How to increase your blogs traffic -part2

Today I will explain more on how to increase your blogs traffic. If you have not read the first part, I suggest you do that before reading this.

Burn your Feed

If you followed what I explained in part 1, then you will surely get extra traffic. But how do you make them come again? That’s where your RSS feeds comes handy. Readers will use your blogs RSS feed if they like your content.Most blogs, such as WordPress, already have RSS feeds integrated for entries and comments which is sufficiently enough unless you want to know how many people read your feeds.

For this you can use the service with which you can track your reader statistics. I recommend signing up for the service and letting them burn your feed. After the signup, find the “Publicize” tab and activate the FeedCount service.

FeedCount lets you post a little icon on your blog that displays the current circulation of your feed as well as make it easier for people to subscribe to your feed.

Select the colors you wish to use for the icon and post the code somewhere on your blog.

Put your Feedcounter where people can find them easily

For reader statistics check under the “Analyze” tab on the FeedBurner website.

If you use WordPress, I highly recommend you use to forward all feed traffic to Feedburner.

Have more than one blog? Then you may want to cross-promote your blogs with BuzzBoost. This service is listed along with other services like FeedCount,PingShot,Headline Animator,etc.

It’s the latest publicity and awareness offering for FeedBurner publishers, and it’s free. BuzzBoost’s job is to redisplay your feed content anywhere you can copy and paste a short snippet of HTML code — in a Blogger or TypePad page template, on a corporate website, or even in a “signature” block on a message board. BuzzBoost code is just a short line of JavaScript that displays content items and information from a FeedBurner feed according to settings you provide.

BuzzBoost helps in sending traffic to other blogs that belong to you.

Configure your blog in Technorati

Yesterday, I explained the basic things you needed to know about Technorati. Now let’s take a look on how to effectively configure your blog in Technorati.

After you have setup your profile, you need to claim your blog. Go to Account and then down the page to ‘Your Blogs’. Enter the URL of your blog in the URL field and then hit “Claim this weblog.” Once you have done that go to “Configure this Blog” and add up to 20 ’static’ tags to your blog, for use with Technorati’s ‘Blog Finder’ service. You don’t need to use all 20 tags, and you can always edit them later, as well as the blog description.

Technorati will crawl your blog and search for tags after you claim it. Make good use of Technorati tags by tagging every keyword in each of your posts. If you use WordPress, I recommend Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) which makes tagging Technorati a lot easier.

Use relevant tags, and if possible keep them to one word each.

Upload your Logo

You should create an attractive logo to use on Technorati. Technorati will reduce the image down to about 60×60 for your profile page, and about 40×40 for use in search results.

When doing a tag search, most readers scan the tag headline and then briefly touch on the contents if the headline seems to fit what they are looking for.

I believe that people tend to click more on links that have a logo than those that don’t. If it’s a decently done logo, it also adds professionalism to your blog.

You may also use your photo but it’s best for Corporate blogs to use logos.

You can now see your photo or logo on Blog Finder and Tag searches.

Putting your logo has also another use. Technorati rotates “Featured Bloggers” on the main page, and without a logo, you will not be included in this rotation. When featured, your blog will experience a short timed burst in traffic.

In the above image, you can see a featured blog. Also the most searched for tags called ‘Hot Tags’ are listed.

:idea:Write a few posts on that topic and tag them with these hot tags to get a boost in traffic.

Take part in Forums

Participate in discussion forums of your interest and contribute regularly. Soon you will find an increasing amount of traffic to your blog coming as a result of your contributions to these forums as many of them allow you to add your link as a signature to your posts.

Offline Techniques

Blog Promotion need not only happen online. You can also promote it offline and could just bring in some new readers. Some techniques include putting your URL on business cards.

Bookmark your blog

You can bookmark your posts on social bookmarking sites. After writing a good article submit it to Digg and it will automatically be picked up by other social bookmarking sites.

Write a ‘how to’ post that walk your readers through a process that teaches them how to achieve a goal they might have (similar to this post) and they are more likely to want to bookmark it. These type of posts are often listed in del.icio.us Popular Page.

You will get huge amounts of traffic if your posts come up in Digg’s Frontpage or del.icio.us Popular Page.

You may also want to read Part 3 of this series.