Huge Traffic Generation :Traffic-Friendly’ Blog Set Up

Part 2 of 5: Exact step-by-step strategies to drive traffic to a brand new blog, starting from scratch, and with little technical knowledge.

It is important for a brand new blog to start getting traffic as soon as possible. Traffic brings more traffic. So the earlier you can start driving traffic to your blog, the better it is. After defining the purpose of your blog, setting your goals for it and modelling after other successful blogs, now it is time to set up your blog so it is ‘traffic-friendly’.

There are a few ways to make your blog traffic-friendly. There are two parts to this.

Part 1: Make it easy for your target market to find out about and come to your blog.
Part 2: Make it easy for them to stay and revisit your blog.

To make it easy for your target market to find out about your new blog, it is important for you to know what your target market wants. Assuming you already know your target market and what they want, then you must set up your blog to provide them with what they want. Write articles that solve their problems, fulfil their needs and desires. The golden rule is: ‘Give them more of what they want.’

On top of writing articles that are beneficial to them, you also need to make your blog search engine friendly by doing some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies. One simple and highly effective SEO strategy is to ensure that your article postings contain the keywords that are highly searched by your target market. For example, if your target market is looking for a cure for back pain, then you need to write articles that contain the keywords ‘cure for back pain’ or ‘back pain cure’ or something along those lines. You need to include the keywords to the following elements to make your blog optimized:

- Title of the article / post
- The first paragraph of your of article / post
- The body of the article (include the keywords a few times in a natural way, but do not overdo it! About 3-6 times in a 500 – 600 words article should be good.)
- The keyword tags
- Webpage meta-data: Webpage title & description

By doing the above, you will make your articles/posts highly optimized for search engines to find them easily. This also means that your target market will find them easily and arrive at your blog.

Once they arrive at your blog, you want them to stay at your blog as long as they can, and return to your blog often. The more they return to your blog, the more loyal they become. And when they are happy with what they find on your blog, they will refer others and drive traffic to your blog. That is why it is important to model after successful blogs because you can learn where they place certain elements of their blogs to make their blogs more ‘sticky’.

Luckily there are plugins that can help you make your blog more reader-friendly and sticky. There are literally thousands of different plugins available for free. You can find most of the plugins at www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins. Here are some of the plugins that will be useful for you:

- Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to prevent spam from getting into your comment box.
- Feedburner FeedSmith: Detects all ways to access your original WordPress RSS feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every subscriber.
- Get Recent Comments: Displays the most recent comments or trackbacks in the sidebar. This encourages interaction with your readers.
- Google XML sitemaps: It will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. This makes your blog search engine friendly.
- Headspace2: Meta-data manager, allowing complete control over meta-data such as keywords/tags, title, description, stylesheets, and other goodies. This makes your blog search engine friendly.
- Optimal title: This makes your blog page search engine friendly.
- Popularity contest: This plugin shows your readers the most popular posts on your blog. This encourages interaction with your readers.
- Related Posts: Shows a list of related posts based on active/passive keyword matches. Encourages readers to stay longer on your blog.
- Sociable: Automatically adds links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites, also making it easy for readers to subscribe to your blog.
- Subscribe to comments: Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Encourages interaction and frequent re-visits.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior: For easy tagging and makes your blog search engine friendly.
- Wordpress.com stats: To keep track of the stats of your blog.

Once you have these plugins in place, they will help to make your blog more reader-friendly. However, ultimately, it is still the content that will bring people in and keep them coming back for more. Imagine arriving to blog that has only one article or a blog that offers nothing useful to you, would you return again? Of course not. So before you start to drive massive traffic to your blog (which I’ll discuss in the next part of this series) you need to ensure that there are some good content in your blog.