How to direct a good inflow of traffic to your blog?

If you know how to have a shop with a large number of customers pouring in, you know the basic secrets of driving traffic to your blog.

Think why customers throng a particular shop instead of going to other shops. You can easily realize that it is because the shop fulfills all their requirements, the shopkeeper is friendly and co-operative with customers, the shop sells quality goods in reasonable prices etc.

If your blog has all the criteria mentioned above, it will flourish. Your blog should have quality, informative posts and you should be friendly and co-operative to your visitors-i.e. welcoming their suggestions generously, commenting on them and readily implementing good suggestions that any of your visitors may have made.

I have gone through many articles on tips to improve blog traffic, and I would like to put them into two categories: traditional and non-traditional or untraditional. Traditional tips are those which are used by ulmost all beginners in blogging. They include submitting the blog to search engines, blog directories, social networking and classified sites etc. These tips, if implemented, are great sources of traffic. But at the same time they are not the only ways to boost your blog traffic. There are some other tricks also that play an important role to obtain great results. Since they are less known and beginners are generally not aware of them, I have choosen to call them untraditional or non-traditional ones.

Let us discuss the topics that help to boost your blog traffic one by one.

                         One of the most important tips is: be regular in updating your blog. If you have time, then make it a point to write one quality post everyday. The impression your readers will get from it is that you are regular and your product is a quality one. This positive impression leaves a favorable impact on your readers’ mind. They curiously look forward to your next post that, they know, is scheduled to appear on your blog the next day. Of course, they expect yet another quality post from you. Quality posts attract traffic.

You have created your blog to express what you think on a particular topic, right? What if people fail to make out what you are saying? So, ensure that the language you write is simple and easy to understand. Great writers always write simple language.

Till now we have been talking about how your blog posts and the language you use to write them should be. Now let us discuss some technical aspects that are essential to improve your blog traffic.

First, submit your blog to big search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. These search engines help a lot to achieve your dream traffic.

Now take the next step and submit your blog to blog directories. There are many directories on the internet. Some of them are toptofblogs.com, blogcatelog.com and others.

After you have submitted your blog to blog directories, it is time to submit it to social networking sites like myspace.com, facebook.com, orkut, twitter, digg and stumbleupon.

The comes to turn of the submission of your blog to classified sites like Usfreeclassifieds, Hindlist.com, adoos.com etc. You may search many other classified sites on  the internet.

These are the traditional ways to promote your blog. Almost all the beginners use them to garner traffic for their blogs. But there are some other ways also. If you follow them you get wonderful results.

One of these ways is writing articles on ezine.com. All you have to do is submit the longer and more informative articles on your blog to ezine.com. If your article is liked by visitors of ezine.com, it would result in creating flow of a new bunch of visitors to your blog. Your continual contributions in ezine.com may also benefit you with a large inflow of traffic. You have to create a resource box of your own. A resource box is a signature file with one or two sentences which link back to your blog. Someone who likes your article has to publish it including your resource box. You thus get back links and search engine placements.

You can also expose your blog to people by posting your articles in web sites, blogs and forums where your topic will be discussed. This enhances your chance to boost your traffic.

Last but not the least is creation of links. The more blogs have created links to your blog, the more your chances of getting page rank and search engine ratings. It upgrades the quality of your blog.

The list of blog traffic tips does not end here. I will write more about some other great tips in my further post.