How to Improve Blog Traffic
Posted by pumpupyourbookpromotion on April 13, 2008
I am constantly writing about the benefits of blogging to promote your books, so creating traffic for that blog should be top priority for any author wishing to sell their books. ProBlogger had a wonderful guest post from Courtney Tuttle about improving blog traffic and in only 30 minutes.
I especially liked her first suggestion…
1. Create link clusters within your blog
A link cluster is a group of links that you can point at a post or page to improve its search engine ranking. Let’s say you have a post that’s ranked for ’stupid business ideas’. Edit 10 of your other posts to create links (using ’stupid business ideas’ as the anchor text) to the ’stupid business ideas’ post and you will surely move up in Google for that keyword. This process can be implemented in about 10 minutes and can be used for any keyword your site ranks for or is trying to rank for.
I’m going to have to reread this so that I understand what to do but it does sound like an excellent idea.
I also liked this suggestion:
6. Stop writing about yourself. Start solving problems
Surfers become readers when a blog provides something that is wanted. A casual visitor may read your blog because they find training, answers to problems, entertainment, or something else they want. This more than likely will mean that they won’t want to read about you, your girlfriend, your cats, your kids, or your catastrophes (unless you have a personal blog that your friends read). Discontinuing the off-topic posts will help you to develop more repeat traffic and takes exactly 0 minutes to implement.
If that doesn’t make sense! I have been preaching about this for a long time. Save those kind of blog posts for a personal blog. However, I do like some intimacy involved between author and reader but just don’t make it a habitual thing.
But the point Courtney is making is this. People are in a hurry. If they land on your blog and you’re talking about your pet doggie, they’re apt to run off. But..if you were talking about writing tips, promoting tips, what have you…they just might stay a little longer. People want to learn. They want to find out secrets. Give that to them and keep giving that to them and you could end up with skyrocketing stats!
Thank you, ProBlogger, and thank you, Courtney!
