The Top 5 Ways to Generate Traffic With Less Work
Effective use of time is the main ingredient in creating a thriving blog or website. In this post, I want to explain some high-impact traffic generating techniques you can use that minimize time and effort without minimizing results.
1. Don’t write guest-posts — exchange them. Generally, a guest-post on another blog means one less post on your own blog. This doesn’t have to be the case. Exchanging guest-posts is an idea introduced to me by Trent from The Simple Dollar. It’s exactly what it sounds like: you write a guest-post for another blogger and, in return, they write a guest-post for you. While you’re out promoting, your blog is still freshly updated. It’s an arrangement that allows you to have it all at once.
Like any exchange, though, it should be equal. If the blog you’re swapping guest-posts with is too small, you’re not going to get much in return for your work. If the blog you’re swapping guest-posts with is too big, they won’t see how writing for your audience will benefit them in proportion to the work they have to do.
The obvious solution is to target blogs that are in (roughly) the same stage of growth as yours. This is not the only solution, however. You might still be able to get exposure on a big blog if you ask for less from the other person. For example, you might ask an A-list blogger to write 100 profound words in exchange for 500 from you. The extra exposure will be worth the extra work, and by making it easy for the other person, they’re more likely to accept the exchange.
2. Promote your site during daily tasks. Unless you’re incredibly dedicated, you probably use the internet for more than just blogging. It’s worth thinking about how you might be able to turn seemingly mundane tasks into promotional activities.
- Put your blog’s URL at the bottom of your emails, so each message you send will promote your blog.
- If you participate actively on forums, add your blog’s URL to your forum signature.
- If you use Google Reader, you could share a post from your own blog with others who’re likely to be interested in it.
- Put a link to your blog on your social networking and social media profiles.
- Set Twitter to publish links to new posts from your blog.
3. Practice in-post networking. This can be as simple as finishing a post with a question to a few other bloggers: what do they think about such and such? You’ll probably want to follow-up with an email to make sure they didn’t miss the trackback. While you shouldn’t expect everyone you call upon to write a post relating to your idea, some might — particularly if your original post was food for thought.
Opinion-based topics are likely to get more uptake, especially if you call upon bloggers who’re likely to have strong thoughts about what you’ve written. If it only takes an extra minute to ask the question at the end of a few select posts, it’s definitely worth doing. Aside from the potential traffic benefits, engaging with other bloggers enriches your niche as a whole.
4. Release a ‘Best of’ eBook. Freebies generate excitement, links and traffic. An eBook of your ten best posts is a great way to introduce your blog to new readers. If you’re not too fussy about production values, you can put an eBook together in 15 minutes. Other eBook options are: publishing a post-series (I did this recently), collating your best posts in the past year, or collating your best posts on a particular topic to create something with a theme.
5. Build a mailing list and use templates. Whether you want others to link to you, vote for your articles or answer a question, emailing others to ask them a favor is time-consuming yet rewarding. Often, time-constraints stop bloggers doing this often. But if we look at what makes emailing a number of people time consuming, we can see that it doesn’t have to be.
First, create a few different mailing lists you can use in different situations — for example, one for social media votes, one for questions, one for sharing your work, and so on. Keep them in a safe place. By saving your mailing lists, you can make sure this is a job you only need to do once.
Secondly, for each group email you need to send, develop one template you can use. Even though you might end up sending the template email to a large number of people, aim to make it sound personal. This can usually be done just by greeting the intended recipient by name and addressing them as an individual rather than a group. Put plainly: you don’t want your template email to read like a template email.
Remember that templates are one person, one use. If you cut and paste the same email to ask for social media votes, for example, the process is going to seem uncomfortably mechanical.
Source : Skelliewag
| 2.5 |
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Shawal
