Traffic is the lifeblood of any successful blog, and without it, your blog is doomed to fail. Which is why it’s smart to develop a traffic generation plan that ensures your blog receives a steady supply of new readers over time. This guide provides several tips for getting all of the traffic you’ll need to run a successful blog.

Content Is Key

Before you begin your quest of winning new readers and increasing your traffic, it`s important to offer a good reason for them to visit your blog in the first place. This means having quality content that engages, entertains, and educates your reader. If your content isn’t up to par, then your new readers won’t be hanging around for too long – which means your efforts will be wasted.

Ensure your content delivers exceptional value. If you’re struggling to generate traffic, then creating quality content is the first thing to focus on. What’s more, good content makes every other aspect of blog promotion easier and more successful in the long run.

Take advantage of the various mediums available when you’re creating new content. Use images, videos, infographics – and try a variety of content styles, such as instructional guides, personal stories, and more. It’s wise to learn which content types your audience appreciates the most, and aim to give them that.

Next, make sure you’re posting quality content consistently. Frequent new posts will keep readers coming back for more, and a fresh blog will be favoured by search engines, too.

Share Your Content

Ideally, you should create content that’s likely to be shared by your readers. Creating this content will require in-depth research into your market, and a deep understanding of the content that goes viral with your industry.

A good place to start is Topsy, just type in your keyword and you’ll see the most popular tweet from that keyword. It will give you a good indication as to what is popular and trending in your industry.

Next, make it easy to share your content. Add multiple sharing options, so your readers can share your content on Google +, Twitter, StumbleUpon, or Pinterest – all with a simple click. AddThis is a great wordpress plugin that will allow you to get this setup quickly and easily.

Create A Community

Creating social interaction on your blog is an excellent way to keep readers coming back and grow your traffic over time. Begin by replying to each comment personally and starting conversation. Also, try to encourage feedback by asking questions of your reader at the end of yours posts.

Make sure you’re reading and commenting on other people’s blogs, too. This social interaction will give you valuable backlinks, additional referral traffic, and it can even be the start of a fruitful collaboration with another blogger. In general, leaving insightful comments on other people’s blogs is a good way to create useful connections that will bring further benefits over time.

I would suggest picking just 5-10 blogs in your niche and concentrate on these. Think of it like you are in a huge conference. If you went around meeting everyone in the conference you’d probably not strike up any real relationships. Most of it would be meet and greet and small talk. Now lets pretend instead of trying to meet everyone, you concentrated on just 5 people in the conference. You’d build a better relationship with these people. You’d get to share more idea’s, jokes and find more about each other and how perhaps you can help each other.

Perform SEO

Getting the search engines on your side is a boon for any blogger. While it can be risky to rely solely on search engine traffic, there’s no denying the huge impact it can have when it’s working in your favour.

Get your on-page SEO established,  listed below is a good framework to build upon:

• Correct keyword research.
• Appropriate keyword density.
• Relevant page titles.
• Keyword optimized tags.
• Internal linking.

Be wary of triggering any SEO optimization penalties. SEO best practices constantly change so be sure to research any on page change you make before hand.

Also, consider using long-tail keywords in your post titles. Rankings for these terms will often come quicker than you might expect, and it’s an easy way to gain a trickle of new readers each day. As you can see in the graph above, the competition for ranking on longer keyphrases is generally lower than the more generic, shorter keyphrases.

Realize that you need to think long-term when it comes to traffic generation for your blog. While overnight success happens, it’s extremely rare. Most successful bloggers have spent years working on their craft before finding any great success, so you need to be in it for the long haul.

However, if you remain consistent and you’re willing to work hard, there’s no reason why you can’t grow your own high traffic blog, and enjoy the success you’ve worked to achieve.

For more tips on how to rank in search engines and gain traffic more effectively download my free ebook here.