach out to other bloggers and offer to write guest posts for them so that they can take a little time off and still have fresh content on their site. Their readers will see your guest blog post (and hopefully like it), bringing them to your blog in no time. Allowing guest bloggers can also benefit you; their adoring fans may well follow them over to your URL.

6.) Write catchy titles and headlines.

Since we already have a WHOLE post about writing the right blog titles, I won’t go into this too much. It needs to be noted, however, that catchy titles attract attention and make web surfers who come across your content on social sites, search engines, and other places around the web that much more likely to click on through to your blog, boosting your traffic in a substantial way.

Even he wants to know...

Provided this isn’t your first visit to the Buzz Baiting Blog, you know that you need a niche blog if you want to bring in a lot of natural traffic and more chances to make money. In order to maximize site traffic and income, micro niche blogs may be an even better way! Before you start your micro niche blog, you need to know what these are and how they work, and this primer can help you get started.

Really, what is a micro niche blog?

A micro niche blog, sometimes called a micro blog, has a very tight, narrow topic.

A regular blog focuses on a relatively broad topic such as gardening, for example. A niche blog is a bit more narrowed; instead of looking at gardening, a niche blog may look at container gardening or even organic container gardening. A micro niche blog in this area may look one particular type of plant, say growing tomatoes in an organic container garden.

To think of what a micro niche blog in other topics would be, keep narrowing a topic down as much as you can. Once you feel that you cannot reduce the topic any further and it is as reduced pointed as possible, you probably have uncovered the micro niche.

How do micro niche blogs work?

Usually, these micro niche blogs spring from your existing niche blogs. Using the previous example, as you are writing about organic container gardening, certain popular plants may come up again and again.

You may note that bell peppers and chives continue to be hot topics on your niche blog, so you need to see if other people are buzzing about these crops. After some keyword research with the Google Keyword Tool or some other resource, you may find that gardeners globally are going to Google for more information on these plants. You can then make a micro niche blog to address each of these specific micro niche topics.

How will I benefit?

It’s always about you, isn’t it? You always want your blogs and websites to do well, and if you create a micro niche blog based on a smart low competition keyword, you may have a winner.

Micro niche blogs usually do very well in terms of search engine optimization. When it comes to SEO, micro blogs are successful because your topics should all be low competition long tail keywords. This means that you have the best odds of being at the top of search results…as long as people actually are searching for these topics! A similar topic to this is discussed in our article “How to plant seeds that grow 100% organic traffic“.

Additionally, readers will love your micro niche blog. Visitors will find exactly what they were looking for, and they will probably come back again and again to their new favorite resource. Once there, these visitors are likely to click on your affiliate links, purchase products, see your ads, and may even click through to your main blog or website.

Conclusion

These fun, highly effective little blogs can bring in big traffic and tall money if you pick the right topic and put up high quality, original content.

If you have a blog, you want people to see it; otherwise you would be writing in a journal stashed under your mattress, NOT on the World Wide Web. This means you need more traffic coming into your blog. If you don’t have visitor traffic coming to your blog, not only will your message not get out, but you won’t be able to make any MONEY either!

No matter how much traffic you have coming into your site, you could have more. The following tricks are free tips that you can use to help drive more traffic to your blog, and in turn, boost your revenue.

1.) Write for an audience that is likely to share.

Those most likely to share are those with their own blogs or sites. Also highly likely to share are those who are active on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Of course, these folks also need to have some interest in your niche and topic, and they need to like your writing style and point of view.

What will they want to share? They will pass along content that they find to be particularly helpful, thought provoking or entertaining. Provide infographics, tell stories, make videos, provide facts and challenge conventional wisdom in your niche to inspire more sharing. The more valuable they find this content, the more likely they will be to pass it on.

2.) Answer questions.

Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com can sometimes seem silly, but they serve a purpose. There are people who go there for answers to legitimate queries that couldn’t be resolved with a web search. You can help them.

Don’t answer just any question. You should answer high quality questions that have thus far received few (or poor) responses. Pick questions that are high ranking or featured.

Answer questions in a way that makes them valuable for more than the original poster. Give an authentic answer with relevant links, ideally for your posts. Ideally, if you have time, create a new post that focuses on the subject, and link to that. Make sure that your answers are quality all the way to drive traffic; if you give a poor answer or just leave links, you will be accused of spamming.

3.) Utilize your email signature.

Letting others know you have a blog is a quick grass roots sort of way to drive traffic. It is hard to drop in the fact that you have a blog into every email message and conversation you have, however.

What you can do is utilize your email signature to let everyone you send a message to know about your blog. Not only should you provide a URL, but you should link to your related social media accounts as well. This may not give you the biggest boost in traffic, but it can help to convert people you already interact with into visitors.