10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Corporate Blog

Like you, I want to drive traffic to my website. Not just trickles: I want stacks and stacks of visitors! And then some.

Here are ten of the things that I do to generate traffic; maybe they can help you as you seek to drive oodles of traffic to your own site:

1. Blog with WordPress

Ever since I made the switch from ExpressionEngine to WordPress and Chris Pearson’s Thesis Theme (no affiliate link) I’ve seen my traffic rise and rise. Sure, it was a bit messy shifting blogging tool, and I lost a year’s worth of posts, but I learned my lesson and now make weekly backups. And I definitely don’t regret changing.

WordPress is an easy blog system to use. There are stacks of plugins to help you do whatever you want with your installation and since the Scribe WP plugin (no affiliate) for optimised copywriting appeared on the scene I’m even happier. I’ve seen my site perform better in Google and that’s brought in traffic. A massive 600 percent more traffic than when I used ExpressionEngine.

If you don’t take my word for it, the Top 100 bloggers can’t be wrong.

2. Blog Often

Google seems to like it if you blog regularly. Of course, people come only back regularly if they like what you’re doing, but I’ve also started seeing my posts turn up higher than they “should” in Google since I increased from 2-3 posts a week compared with 4-5 times.

Although it can be tough to write four or five posts a week I find that a bit of forward thinking, a bit of planning, a bit of inspiration from other people and some occasional hasty scribbling seems to keep things ticking over.

3. Write Better Blog Posts

Of course, readers don’t come back just for the sake of frequent updates. You have to produce quality content. And there’s the rub.

Striving to write great stuff day in day out is incredibly hard. You’ll find that you’ll need to bolster your outlet with guest posts, interviews, off-topic posts, just to keep going. So reach out to your community, encourage others to guest post for you, and if it’s a business blog within a medium-to-large company, encourage your boss to let you team blog. It’s a great way of producing more and better quality posts.

As a single-business blogger you’re really going to have your work cut out so you might think about outsourcing your work to a ghost-blogger to lessen your load. But you have to weight that up against watering down your unique voice.

Personally, I’ve found that the more I push myself to produce better content, the more visitors I get.
My strategy over the last three months has been to ask myself the same question repeatedly each time I sit down to write: “How can I help my target audience?”

This is the best writing tip I’ve been able to give myself. By trying to stick to this, my traffic has increased, I’ve made more connections online and in turn my online content marketing has helped my business grow.

4. Tweet

Don’t underestimate the value of Twitter when it comes to driving traffic to your site.

I’m a regular user of Twitter – click to follow me– and have been for about a year and a half. Over the last three months between 6-8 percent of all daily traffic to my blog has come via Twitter – and the trend is still going up.

Twitter sends visitors to my website when people click on the links I share to my blog (once or twice a day), or other people’s tweets / retweets that link to my site.

The TweetMeme WP Plugin encourages people to tweet my blog posts and it’s one plugin I wouldn’t want to be without. If you haven’t got it on your business blog yet, go get it!

Being active on Twitter, though, isn’t just about promoting links to your website. Engaging with people, having conversations and trying to help people will also drive traffic to your blog.

5. Install Disqus

I’d recommend you seriously consider switching to Disqus.

Although I was happy with WordPress’s comment feature, I felt I wasn’t getting enough reaction to my work so I also switched to Disqus. For some magical reason it seems to encourage others to Tweet or mention my posts of Facebook more than not having it.

Although I’m not 100 percent happy with the look or feel of Disqus, I’m sticking with it because, bottom line, I’ve seen an increase in traffic since installing it.

6. Be Everywhere

I wanted to say “be ubiquitous” but I know that sounds too pretentious. But take it from me, you should be everywhere your customers possibly might hang out online if you want to drive traffic to your corporate blog.

I try and share as much of my work as possible for free on sites like:
Slideshare
YouTube
Scribd

These sites send a regular trickle of traffic everyday.

Warning: It takes time to build up an online presence across a variety of sites and services. It then takes even more time to keep that presence fresh and sparkling.
A good rule of thumb is that once you commit to online content marketing on a number of sharing sites, you have to keep it up.

7. Push Your RSS Feed at People

I know. I know. My blog doesn’t have the most prominent RSS button in the world – primarily because I think they’re so ugly; but a well-placed RSS feed seems to bring people back to my website from what Google Analytics tells me.

Although Tech Crunch might tell you that RSS is dead, it still seems to work for me. On average I get a couple of new subscribers everyday and as the list of subscribers to my feed increases, so do my visitor stats.

I don’t have thousands of subscribers – yet! – but I’m sensible enough to think that it’s got more to do with the quality of the content I’m writing than the size of my button.

8. Bug Friends and Followers on Facebook

Even though I know my “real” friends on Facebook don’t appreciate my Twitter stream being linked to my Facebook account, I make sure that every tweet I write is published on Facebook. I stopped doing this for two months when friends first complained, but very real 1-2 percent decline in daily traffic over those 60 days was enough to persuade me to link them up again. And back came the traffic.

Try linking your RSS feed and Twitter stream to your company Facebook Page and monitor the results.

I also find that appropriate call-outs on Facebook drive traffic back to blogs – especially if an image is attached.

9. Guest post

Yes, it really does work! Having guest posted for a couple of blogs this quarter I can safely say that guest blogging brings in the traffic. Surprisingly, some of them even stick around.

10. Talk About Your Business Blog

Even offline marketing will boost traffic to your blog – if you do it correctly.

I’m lucky in that I get to talk at conferences and universities, as well as when visiting companies and that helps spread the world about my business blog. Word of mouth is very important, and I’ve noticed that it’s actually easier if you have a friendly url: jontusmedia.com (the name of my company) doesn’t go down as smoothly as jonbuscall.com. And adding my name as a mirror for this site worked a lot in helping people connect me with my blog.

At the end of the day, if you put your blog url on your email signature, publicity material, and actually talk about blogging when you can, you’ll send traffic to your site.

What about you?

Of course there are other ways to drive traffic to a business blog. Got any experiences to share ?

Image: FlickrCC