learn wordpress now – how to blog!

Archive for the ‘Getting Traffic’ Category

When you first create a blog and start posting to the world it can be very frustrating that nobody ever visits it!

Because there are now billions of websites and blogs competing for attention it can be quite a challenge to make your blog visible. To get your blog noticed by your ideal visitor, first you have to get it noticed by the search engines.

The leading driver of web traffic is the search engine Google and so you need to please Google. The other major search engines, Yahoo and Bing, tend to copy Google so if you please one you please them all.

Now, actually only a few people in the world (and they are the high powered Google executives) really know how Google’s search engine decides to rate and rank blogs but, for the rest of us, here are a few pointers that definitely help to get your blog noticed.

It all really starts with keywords.  When you first have an idea for a blog you need to visualise your target audience and to ask yourself the question ‘what does my ideal visitor type into Google search that would ideally lead them to my blog?’ For example, if your blog was all about ice skating techniques, your ideal visitor might type in the keyword ‘how do i learn to skate’.  If that’s the sort of person you want to attract to your blog you want to set up your blog like this:

• Your domain name should be descriptive and should convey to Google just what your blog is about. In our example, ‘iceskatingtechniques.com’ would be a good and better domain than ‘iceskating.com’, which is probably too general and would have more competition.
• Your blog title should be explicit and should contain your keyword. This is the text that appears when the search results are displayed and so it should be phrased to attract the visitor to click on to the home page of your blog. ‘Ice Skating Techniques – Learn How To Skate Like A Star!’ would be a good title.
• You should have regular blog posts with titles like ‘How Do I Learn To Skate?’ and ‘Learn Skating’ and ‘Advanced Ice Skating Tips’ – all the phrases that a rookie skater (and your ideal visitor) would type into Google search.

That’s just the start. Then you’ve got to get inbound links to your blog. If other websites or blogs contain a link to your blog with the keywords ‘How Do I Learn To Skate?’ and ‘Learn Skating’ and ‘Advanced Ice Skating Tips’, pointing to your appropriate post, then Google treats that as a recommendation and begins to take notice.

I’ll deal with the question of getting inbound links next week. Stay tuned!

One of the biggest problems bloggers have is attracting traffic to their blogs.

If you have a WordPress blog, did you know that there are certain ways you can configure it to make it appear much more attractive to the search engines? And if the search engines like the look of your blog they are much more likely to send you targetted traffic.

Knowing how to do this has, until recently, been one of the best-kept secrets of the blogging world. Only a few expert bloggers have really known how to optimize a WordPress blog and they have usually kept the information under wraps…

Until now! Jeff Johnson of Underground Training Lab has spent a lot of time and money developing a plugin that optimizes your blog in all the areas it needs to attract maximum traffic. And the good news is he’s giving it away.

To download the plugin, click here. You’ll only have to give your email address – there’s nothing to pay, no upsells, no hassle.

I’ve used this plugin myself and I can genuinely recommend it!

One of the problems we all face is that any blog (or website) has to compete with literally billions of others to attract the attention of the target visitors.

Let’s assume that you’ve got your blog all set up with sparkling content and a good, appropriate theme and that you’re posting regularly. Feedback from what visitors you have had suggests that your blog is well received.

Fine – but how do you get more of those visitors?

The basic answer is that you have to put your blog in the path of the traffic.

And to do this you have to master some fundamental skills that all successful bloggers need:

• Market research
• Keyword research
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Marketing strategies
• Publicity
• … and more

In other words, not only do you have to be a good blogger, you have to become a good and knowledgeable marketer.

You have to put your blog in the path of the traffic.

The quick way to do this is to buy traffic; the slow way is SEO to get free traffic.

If you are just starting out, be warned that this is a big topic.  It’s far too big to go into in this blog post. There are a number of gurus and membership courses that offer expertise in this area and the prices range from free to tens of thousands of dollars.

I will tell you the course I used to get myself up to speed on this topic: John Reese’s Traffic Secrets course.

This isn’t the only course on the market and it isn’t the cheapest (nor the most expensive) but it is very comprehensive and I can thoroughly recommend it.

If you are serious about getting traffic to your blog or website you have to be serious at learning how to do it. Go for it!