Where do blog visitors come from?

Blog visitors aren’t from outer space. If we could just realize where they actually and potentially come from, it would help us maximize those contact points for more blog visitors. Assuming that you have good writing skills at the very least and that you are writing about interesting stuff, maximizing the sources of traffic of your blog could help improve site views and, hopefully, your revenues, too! Even if the topics you cover in your blog aren’t very interesting but if you promote your blog well enough, you’ll get visitors. I’ve seen less-than-interesting blogs with great traffic! I’ve also seen interesting ones that get few traffic.

Before you drive traffic to your site, though, you better understand who your target audience is. That way, you will understand which of the following sources of traffic works best. Here are the sources of traffic and some recommendations on how to maximize them.

Search Engines

Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and Bing among others, are the top source of traffic for a lot of blogs. They usually target hot keywords and build their blogposts on these search terms. After writing their blogpost, they engage in Search Engine optimization (SEO) for better results. If the blog lands in the first Search Engine Results Page, meaning the keyword belongs to the first ten results, it can send tremendous amount of traffic to the blog.

SEO is hard work and it takes some time. But if you spend time learning about it, you will certainly reap big rewards in terms of traffic to your site.

Forums

If you love interacting with people who hold similar interests as you do, you should check out forums. The topics they cover range from geek stuff like computers, web design and science to homey matters like cooking, kitchen and homemaking. Still, others are devoted to school-specific things (visit www.peyups.com, for example). The range of topics is endless. When you do interact with people, you should design your signature such that it contains links to your blog or websites.

Other Blogs

Bloggers usually connect with each other. It is not uncommon to see bloggers asking for link exchanges. You put their link on your site and they put your link in theirs. Another way to harness blogs as sources of traffic is by commenting on the posts of your blogger friends. This way, their visitors might get curious with your comments and will visit your site, too! This might be time-consuming but it is one of the more effective means to drive visitors to your site, especially your target audience.

Blog Directories and Carnivals

Thousands of blog directories and blog carnivals are out in the World Wide Web. You can make a cursory search at Google.com and you’ll see millions of resulting websites. By submitting your site to these directories, you become part of the Web index, thereby increasing your presence and the likelihood for people to stumble onto your site. There are also blog ranking sites out there that you can use. In the Philippines, one of the top blog ranking site is www.topblogs.com.ph.

Microblogs – Twitter, Plurk, etc.

Twitter.com and Plurk.com are just two of the many micro-blogging platforms around. Through these sites, you can post your bite-size thoughts. You can even add in a link to your blogpost. In fact, Twitter is one of the most popular sources of traffic for a number of professional bloggers out there. The key to using these tools, however, is to gather a fairly large following.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Bookmarking favorite sites is no longer confined to your browser. You can use online social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, Mixx.com, Reddit.com and Google Bookmarks among others. There are also digital products allowing you to submit your blogposts to social bookmarking sites automatically. With the help of these sites, you get to share information with other like-minded individuals and drive traffic to your site. Don’t overdo it though, because you may be flagged as a spammer.

Go to www.onlywire.com to get a free social bookmarking site submission tool.

Social Networking Sites

These sites connect you online with your friends, their friends, and the friends of their friends, ad infinitum. Take a look at Facebook, Multiply and Friendster and look at the lengthy network that you can develop. By posting your links to these sites, hundreds of people will become aware of your blog and your posts. If you are a good friend of theirs, chances are, they will visit your site. To maximize exposure in social networking sites, though, is to make your presence felt through comments, games and other features that the SNS have to offer.

Online PR sites

Just like newspapers, there are also Press Release site in the Internet. If you have a compelling press release, you can submit them to online PR sites, together with your link, and they’ll get the word out. If your PR campaign is effective, people will start noticing and they will visit your site.

Article marketing

In addition to the articles you write for your blog, you can also write short articles for submission to article directories. This is called article marketing. The goal is to submit as many articles as you can to these article directories. Each article should contain a link to your site. You should also target keywords for every article you submit to make this campaign more effective.

Offline marketing

I’m pretty sure you have friends and family members. In addition to online marketing, you can also let them know about your online projects and tell them to visit your site. As every loving friend and family should do, they will pay your site a visit. Granted, they may not be as computer and internet savvy as you, but they can still help spread news about your website or blog.

Which of these sources of traffic you benefit from? Which of these are under-utilized in your blog? If there is a single source of traffic you’d recommend, what would it be? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

These sources of traffic are but the initial contact you’ll have with blog visitors. What happens when they land on your site? You have to generate interest, prepping them for the action you want them to do. But that calls for another post for another day.

image credit: http://serpslayer.info/

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