How to drive traffic to your WordPress.com blog

In response to a recent comment I received from Alex Hwang at http://thetechadvisors.wordpress.com, here’s my suggestions on increasing traffic on your www.wordpress.com blog.  While I don’t claim to be an expert in this area, I have seen some recent success with these techniques on this blog.  There are many more ideas to drive traffic, but they require a personal install of WordPress.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Submit sitemap to Google – WordPress XML Sitemaps Submittal to Google
2. Have a Twitter, Facebook, and Delicious accounts
3. Distribute your posts to various social sites:
   • Focus on Twitter, Facebook, and Delicious or other sites within your industry
   • Check out My Social Network Publishing Model
   • Brand your microblog post with your site name – see www.twitterfeed.com
4. Create a Twitter direct mail auto response to new followers
   • Check out Twitter Follower Auto-Responding Email Message
   • Brand your blog in the direct message
5. Fully utilize the WordPress SEO fields
6. Become part of the community – Post comments on other sites with references to your blog. They will in turn post on your blog
7. Check your site out at www.googleRankings.com Website Diagnostics Panel
8. Cross site linking is key – find other sites that will link to your site and return the favor
9. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.
10. Review your sites stats to see what posts are driving traffic, and focus on those topics
11. Blog on a consistent periodic basis so your readers know when to check back
    1. Create a “Rap up” post reviewing the post from the past week or month depending on your post frequency
12. Promote your posts on Digg and StumpleUpon. Unfortunately these are manual processes
13. Make sure you tag your posts!
14. Create great content
    • Ensure you blog has a purpose
    • Create hyper links to other sites within your posts
    • Link Building Tricks for Search Engine Optimization SEO
    • Use graphics/photos – pay attention to meta tags (Alt tag, description, link url) .
    • Ask your readers for their opinions and or suggestions
    • Focus on hot topics and keywords
    • Post titles should contain relevant keywords. Use catchy headlines

Remember, driving traffic takes time. If your blog is new, don’t expect lots of traffic.  Stick to it and keep blogging. If your content is good, readers will find you following the steps above.

If you have other suggestoins, I like to hear from you.

- Steve Hart

Tags: Blog, driving traffic, increasing traffic, Page views, SEO, wordpress blog