6 Ways to Increase Blog Traffic

Increase Page Views with these Six Tips

Of course it's great to get new visitors, but it's even better when they stay and read more than just the landing page. Here are six great ways to keep your visitors longer:

1. Create a "Must Reads" Section at the end of your article. One of the most common (and effective) ways to attract current readers to view other sections on your site, is to produce a short list of similar posts that displays at the bottom of each post. Top Web publishers (like About.com) use this feature religiously.


2. Link Within Articles. This works well, both to explain unfamiliar terms and ideas and also to direct readers to more detailed information on a specific topic. As an example, see the next suggestion.


3. Build your Blog Community When readers are engaged, and feel like part of the conversation, they'll feel comfortable and confident to explore your content.


4. Use "Hub" or Compilation Pages. This is a great way to tie your content together into clear and easily readable collections. It is also very likely to be visited more frequently than if the content is broken up over the whole site. For example, if you are a technology consultant who blogs about different online service providers, a great hub could be: "Online Backup Reviews", listing links and a brief description to each individual post.


5. Make Use Of The Sidebar. Make use of the "Category" and "Top Posts" or "Recent Post" options in the sidebar and you'll help readers find similar articles on the same theme, and they'll stay longer, reading more.


6. Use Excerpts On Your Home Page. On blog home pages, you usually have two options.
   • Display the full content of your post on the homepage,
   • Display just an excerpt, which links to the full post.
   What's the difference? Well, if you visitors visit your homepage directly to read your latest post, either format will be fine. But if you have visitors who land on your site, thanks to search engines or a link from another site (which is almost always the case) you'll want to use the excerpt feature. Here's why excerpts are better: If you display the full article and it takes up the whole screen, then what if the article doesn't catch their interest? Then the reader leaves and this potential client is lost. In contrast, the excerpt feature allows visitors to view multiple new posts on one page, hopefully one of which is of interest. Web readers are used to clicking for content, especially if the title/excerpt catches their attention.

It takes much thought to blog successfully - from publishing great content in an engaging format to what you will say. Following these six simple steps will help your readers find and benefit from this content.