Tips to increase blog traffic

Does your blog lacking traffics? Here are simple tips you can use to significantly increase your traffic. Some of the tips in the list are either based on my own experience or researched from the 'Net. Ready? Here we go:

1. Participate in conversations – What I mean by conversation could be as simple as a comment to a mailing list. For starters, comment on other’s blog and leave your URL in the comment. You can also participate in discussion forums. Try to join the Google Blogger group or Bloggerforum, and under every post you made, leave your blog URL there. This technique is proven to be very effective to kick-start your traffic.
2. Write good contents – I know that this is an *ancient* trick, but it still works, believe me. By writing many good stuffs, people WILL come back to read more. 3-5 posts per week is ideal to grab traffics, but that depends on what you are writing about. If you are reviewing automobiles, 1 post per week is enough. But if you are blogging about the local news in your state, I would recommend 5-7 posts per week, as news is always updated fast.
3. Reply to reader’s comments – When a reader leaves a comment at one of your post, MAKE SURE THAT YOU REPLY IT! This is very important to build trust between you and your readers. They wouldn’t want their comments to be ignored. And besides, people will come back to your blog to see if the comment have been answered or not. If not, the chances are that they wouldn’t want to come back for a second time.
4. Shorten your feeds – This little tip, although frequently underestimated, could give quite a boost to your traffic. How it works is actually very simple. When you write a new post, be it only two or three paragraphs, the readers who followed you will only see the ‘excerpt’ of it, and to read it fully they will have to visit your blog. Simple right? For Blogger users just go to Dashboard > Settings > Site Feeds, and choose ‘Short’ in ‘Allow Blog Feeds’.
5. Allow readers to bookmark you – Put a button that could let your readers to Digg you, or to save your blog in their Delicious bookmark. Buttons like ShareThis works well with blogs. People will be able to see you and hopefully visit it. See my other tutorial here to create your own ShareThis button.

Well, that’s all for now folks. Hopefully this 5 tips could give a boost to your traffic, but one thing for sure: it won’t happen overnight. You must work hard for it. I’ll post more of these soon, so stay tuned!