Increase Page Views for Your Blog Posts

Here are some hints to increase the amount of hits that your blog posts will get:

1. SEO optimization. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, you want to optimize the chances that your post will be picked up by search engines. Pick a few key words to highlight your post. Work them into the title and first paragraph. But do not use the words to many, or your post will be tossed out by the search crawler. Just a few times is sufficient.

2. Determine whether the topic is even being searched on the web. Just because you have your post SEO'd, it does not mean you will get hits if people are not interested in the topic. Google Trends is a good place to see if your topic is being searched for. You can also try different combinations of searches and compare them. Perhaps you can find a search with higher statistics.

3. Promotion. This is either through you or others. Use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites to advantage. Stumble Upon also works quite well.

4. How active are you are as a write?. If you continually write articles, readers may be interested in reading some of your older material and may check it out.

5. Back Links from popular sites. This ties in to SEO. If your content is good, you may get lucky and start to earn backlinks from popular sites. Some higher ranked sites will take payment for backlinks. Would I pay for backlinks? Uh, no. But that is up to you!

There probably is a few other reasons that folks with more experience than I could bring up. Feel free to drop them in the comments.

Pay attention to these and you will start to see more and more traffic to your site.

Holiday Drop in Traffic

Holiday traffic is something we all have to deal with when want to go out and get Christmas gifts for our loved ones. Cars cutting each other off, angry words and shaking fists. Ahh, the joys of Christmas.

Traffic is also something we have to deal with as Christmas approaches if we want to make money on the Internet. As Christmas approaches there is a definite drop in Internet traffic. This is because the online shopping is done. No time ship, so instead of online shopping, most people are hitting the pavement to actual stores to do their shopping to fill in any last minute Christmas requests.

If you are suddenly noticing a drop in traffic to your site, take it in stride. It is most likely because most people are not shopping online and are using the search engines much less. This is especially true during the evening hours. I have observed a modest drop in traffic to my sites over the last week. This was quite different from the weekend after Thanksgiving when my traffic stats went sky high (well at least for me!)

I suspect that traffic will pick up once again when the holidays are over.

There are a couple of things you can do to get around the traffic loss during the holidays. If you still have the writing bug, go ahead and write away! If you focus on current news events to drive traffic to your site, then the hits will certainly take a hit. It may not be worth your time to try to catch the latest Google Trends.

Look to write about content that will last through the ages. Focus on writing what is called "Evergreen" topics. These are things that are popular throughout the year. You can hone your craft by taking the time to learn about something new and focus in on that topic.