65 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

This guest post is by Satrap of BlogStash.com.

What is the best way to drive traffic to my site? What’s the fastest way to generate traffic to my site? What’s…?

We all want to know the best way to drive the greatest amount of traffic to our sites. However, the truth is that there is no best or fastest way to drive traffic! What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. Just because I manage to get 500 visitors a day from an article I submitted to article directories doesn’t mean you can get that much traffic doing the same thing.

Of course, there are some traffic generation methods that produce better results than others. But again, it all depends on you and your situation. Let’s take article marketing as an example. Article marketing is one of the oldest and best ways to generate traffic. But the success of your article marketing campaign depends on many different things, like the number of articles you write, the number of article directories you submit to, the quality of your articles, how many articles a day you submit, and more.

My advice would be to pick a few methods from the 65 I’ve listed below, and start implementing them. Test them for yourself. Depending on your skills, you might find a method that would work wonders for you.

Don’t just follow what everybody else says. I’m not saying, “Don’t listen to experienced people who are successful in generating traffic to their site.” By all means, listen to them and do take their advice—but experiment to find out for yourself which traffic generation methods work best for you and your situation.

With that said, here are 65 simple and (mostly) free ways to generate traffic to your site.

1. Turn your articles and blog posts into PDFs using free PDF converters like OpenOffice. Then submit your PDFs to document sharing sites like Scribd and DocStoc.
2. Write truly informative and useful articles related to your niche, and publish them on WikiPedia.
3. Hold a contest and give prizes to your readers. Use social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to let people know about the contest. A good contest with good prizes will attract a lot of people.
4. Build a wiki page for your blog. To ensure your page doesn’t get deleted, create an article that is educational, informational, and not self-promoting.
5. Write list posts like the one you are reading. Readers love posts like “10 ways to make money” or “6 ways to drive traffic to your blog”. List posts are amongst the most popular kinds of posts, and people tend to share list posts with others more often than other posts.
6. Make flyers with a catchy title and a description of your blog, and post them on bulletin boards in the entrance to supermarkets and other community buildings.
7. Post frequently, but don’t sacrifice quantity for quality. Both search engines and visitors like to see fresh, quality content. The more content you have, the more chances you have for ranking for variety of keywords, which will mean more organic traffic for your blog.
8. Make a lens (or more) using Squidoo and in it, place a few links back to your blog.
9. Submit your blog to directories relevant to your niche, like InsLink.com (an SEO/webmaster directory).
10. Make it easy for non-technical readers to link to your blog or share your links with other people by making a “How to link to us” page. Here, give readers easy instructions on how to link to your blog with your keywords as anchor text.
11. Submit your blog to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Or simply use AdMe.com to submit your site to over 25 search engines for free.
12. Use sites like Odiogo to turn your blog into a podcast, then submit your podcast to podcast websites.
13. Answer questions related to your niche on YahooAnswers and other Q & A sites. Include a link to your blog in the resource box.
14. Submit your blog to social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.
15. Write and submit articles to article directories like EzineArticles and ArticleDashboard.
16. Turn your articles to videos using free video creation services like Animoto, and submit them to video directories such as YouTube and DailyMotion.
17. Build a Facebook fan page for your blog.
18. Make use of plugins like Tell-a-Friend to let your readers quickly share your posts with their friends and family vie email.
19. Use Hi5 to build a page for your blog and create a community around it.
20. Don’t clutter your blog with too many pictures, ads, and so on. Keep it clean and easy to navigate. This will help both search engines and visitors to navigate around your blog easily and quickly.
21. Join BlogEngage to submit your blog and create a community around it.
22. Ping your blog posts using free ping services such as Pingler and Pingoat.
23. Create a hub about your blog on HubPages.
24. Register with few good niche-related forums and use your signature to place links pointing to your blog. Participate in discussions and contribute as much as you can.
25. Make it easy for your readers to share your posts by installing social bookmarking plugins like SocialMarker and Digg Buttons.
26. Readers like to read other people’s comments, especially those who responded to their comments. So, take advantage of that by using a plug-in like Comment Notifier to automatically let your readers know of new comments posted on your blog.
27. Make your blog more search engine friendly by using SEO plug-ins such as Platinum SEO Pack.
28. Target long-tail keywords with low competition and try to rank for them. Such keywords are easier to rank for in search engines and give you much more targeted traffic.
29. Make a MySpace page for your blog.
30. Make business cards with your blog info on them, hand them to friends and family, and ask them to pass them on. Mall parking lots are good place to pass your cards around. In some states you can even put your business card on windshields. You can get up to 250 free business cards using sites like VistaPrint (although you do have to pay $5 shipping).
31. Submit your blog to the free directories like DMOZ (hard to get into, but well worth the effort!).
32. Write a good press release, or hire a professional to do it for you (you can get a pretty decent press release written for you for $5 on Fiverr.com), and submit them to free press release distribution sites like PR.com.
33. Write creative and attention-grabbing ads about your blog, and publish them on free classified ads sites such as CraigsList and UsFreeAds.
34. Controversial posts attract visitors. Write a controversial post. Be creative and bold, but be careful not to cross the boundaries.
35. Ask an expert or a trusted, well-known person in your niche for an interview. Then post the entire interview on your blog, either as a text post or as a video.
36. Leave quality comments on blogs that are related to your niche. Make sure your comments add value to the blog. Don’t just spam-comment and hope for the best. It never works, and your links will get deleted. Worst of all, you might get blacklisted from the site. If you leave a useful comment, people will be more likely to visit your blog.
37. Use free banner-making tools like BannerFans to make an interesting banner for your blog. Then find other bloggers in your niche and exchange banners with them.
38. Exchange links with other blogs in your niche. Don’t go overboard with this technique, or exchange links with each and every blog you find—be selective and make sure the context for your link is appropriate. Most people use their main keyword as the anchor text for their link, that’s good for SEO. But, if you want to get more traffic from those links, instead use attention-grabbing text as your anchor text. Don’t use “Make Money Online” for your link text—people are used to seeing those links all over the web. Instead use something like “10 ways to make $10 in 10 minutes.”
39. If you find interesting posts on other blogs, write a post about them and link to them. The other bloggers will notice and might do the same for you.
40. Find good blogs in your niche that accept guest posts. You can either search manually or make it easy for yourself by registering for free with MyBlogGuest, which matches guest bloggers with blogs that accept guest posts. Write and submit your best articles to get the maximum exposure. Don’t just submit the article and leave. Make sure you follow up and respond to comments and questions that readers of those blogs ask.
41. Submit your site to review sites that write reviews on other websites and blogs, like CoolSiteOfTheDay.
42. Submit your blog to BlogCatalog.
43. People love free stuff, so give out freebies that are related to your niche. If you are in “online money making” niche, a free ebook that teaches people who to make money on Twitter might make an appropriate freebie.
44. Write a page on 43things.com about your blog and what you want to do with it.
45. Use your keywords in the title of your posts. Having your keyword in the title makes it easier for you to rank for that keyword, thus bringing you more organic traffic.
46. Use your blog’s name as your username on forums, social networking sites, and other places like YahooAnswers. People are curious by nature, so they may check out your blog out of curiosity and if you have good compelling content, they may become your loyal readers.
47. Make a bumper sticker with your blog address on it, and place it on your car’s bumper. You can even ask your friends and family to do the same for you!
48. Make a Twitter profile for your blog and tweet each and every post you publish on your blog.
49. Register with EntreCard and start dropping your card on other blogs. You will be amazed how much traffic you can get from EntreCard.
50. Register with ComLUV.com and download their plugin.Then use the Global CommentLuv Search to find blogs related to your niche and comment on them. It will return up to ten (recent) posts that will be sent back when you comment on a CommentLuv enabled site. Most are dofollow blogs, and you will get dofollow links back to your most recent posts. This is good for link building and getting some traffic.
51. Make a free ebook with a link back to your site in it, and submit it to free ebook sites like GetFreeEbooks.com.
52. Buy .info domains with long-tail keywords in them and use a redirect to send the traffic they receive to your main site.
53. Rent a mailing list and send high-quality content with a link back to your site to all the subscribers. Take care with this technique so that you’re not blacklisted as a spammer, though. Find a reputable list broker—or, if in doubt, why not start your own?
54. Post a classified ad on eBayClassified with a link to your site.
55. When you eat out, leave a good tip along with a business card with your site info on it.
56. Create a short report with resell rights and and include your links in the report. Give it to people for free: those people can sell the report to others as their own, so long as they don’t remove your links. The results of this technique will surprise you.
57. Come up with a really crazy but buzz-worthy post and submit it to NowPublic.com (Previously known as Truemors). If it’s good enough, it might just go viral!
58. Go to YouTube, find popular videos related to your niche and start commenting on those videos with a link back to your blog. Youtube videos get thousands of views, and since most people are sociable creatures, they will read the comments no matter how far down the list your comment is.
59. Create a page (personal or business) at LookUpPage.com. You can add as many links to your blog as you like. Write a short “about” post about yourself or your blog, and make sure to link to your Twitter and other social networking sites as well. After creating the page, bookmark it using SocialMarker and ping it with Pingler (or any other tools you like).
60. Register with Visible.me for free, and add links and information about your blog. Its a great way to build your brand and get a few backlinks from a high-PR (6) dofollow site.
61. Submit your RSS feed to RSS aggregators. Here, I don’t mean just your blog’s RSS feed: grab the RSS url of every site you have a link on (example: if you submit articles to ezine.com, you will have your own “author RSS” URL), and go to RssMix.com. It will let you make a custom RSS feed. Take that and submit it to RSS directories and aggregators. This will put your RSS feed on steroids—and will give you many more backlinks.
62. Make a few (yard) signs with your blog’s URL and a good title related to your niche, and place them on highway exit ramps, at busy intersections, and so on. Make sure you abide by the laws in your own state or country if you try this approach.
63. Put an ad in your local newspaper. If you live in a small town, it may not be very expensive to have an ad on your local newspaper—or on TV or radio, for that matter.
64. Order some T-shirts with your blog URL and title printed on them and give them away. People will check out your URL!
65. This is just for fun, so enjoy it! Make a big and I mean big sandal (or flip flop) with your blog’s URL engraved on the bottom, go to a busy beach, and start walking all over the sand! Leave your mark for others to see.

These methods will keep you busy for a while. But perhaps the most important tip I can give you is to be patient. Getting traffic to a blog takes time and a lot of work. You cannot expect to have hundreds of visitors after a few weeks, or months of starting your blog. But, if you are a dedicated person who’s willing to put enough time and effort into it, you can’t help but attract more visitors to your blog over time.

Which of these ideas do you like? What has or hasn’t worked for you? Share your experiences with us in the comments.

Satrap writes at BlogStash.com about different work from home opportunities. Visit BlogStash to learn real ways to make money online.

The picture is courtesy of Biff Tannen.