Increasing blog traffic – alternative strategies

As a blogger I am always on the lookout for ways to increase blog traffic. There are methods that were used in the past that are no longer as effective now, post goolge panda/penguin. Needless to say I am not a big time SEO guy or a problogger, I pick up ways of growing traffic by reading major blogs like problogger.net, smartpassiveincome.com and a whole lot of other blogs.  I also learn by not only reading about ways of growing traffic but implementing them and seeing what results I get from several methods.

Back in the beginning about 6 months ago, I was using updating my blog regularly as my only strategy of growing traffic and that was going well and it has been proven to work well but, It was going to take a long time to get a lot of traffic and I am a one-man team so I cannot keep posting regularly without sacrificing quality, which counts more than quantity if you plan to retain viewers. I do not post often for this blog but I try to post as much as I can for my fitness blog.

rise through all the challenges and come up ahead

I started blog commenting  but I was not doing a lot of that, so I have not seen much progress from that yet, maybe I need to increase the amounts of comments I make to maybe 5-10 daily comments to blogs in related niches. It has worked for many others before and its works now even during these google updates.

As I said in my other post about things I have learnt in a few months blogging, I realised that other fitness bloggers had steady daily traffic and yet they only post a couple times a month. 

So I started trying to build strong back-links using eZine Articles, squidoo and hub pages. What happened next is that my blog disappeared for 2 weeks probably because of what’s called the google dance. I had built too many good back-links in a short space of time and I was punished because it did not look natural. At a later point I decided I will no longer submit to eZine Articles except for maybe once or twice a month.

Hubpages was bringing me some decent traffic and Squidoo as well, these types of sites seem to be doing well after the google updates. I plan to submit more articles to these sites (when I find the time), but I read somewhere that if you want your Hubpages or Squidoo  pages to do well you need to build back-links pointing to them, that will help both your pages and sites rankings and increase your traffic.

I have guessed posted a couple of times to a related fitness site, which is one of the top fitness sites on the web. I got some traffic from those posts on the day, still waiting a few weeks to see the effect of all these back-links on my traffic.

I was hit slightly by the updates luckily my blog was still new and I have been working my way back ever since but things seem to be looking up now, the problem then was that I was relying of blog content only and I had no back-links.

I have found an awesome way to get back-links and traffic to my blogs, Using Tumblr. You see Tumblr has a viral effect and if you create related content in the short most viral form like images and smart little quotes, you can get a lot of back-links through reblogs and more people can be exposed to you blog that way by placing relevant links in your content.

Plus using Tumblr is fun, I prefer it over twitter but I do both. I will create a Facebook page for my fitness blog when I have enough traffic, for now I will learn more about using Facebook to drive traffic, and how to build effective Facebook pages. Oh and I almost forgot I also use Google plus, I share all my post there but I am still not sure how to get more people using it. One person can only do so many things by themselves, I think its best just specialising in getting traffic using 1 or 2 social networks.  

Posted in: blogging