6 Prerequisites To A High Traffic Blog

When we speak of driving more traffic to your blog, most of the tips and tricks available online speak of what you need to do outside your blog to drive more traffic to it. For instance, these tips talk about posting on forums, commenting on other blogs, getting other blogs to link to your post and a long list of networking strategies. The fact is, this is only half the job.

To drive more traffic to your blog, you need to do a couple of things on your blog. I compiled a list of the prerequisites to a high traffic blog… the things your blog needs before it starts receiving heavy traffic.

1. Valuable And Quality Content

This is probably the Nth time you’ve read about quality or valuable content as a requirement to a successful and high traffic blog. Well, it’s indeed true and the logic is pretty simple.

When you write a quality post, other people link to it, bookmark it and share it to their network. The viral effect of sharing your post will then boost your blog traffic. I think the better question should be: what is quality content? Darren of Problogger wrote a post to help us understand what it takes to have a quality content.

2. Fresh And Timely Content

If you noticed, blogs that receive high traffic are those that are updated everyday. Take a look at the Technorati Top 100 Blogs and Technorati Most Favorited Blogs, these blogs are updated regularly with about 3-10 posts.

You need to understand that a blog receiving high traffic does not only rely on new visitors but they also receive a huge amount of repeat visits. And to keep your visitors from coming back day after day, you need to give them something new to read on your blog.

Alternatively, instead of writing time-bound content, you can write timeless content. Steve Pavlina in his post on Building A High Traffic Website tells us to create timeless blog content.

In terms of traffic building, timeless content connects with people at a deeper level than time-bound content.  The latter is meant to be forgotten, while the former is meant to be remembered.  We forget yesterday’s news, but we remember those things that have meaning to us.  So I strive to write about meanings instead of happenings.

3. Make Your Blog “Sociable”

You probably know that Social Networks are powerful sources of traffic for your blog. Websites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz, Reddit, Delicious etc. can drive tons of traffic to your blog and crash your server. To take advantage of the traffic they can bring to your blog, install social bookmarks to each of your post. Because most people online are lazy, making sure that bookmarks are readily available to them will increase your chance of getting their vote.

I recently made a post about the 5 Essential Elements Of A Blog where bookmarks and comment systems are included on the list. Check the post for more details.

4. Search Engine Optimized Blog

A big deal in optimizing your blog for search engines is to build more backlinks to your blog. But not being able to make your blog search-engine-friendly could off set your efforts to build more inbound links. You see, your search engine optimization efforts should start first with your blog itself. By this I mean, optimizing your title tags (h1, h2, h3), using targeted keywords, optimizing your blog’s CSS, PHP etc. If you are not knowledgeable of CSS and PHP, you can use search engine optimized Wordpress themes like Thesis Wordpress Theme.

To those who are new to blogging and search engine optimization, take a look at my previous post on tips for SEO to access free information on basic SEO. The post will show some fantastic resources that will help you understand search engine optimization.

5. Option To Subscribe

Another prerequisite to a high traffic blog is to offer your readers the option to subscribe to your feed. Or a much better approach is to build your own mailing list. You need these because they serve as a reminder to your previous readers that you’ve posted new contents to your blog. To read the entirety of your post (in case you only publish a partial feed) or to leave their comments, your feed subscriber will have to visit your blog, which then result to an increase in your blog traffic.

Jeff Schuman, one of the many contributing writers of Ezine Articles shares his tips on how you can use RSS feed more effectively to boost your blog traffic.

6. Use Update Services

If you’ve submitted your blog to feed agregators, make sure you ping them everytime you publish a new post. For Wordpress users, you can tweak your setting to automatically ping Technorati, Google, Feed Agregators etc. that you have posted new contents. Previously, I made a post on the step-by-step process of setting update services to work on your blog.

What else am I missing? Share them in the comments. Thanks.

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