Boost your Traffic with These WordPress Tips

Guest post by Sandra De Freitas

Are you using WordPress to power your blogsite? Most entrepreneurs are and for good reason. WordPress has been around since 2003 and has almost 30,000 free plugins available to customize your site and user experience.

WordPress has become so popular because of it’s flexibility, and huge community of developers who offer brilliant themes and plugins, to make your WordPress blogsite express your brand and brilliance.

This makes our jobs as entrepreneurs easier as we tend to get really creative and we think big. We need a platform that allows us to be creative and put our big plans into action.

Unfortunately I have met many entrepreneurs who thought if they built it people will come. They are skipping the key thing that will get the results (newsletter subscribers, followers, revenue etc) they desire, that is traffic. If a blogsite exists and no one is around to visit it, does it truly exist? If it fell, would it make a sound?

[Tweet “If a blogsite exists and no one is around to visit it, does it truly exist? ~ @TechCoach @DeniseWakeman”]

3 WordPress Tips to Boost Your Traffic

There are three keys to boosting your traffic:

1. Attracting traffic
2. Asking your visitors to spread the word
3. Keeping your visitors around longer

Attracting Traffic

Attracting traffic means letting people know you exist and where they can find you. If you had a dinner party you would invite people and give them directions to your house, the same ideas apply to attracting traffic. To attract traffic you will want to have fresh and valuable content on your site.

The easiest way to do this is to blog often. You want to give your visitors and potential visitors reasons to come to your site and come back to your site. Then use strategies such as SEO, Social Media Marketing, Google Hangouts and Newsletter Marketing to tell people you have new content on your site. WordPress makes it easy for you to do this by making many SEO plugins available to you such as the popular “All in one SEO Pack” .

[pullquote position=”right”]You have your choice of over 600 plugins to help you promote your blog posts via social media.[/pullquote] One of my favorites is “Sociable”. Even though it has not been updated in a while it still works fabulously on my site. Once you have it set up you can click on one of the icons to share it on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social networks.

If you are into Google Hangouts like Denise is, you can find a couple of plugins to help you create and promote your Hangouts, like the “Yakadanda Google+ Hangout Events” plugin.

Spread the Word

Next you will want to ask your existing traffic to spread the word about your blog posts by sharing them with their social networks. If they found your article, video or audio useful, chances are they know others who will also benefit from it.

This is where the above mentioned social media plugins will come in handy. Most plugins allow you to place the social media icons at the end of your post, the beginning or on the left side of your blog post. Be sure to ask readers at the end of your article to share your article with their networks or individuals they think will enjoy it. If you want something you have to ask for it right? Right!

Help Your Visitors Stick Around

You worked really hard to get traffic to your site. How long do you want them to stay on your site? Chances are you answered “I want them to stay on my site for as long as possible”, and that is the correct answer! Most people assume that their visitors are sticking around for hours but when they look at their stats they see that they are spending less than two minutes poking around.

We can keep your visitors on your site for longer periods of time if we give them reasons to stay on your site. Do you currently point out to your visitors that you have other blog posts they may be interested in reading? When a visitor is reading a blog post, you can suggest a list of blog posts that are related to the post they are currently reading.

There is a great plugin called “Efficient Related Posts”, that will pull in the most popular posts that are related to the blog post they are currently reading. You may have seen this on other sites, where you are reading a blog post on let’s say time management, and at the end of the blog post they suggest you read a few more blog posts on the topic of time management.

I love this strategy because you already know what the reader is interested in, why not give them more of what they want? The longer they spend on your site reading great content the more eager they will be to spread the word about you and your blogsite.

So now you know how to boost your traffic by attracting traffic, ask your visitors to help you spread the word and keep your existing visitors around longer. With these simple tips you will be sure to see a difference in your statistics.

Which one tip will you implement today?

Join me and Sandra De Freitas on Friday, February 28 at 10:00 am Pacific Time on a new episode of Adventures in Visibility. 

But wait, there’s more! Sandra is giving away a copy of her book to one lucky reader of this post. Enter the contest below!
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