Hello and welcome back!

In part two I’ll cover the best practices for driving traffic to your blog once it’s already been released into the wide world of the interwebs. Don’t forget to check out How to Generate Traffic for a new Blog – Part 1 if you missed it!

So you’ve released your blog and hopefully have a little hype going. You’re ready to bowl them over with your stellar content and beautiful design. But what can you do to drive a little traffic your way so all that effort doesn’t go to waste?

Post Release

1) Engage in your community

This is the time to let people know about your blog. You should have, by this point, dumped some serious hours into the blog already, so be proud!

Let the world know!

After all, anything you put on the web should be ready for the public at large. Cause that’s where the sprawling digital masses reside.

Here’s what you should be doing to appropriately engage in your online community:

• Blog commenting – There should be a thousand blogs relevant to your own. Try at first to focus on those that wouldn’t be competing with you, and including honest conversation and thoughts.

  The idea here isn’t to get a comment through, but to engage in real dialogue. Add something of value and people might just decide to check you out.

• Guest Posts – Guest posting is a great way to establish yourself as an expert and draw a little attention back to your website. Not to mention your link portfolio a little.
• Social media – Social media is a truly significant way to drive some traffic toward your blog. Make sure you’re using all the various platforms, as they tend to reach different audiences.
• Outreach to other blogs within your niche – make sure to be friendly! Complement their blog, explain who you are, and try and build a personal relationship with them. The more interconnected you can get your blog, the better off you are.

An important note: You should absolutely be including a link to your blog in your email signature. This means anytime you do any emailing of any kind you’re potentially driving traffic to your site. Remember, every visit counts. You should be proud of your blog—let people see your hard work!

2) Respond to all outreach, blog comments, etc. Be active!

The amount of activity on your blog should be readily apparent to any new visitor. Especially in the first couple weeks! So, make sure you’re responding to any comments or emails you get. And make sure to be friendly and personable—you want everyone you talk to referring traffic your way.

3) Interlink between your content and articles.

Obviously do this in a way that is relevant and helpful. Don’t spam your own articles, but if at all possible make sure you’re directing your traffic all the way through your website.

The more you can cycle traffic around, the better your site will rate. Just make sure not to be spammy in your interlinking. In fact, it might be wise to err on the side of caution.

4) Allow guest posts—just make sure they’re relevant and high quality.

Eventually you’ll begin to receive a daily flood of emails. At first it might resemble more of a trickle. But seriously, don’t turn guest writers away. Likely they’ll want a link back to their own site, but that’s just fine and dandy.

Remember, nothing goes on your blog without your approval. So if anyone turns in garbage, vague, or non-interesting blog posts , feel free to turn them away. Be nice about it, but don’t feel as if you have to publish their post. It’s your blog were talking about here, and you want it to stay as high quality as possible.

Quality attracts quality. So, even though at first you might have to be the only one posting, eventually you’ll attract a writer who can pen an article you’ll be proud to host on your blog.

And finally…

5) Keep researching!

Hopefully, this should be natural for you. Continual research is half the battle in driving traffic to your new blog. You need to know what’s working for your blog, and where your traffic is coming from.

Also, keep checking other blogs within your community to see where their traffic comes from.

For other’s blogs, you can use tools like Majestic SEO to do a backlink profile and see who’s linking to them. For your blog, tools like Google Analytics are amazing for breaking down the various avenues of traffic.

A Final Note

Register your website with Google. It gives you all sorts of resources and access to monitor both your websites visibility with Google, how it fares with certain keywords, the amount of traffic you’re receiving and where it’s coming from.

Bonus: Be Creative!

Perhaps the best attribute any blogger can have is creativity. It helps with content generation, brainstorming new marketing ideas, approaching each day with a fresh perspective, etc. etc.

Creativity is invaluable , and no matter how great the advice I give you is, the success of your blog is truly in your hands. So dig deep and learn as much as you can! I hope some of what I said proves helpful and drives a little internet love your way.

Best of luck!

Image Credit:Robinsonsmay