In this tutorial I’m going to share with you my personal experience of how I managed to go from an average of 94 visitors per day to an average of 630 visitors per day and still growing. I divided the tutorial in 5 easy ways for you to follow.

Due to the lack of free time I had, and still have, I did the bare minimum to increase my website’s exposure. Such methods like advertising your website, guest posting, performing surveys and studies, link trading and many other didn’t apply to me. By applying the Pareto principle I managed to get the most done by doing as little as possible. In this tutorial, I’m explaining the minimum actions that I did.

In the table above you can see a screenshot of my website’s stats since January 2009. It may have taken me 10 months to increase my visitors by a factor of 6,7 but one thing that every successful online guru will tell you is that you need to be patient and consistent when you’re building your online presence.

There’s no overnight success, especially if you’re no one and you’re starting from zero.

1. Start a blog

Nowadays, starting a blog is a great way to connect with your readers, increase your website visitors and get your name out in the blogosphere. That’s why many companies have started a blog and they regularly post on it.

With time, search engines will index your blog content. As a result, more and more visitors will be approach your website after searching about topics that you’ve covered in your blog.

When you’ve finally decided that you want to start a blog, next step is to decide your niche. This is very important as it will help you create a name for yourself and be seen as an expert in that niche. For example Darren Rowse is known as a successful blogger blogging on Problogger.

Make sure that your blog is well designed, easy to use and navigate (add a search function), accessible (validate your site) and that you post frequently on it.

And last, don’t start a blog just for the sake of it! People will notice! Write passionately and post great content!

Read more:

What is a Blog?
Create a Blog for Free in 4 Easy Steps
How to Create a Blog
Blogging Tips for Beginners
18 Lessons I’ve Learned about Blogging
How to get traffic for your blog
How to Make Money From Your Blog
10 Big Benefits Of A Busy Business Blog
10 Great Strategic Benefits of Blogging
14 Types of Stories You Can Tell On Your Blog

2. Content is king, or is it?

Deliver high quality content on your blog. Make your content easy to understand and minimize grammatical or spelling errors. By writing high quality posts, people and bloggers will link to your story, resulting in your post and blog to be read by even more people. Based on my experience, it usually creates a “snowball” effect where people read my post and if it’s an interesting one, they go and talk about it. Other people listen and now then they come to my blog to read the post and after, they go and talk about it and so on.

But still, there are tons of great blogs with awesome content but they don’t get the deserved attention and nobody reads them.

That’s because you have to make sure that your content has solid foundations where to sit on. Things like attractive web design, valid and accessible code, involving social media, fast website loading times, good SEO (explained later on), big readership (created over time) matter and can help your content market itself easier.

Mack Collier writes great about this topic here.

Read More:

Ten Tips for writing a blog post
How to design your posts to guarantee they get read
How to Write a Blog Post That’s Stickier than Velcro
How To Get Past The Blank Page By Creating Urgency
9 Things to Do To Make Sure Your Next Blog Post is Read by More than Your Mom
How to Write a Successful Blog
Content is King, but Linking is Queen

3. SEO

If you don’t know what it is, read here.  Although many disagree, for me this is one of the best methods I managed to increase my visitors. How? By improving my search engine rankings. As you can see from the table below (click to view full size), more than 46% of my visitors come from search engines. That’s a lot of traffic!

So, how do you improve your search engine rankings?

Make sure you have relevant page titles on all your pages. First insert the most important keyword and then other details.

Example:
BEFORE: “MySite.com | Web Design" AFTER: “Web Design | MySite.com”

Ensure that you have included a meta description, unique for each page.

Also ensure that you have inserted meta keywords, unique for each page again. Choose your keywords wisely!

UPDATE: Yahoo! stopped supporting meta keywords as well. It’s a fact, meta keywords no longer affect ranking on any search engine (Google, Yahoo!, Bing). Thanks to Frederik for noticing my mistake.

Add alt and title attributes to images.

Write your posts using headings (h1,h2,h3). It helps search engine spiders better understand the content of the blog.

Last but not least, include a sitemap for your website. Sitemaps inform search engine crawlers that their pages are available for crawling.

Read more:

The Meta Description Tag
5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours
Add Alt and Title Attributes to Images
Drupal SEO is Easy
Expert Google SEO Tips & Advice
SEO , Wordpress and Keywords in URL
SEO Primer: Improve Your Business Website’s Ranking
Improve SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
Website Grader
SEO Tools

4. Freebies!

Everyone loves free stuff! So, give it to them! It can be anything: icons, wallpapers, games, software, subscriptions, entertainment, advice, demos and tryouts or even useful information. This is a very powerful way of attracting people. Many companies offer demos of their product to try out. After testing, you decide that like the product but in order to enable the full features, you have to purchase it. So you do. It’s that simple.

Many game companies proceed in the same way, they offer demo releases of their game for you to try and experience the new features and then, after you are convinced of the quality, you purchase their game.

Even on a blog, you come and read meaningful, quality posts, and then you come again or subscribe, if you enjoyed the blog. Where’s your gain? Well apart from the personal satisfaction of having a voice and being heard, if you have an advertisement section you can also earn some income. Many bloggers have quit their job and became full time bloggers.

On this website, I’m offering free tutorials and information on a variety of topics (photography, web design and development, photoshop, 3D and many more), free desktop and iPhone/iPod Touch wallpapers and services (web design and development, retouching etc).

So, start giving something for free today! You’ll see the difference!

Read more:

SEO: How to Promote Your Web Site with Freebies
How I Make Money Blogging

5. Post loads of images

Compare the hits I’m getting from Google Images (which is my nr. 1 link provider) to the hits I’m getting from Google:

I’m ranking nr. 1 in Google Image search on many keywords such as java t-shirt, iphone wallpaper earth, iphone autumn wallpaper, guide to nd grads, london city photography, birmingham photography,  and many many many more!

Adding images is a great way to earn extra traffic! Remember to optimise your alt tag and title tag and don’t overfill them with keywords. Search engines are clever; they match the keywords to the text associated with the image and discard the irrelevant images.

Read more:

Using Post Images to Increase Traffic to Your Site
3 Ways To Increase Traffic With Better Food Photos
Google Image Search Increase Blog Traffic
Using images to increase traffic
Increase Traffic by Choosing the Right Images for your Post

Conclusion

There are certainly a lot more ways to increase your website traffic, but for me, these are the ones that worked best! Here’s a list with some useful resources and more ways to increase traffic, in case you want to do some more reading:

Effective Techniques Increase Website Traffic
20 Easy Ways to Increase Website Traffic
3 Proven Free Methods to Increase Your Website Traffic
How to Go from 1 to 1,000,000 Users (or Readers)
101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
101 Web Marketing Ideas and Tips
8 Reasons Why Lists are Good for Getting Traffic to your Blog
3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic
How to get traffic for your blog
The 7 Deadly Sins of Blogging
Link Building Blog
The 9 Free Things Every Site (or Lens!) Should Do
Is Commenting on Blogs a Smart Traffic Strategy?
Why You Can’t Make Money Blogging
How to Be Interesting
How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254%

I hope you enjoyed this article! If so, share it and don’t forget to subscribe to this blog!

Any questions, add them below in the comments section!

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