Traffic – is what drive as a blog. Irrespective of why you have started blogging, your blog can only be successful if you know how to promote it and Promotion in turn means traffic and that too, a lot of it.

How can your drive traffic to your blogs or, for that matter your websites?

Blogging is an art that you learn with experience and as you mature in blogging you will start to see new and improved ways of generating traffic to your blogs.

As you start to blog one of the easiest way to get traffic to your blog is by increasing its presence on the blogosphere. In order for your blogs to start appearing in the search engines, you will have to have a good amount of quality links pointing to your blogs. This is called as link-building.

But how will you get other blogs to point to your blog?

Why will some already established blog want to put a link to your blog on their blog?

This is quite difficult if your blog is relatively new in the blogosphere. But you can achieve this objective by commenting.

Now just don’t jump to start out with commenting on all the established blogs out there. This will not solve the purpose.

Wondering why?

This is because most of the blogs out there have a “nofollow” in any link that is placed in the comments section. They do this to prevent spams. A “nofollow” in the links mean that the spiders that crawl these blogs will not recognize your links in the comment section as a link to your blog and will not reach your blog from this link.

So what is the solution to this?

Commenthunt:- The solution is with “Commenthunt”. Commenthunt is a service that helps you find all the “dofollow” links that are there in the blogosphere. Just enter a keyword in the search box and commenthunt uses the service from Google and returns results for all the “dofollow” blogs.

Once you have this information all your need to do is pick the ones that have a very good page rank – even pagerank 3 and 4 is a good enough credibility. Then start commenting on these blogs. But ensure that you put relevant and valuable comments in them otherwise there is a possibility that the author of the blog might delete your comment considering it to be a spam.

Signature:- Create a good signature that you can use and link it to your primary blog. Take care that you link your signature to the best post in your blog, so that your readers get glued to your content in their first visit itself. We can discuss the constituents of a good siganture in another post in detail.

Read the post:- Ensure that your have read the post in detail and also a few good comments in the blog post before you start commenting. Also make sure that reference a few of these comments that you have read, in your comments so that it looks like a strong and valuable conversation.

There are other techniques as well that could help your build links to your post and in turn drive huge amounts of traffic.

What is your way of getting links to your blogs and websites?

Don’t forget to mention your opinion in the comments.

Photograph courtesy Ali Taylor

I am sure, Twitter would not be a jargon for anybody. It is a household interest these days. Everyone from Barack Obama to my gardener is a part of Twitter. Even if they don’t tweet everyday, they still are a part of the revolution called as “Twitter”.

Are you still unaware of what Twitter is? Haven’t heard of it yet!!

For people who do not know what “Twitter” is let me explain it again -

Twitter is a micro-blogging service, where you get to send text messages called as tweets as a response to the question, “What are you doing?” and create a social network by inviting your friends and colleagues to be a part of it.

For more about Twitter – read this post of mine here.

Is Twitter a tool for business?

There was a report that I read somewhere that said, that the search in Twitter was even more powerful that Google. Try it out at http://search.twitter.com, in case you wish to try it. So Twitter is not just a social networking site, but a powerful search engine as well. But how will you use it for your business promotions?

Twitter as a list-builder (promotional tool):-

Twitter is a place where you will find a lot of people who are looking for information and services. Such people are on the lookout to connect with others who can provide them with that information or, service. Since it is not difficult to find like-minded people and people who can provide them with what they are looking for, it is very easy to create a huge list of followers.

Such a followers list is a huge asset. It is a list waiting to be harnessed. If you know what to tweet and how to tweet, then it would not at all be difficult to promote a product you have, thus finding a few buyers in the process.

Twitter as an idea-generator:-

There are thousands and thousands of people whom you can follow on Twitter. These people send out numerous tweets on things that they know or, they wish to know, things that they have and they wish to acquire, things that they have learnt and wish to learn and numerous other things. If you keep a tab on the tweets in your group you are sure to find quite a few ideas, that could trigger a new business thought for you. It might even be something that you can use to improve your business.. Twitter as a tool to generate ideas has worked wonders. I had developed a niche website on one such idea that I came across in Twitter tweets and this website earns me about $300.00 in adsense revenue per month.

Twitter as a feedback mechanism:-

Every business has to have a feedback mechanism. Customer feedback is the most important thing for a business that has a vision to grow. Customer feedbacks give you a picture of how your products are faring in the market and what are the improvements, if any, that are required. Companies spend thousands of dollars in customer surveys and consumer feedbacks.

Can’t Twitter be used for this? Twitter is a place where people vent their heart out. So, what better place than Twitter to get a feedback for your product?

Twitter as a customer-acquisition tool:-

Do you still have any questions in your mind, if Twitter will be able to help you in customer acquisition?

If you are able to present your product well in front of your customer, (rather, Followers) Twitter can become the best place to get a lot of customers. Throw in a special offer for people on Twitter and you will get many more customers and followers.

There are many more things that Twitter can be helpful in and it is worth exploring. Twitter is still in its childhood stage and is waiting to be harnessed. Businesses that learn these different ways in which Twitter can be used, will be able to grow multiple folds, because of the model of Twitter.

Blog promotion through twitter is very easy. All you need to follow is some basic steps.

You would see me writing a lot on promotional tools and methods. If you have started your blogging journey, then I am sure you would not be surprised to see me doing this. But if you one of them who is yet to start a blog, then I would have a single sentence to answer you. “Watch the television”.

Promotional activities is what gets your product, business. You are here to learn blogging and not just to blog for the heck of doing it, but to earn money. So if you wish to earn money, you need traffic to your blog – good amount of traffic. And this traffic in turn will only come from promotional activities.

I have seen quite a few people following almost everything that they could to promote their blog. It is good especially if your have all the time in the world to do that. If you are like me, with very less free time, then it is wiser to decide on a few good ways of promoting your blog and then consistently following them.

Twitter – It is unlikely that you are not familiar with it. If you are not then take a walk in the park at http://www.twitter.com. In the meantime, do not also forget to register there.

Twitter is a micro blogging website. After you had registered yourselves you would have seen that you are given a small textbox with a 140 word limit asking you, “What are you doing?”. This is the very essence of micro-blogging and Twitter. This 140 word text box is your world to traffic.

Wondering what to write in a 140 word text box. Start off by writing a one liner on the niche topic on which you are planning to start your blog. Did you feel that the 140 word limit was too little? If you felt so, do a bit of editing. After you have done this a couple of times, you would start to feel that 140 words is quite a good amount.

Twitter has a phenomenon called as “following”. This is where you actual traffic will come from. At twitter, you can follow the “tweets” (the twitter terminology for a post at twitter) of like minded people like you by following them. In turn, they will follow you. The more valuable your tweets are the more the followers you get.

How to use the tweet box?

The margin of error between success and failure in very thin and is only 140 words long. Yes, you got it right. Your success with Twitter lies in how meaningful your tweets are.  If your tweet sounds valuable to a follower or, reader they go ahead and re-tweet it thus increasing the reach of the original tweet. These readers and visitors might come to your blog following the link in your tweet. These readers would account for traffic to your blog and as more and more readers keep coming you would start to see the power of Twitter.

So what is the thumb rule to write a good tweet? If you are using an automated Twitter submitter like Twitterfeed, then part of your work is done. All that you need to do is write a catchy and meaningful title for your blog post. Twitterfeed picks up this title as the first few words in the feed. Then you can follow it up with a few words from the inital part of your post. This would in turn mean that the starting few lines of your blog post should also be catchy and meaningful. That’s it. You are done for Twitter.

If you are not using an automated submitter, which I would never recommend you do, you will have to practise writing statements that are punchy like – “The secrets to…”, “I learnt how to..”, “A knowledgebase to learn…”, “Easiest way to learn…” etc. etc. Though some of the above might seem to be a bit boring and repetitive, these can be refined to be used in your tweets. The best way to learn how to tweet is to assume you are one of the readers and think of a few lines that would have caught your attention.

Keep tweeting for some time and gradually you would learn how to tweet.

Don’t forget to follow me at Twitter.

The first sip is always the difficult one. Similarly is the case with getting the first visitor to you blog. My first blog sat there for about 3 months before I could get my first visitor. I had no clue how to get one and I kept writing and writing. Then one day I realized that there was something that I was missing. i was not promoting my blog.

Blog promotion is a big thing today. There are people and consultants out there who do this for a charge. But I often wonder why you would want to hire a consultant or, a third party to promote you blog when it can be done by yourselves, without spending a dime.

With Web 2.0 being the show-stopper these days and networking being the mantra, what else would somebody need to promote their blog. Blog promotion is very easy, if you do it the right way and your first visitor would be at your blog within hours of the start.

It is said that the things that are the most simple are the ones that are most ignored. If you don’t believe in it, then you would start to by the end of this article. Below is 4 simple things that are often ignored, but which could prove to be the best way of promoting your blog:-

1. Email signatures – If you have your blog at your own domain, then you would surely have an email address on the domain. Start using this email address instead of that free email ID that you use. Create a simple signature for yourself, with a simple punchline and a link to your website below your name. Use this signature in all your communications. You might assume that the people you are sending the email to would never visit your site. But the people who receive your emails as forwarded mails, or accidentally happen to read your mails would want to visit your site.
2. Commenting – Surf the internet for blogs that are common to your topic. Leave your comments with a link to your blog (You could even use your signature). Just be careful that your comments are valuable. The objective here is not to get backlinks, but readers. If your comments are valuable enough, the reader of the comment might want to visit your blog.
3. Social Networking – I hated social networking sites and had never had an account on any of them until I realized the fact that they can be very useful in promoting my blog. Create an account with all such networking sites that you know, primarily Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut, Twitter and Gather.
4. Social bookmarking – Don’t confuse social bookmarking sites with networking sites. Bookmarking sites are Stumble Upon, Delicious, Digg etc. Create and account on these bookmarking sites and join communities that are created on a similar topic as that of your blogs.
5. Squidoo – This is the best way to get a lot of traffic to your blogs. I have used Squidoo quite a lot for promoting my blogs and affiliate marketing as well. Create an account with Squidoo. Squidoo is a hub of one-pager websites that are easy to create. I will discuss about Squidoo in detail in one of my next posts because, frankly I don’t think it would be justified in wrapping up everything about Squidoo in one point.

While you do all this to promote your blog, just keep one thing in mind. “Content is the king”. If you are able to give a content of value to someone, your blog would be read. This content of value could be your email with your signature or, your comment on a fellow-bloggers’ blog with a link to your website. And most importantly bear in mind that valuable content can be found on the internet itself at places where normally people don’t tread.

(Photograph by karynsig used under Creative Common License)

Traffic exchanges can be a very good way of getting traffic to your blogs. Check this out here.