How I Put My Site On Steroids has proved to be one of my most popular posts, but it’s been three years since I wrote it. In today’s exercise for Problogger’s 31DBBB project, we were urged to update an old post. I decided to go back and see whether the steps I outlined then still held true.
Article Marketing
The first step I took back in 2006 was to use article marketing, writing articles with a link back to my site. That worked well and still does. In fact, I am still getting traffic from articles I wrote back 2005. I no longer write reviews for consumer sites, but if I were going to do it, I’d probably write those reviews on Amazon as their profile features are now much better.
Leveraging Your Blog
The second step was to get a blog and submit my site to directories. That still works too, although I would argue that getting a social media presence is far more important. If I were writing this post from scratch, I’d suggest people get a Twitter account, Delicious account and Facebook profile or page (depending on whether they are promoting themselves as individuals or businesses).
Navigation
Making your site easy to navigate is still a valid way to boost traffic, so yes, having a search box and sitemap are crucial. Once your blog has a bit of content, it’s useful to use a layout that makes it easy for people to see content in different categories. I also like having a tag cloud, because it tells me both what your blog focuses on and how to find it easily. There are also dozens of plugins which highlight your content such as related and popular posts plugins – use them. (For example on this blog, I use related posts, random posts, featured posts and a tag cloud.)
Social Media
One piece of advice which I didn’t give in the original post was to participate in the social media. When you connect with others on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Stumbleupon and through blog comments, you encourage them to visit your site. The more you reach out, the more you get back. And that’s a great way to build both a network and site traffic.
I know these steps work, because my traffic has increased more than tenfold since I wrote the original post. What else would you use to put your site traffic on steroids?
The post How I Put My Site On Steroids – Again appeared first on Get Paid to Write Online.
