In today’s world of freelancing it has become harder to find effective marketing techniques. We all know that it is an absolute necessity to have a blog, and knowing this fact many freelancers are now blogging. This leaves you with the predicament: How do you ensure your blog does better than the rest?

Below are eight easy-to-follow points which will help increase traffic to your blog.

1. Have an RSS feed

A simple way of ensuring that you can have a pool of people who will be regularly reading your blog is to offer your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed. The number of RSS subscribers can illustrate the success of your blog, although this may not be the most thorough check, it is a good indication.

There are several websites which offer the service of creating a “trackable” RSS feed, Feedburner being just one of them. Whichever service you wish to choose, do bear in mind that this will help in maintaining a reader base which can eventually help market your services or product.



2. Create a mailing list

Following on the idea of maintaining and increasing your reader base, create a mailing list. The readers of your blog will sign up, but usually will need an incentive to do so. There are seas of methods of getting people to sign up. Incentives can include allowing access to a free e-book or creating a discount on your services/premium e-book.

I would suggest emailing your mailing list on a bi-weekly basis. How many times have you given your email address to someone who began spamming your inbox? I know of freelancers who will send out an email every day and many people are irritated by this. Even weekly can be overwhelming for some, but if you feel that you must send it weekly then you should.

3. Link your own website to your blog

Vice versa is also true. The whole idea behind blogging is to market your services. It is fairly obvious, to those of us who have an IQ above that of a hamster, that you ought to link your blog to your website, however, many freelancers will make the mistake of not linking their website to their blog.

Place yourself in the shoes of your potential client. Before buying the product/service you may be worried if the freelancer is reliable, so when they can see a blog and read articles authored by you, they may become more comfortable in hiring you or buying from you.

4. Guest Writers

Try to get an expert in your field to write for you. Usually their name will help bring in traffic and people will be interested in hearing what they have to say. A greater advantage than this, however, is if they link your blog on their blog or website.

Experts are usually busy and may not have the time to write for you. You may want to consider interviewing them and publishing the interview on your blog. This may be the next best thing, but still try to get a link back from them.

5. Reviews

Review a product or service and in return get a link on their website. Often companies will pay for reviews, however you can choose to wave this for a link, or negotiate both!

6. Social media

When you have written a blog post, submit these articles to social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon etc. Try to create a following on these sites, so that every time you tweet, or update your Facebook status, you will get an adequate response of people clicking to read your article.

7. SEO

When you write an article, don’t focus on cramming your title or article text with keywords just to target the search engines. This will spoil your article as you will end up writing gibberish. A proper way of doing this would be to write on relevant, interesting topics. By writing on relevant topics, you will be able to hit the search engines without alienating your real, human readers.

8. Have an opinion

While blogging we begin to think that we must be fair to all opinions and therefore not express our own opinions. The opposite, however, will help you far more.

Creating a means of dialogue on your site will cause people to express their opinions and have a healthy debate. You are more likely to have visitors on your blog when they have the means to express their beliefs.

Do be careful to respect the opinions of others, this does not mean not expressing your own views.

Final Word

The greatest thing which will increase traffic to your blog is dedication to it. Constantly writing articles will eventually generate massive exposure to your blog through search engines and direct traffic. Do not be hasty and expect tons of traffic in the first few months of your blog, grow it slowly and steadily and you’ll soon be able to reap the benefits.

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