Traffic is what a blog revolves around. There are many successful bloggers that have come to understand this. After all, your blog would be useless without having a good amount of traffic. You can increase your blog traffic by using social media websites such as Digg and del.icio.us. Bloggers have learned how to use these types of websites to their advantage which has led them to higher amounts of incoming traffic. This article will help you maximize your blog traffic by using social media websites.

If you use a social media website correctly, you can expect a good amount of high-quality links pointing to your content. There are two types of traffic that can be generated to your blog by utilizing social media websites. The first one is primary traffic, which is simply a high number of traffic that is generated directly from a social media website. The second one is secondary traffic, this is from other websites linking to you. This will send additional traffic to your blog.

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You already have a site + content + really really good content + free stuff to give away and you are blogging daily, still no traffic?
Well here is where i’ll help you get a kick start on your web site, going social!

Using the power of social networks and social networking sites is something that takes up alot of your time and I agree it really does but look at the benefits of it, it gets you alot of targeted traffic, for free!

Here is a list of sites that i have created which are free and easy to use.

Twitter

Jaiku

Pownce

Facebook

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A few weeks ago i covered a visual search engine by google and i knew there would be more who would follow in those footsteps in order to make an “even better” search engine and here we are, ManagedQ has released their visual search which is said to be the visual search engine experiment that actually works.

I ran a few queries at MQ and it seems to have a really great sorting system where it sorts the results of your query by Person, Place and Thing. I think that is what i am looking for mostly at google to find a certain person with a certain thing in a certain place..

Although MQ has its flaws such as query result page titles and various text problems on the main windows of results and the keywords on the place/person/thing area where the keywords are really irrelevant to what’s being talked about.

The following post is Guest Blogged by Scot Hughes of Philosophy Forums.

In business, you must focus on your customers. For webmasters, this generally means your website users. Nonetheless, networking with other webmasters can help you get more customers.

Firstly, making friends with other webmasters will help you get more exposure. The other webmasters may decide to link to you or blog about you. Generally, you want your customers and visitors to tell their friends about your website and your great services. If you make webmaster friends, then they will tell a lot of people when they choose to spread the word about something because they can post about it on their website.

Networking with other webmasters will also open up the opportunity for joint ventures. By joint ventures, I refer to when one or more webmasters work together on a project. By combining their resources, they can usually do something extra great, and it will usually help give both webmasters more exposure. One example of a joint venture is a contest.

Another benefit of networking with other webmasters is that you can share expertise. Other webmasters can give you tips and offer you advice. They might be able to give you a heads up about current events that will affect you.

Maybe best of all, if you have other webmaster friends, you can ask them for reviews. If you have a product or service, you can offer them a free trial in exchange for a review. If you already have a preexisting relationship, they will be more open to making deals such as that. Also, they will be more inclined to put effort into trying your product. Even if you do not have a product, you can have them review your website or a part of your website.

For bloggers, networking with other bloggers is especially important. Other bloggers will likely add you to their blogroll if you build relationship with them. Additionally, bloggers often make a habit of reading blogs and subscribing to RSS feeds. There is a very good chance other bloggers will regularly read your blog if you befriend them. Then they will post on their blog about a post on yours whenever they read something that interests them on your blog. This can be great promotion for your own blog.

In conclusion, if you have a great website or blog and you want to help get it to the next level, I recommend you try networking with other webmasters.

Reader Optimization is another term i use for User Friendly but reader optimization deals with more features that deal with features that benefit the readers rather then the search engines.

Nowadays everyone is trying to please search engines, there’s only a certain limit till you can seo your site but after that its all content and user friendliness that will keep the real visitors coming back again and again for more content and more of your blog.

Design

A good design/user interface is the the first step towards Reader Optimization, real visitors want more then content they want flashy content and eyecandy images that make reading the articles so much more pleasing and interesting, many sites with a great design and less content do 4 times better then a blog with tons of great content but a poor design.

From what I’ve seen only 12% of the blogs get away with an ugly design but since their content is so addictive people keep coming back, Smashing magazine published a post on the 45 most attractive blog designs on the net, take a look and check out the competition.

Navigation

Usually people say that navigation and link placement is a part of UI as well but i think it deserves its own discussion here, navigation and accessibility of content (inner pages) is important for both SEO and RO, read up on 30 usability issues once again by smashing magazine they explain most issues that i was going to discuss here.

SEOMoz has included navigation and in-content mentions to inner pages alot in their premium content and various seo articles, and it is a crucial aspect of web design and development.

Friendly Scripting

Using a good platform on which you can make your site has its own long line of rewards, one thing was painfully obvious to me, never use flash to make websites if you really want users to come and stay never go with flash its laggy and slow for most people and there are several incompability issues in my opinion i know alot of people may argue with me on this but i feel that flash is not the right way to make a profitable and user friendly website, CSS is where i like to stay there are so many awesome sites in css and you can see them showcased here.

Be the man

From a blogger’s view, I’d say the best thing in a blog that keeps users there is the personal touch unique bloggers have in their posts, so be yourself doesn’t matter if you curse alot or you have bad grammar, as long as you make a valid and stern point you’ll be just fine.

This is just a theory but it makes a hell lot to me so i thought i’d post this, now we all know Twitter is a great way to make your own little community of friends whom you can update about yourself at any moment and everyone on your followers list will get that message instantly, so i was thinking why not use twitter to build lists?

Its a simple 2 step process, signup and make your updates private and you are good to go then only the people who follow you (you will have to approve them before they can see your updates) can now see your updates and reply to you as well, so this way if you are building an information based incentive list like “I’ll teach you how to make money! Subscribe to me!” twitter will make it really easy for you to go about promoting yourself and your content, some features are:

• Instantly Update - No hassle (short updates)
• If you have long updates or static pages/blog post based updates then you can link to them
• Instant updates on how money people are still following you and how many left
• Perfectly Safe
• Free to use
• Great Speed
• Twitter has a large community whom you can appeal to
• Instant Traffic

Usually i’ve seen people use emails to get in touch with their subscribers, but twitter seems like such a better idea to me, any ideas on this appreciated!