Tips for increasing Traffic to your Company Blog

Your company needs a business blog, but how do you get people to visit it? You can use search engine optimization and other tricks to increase Google traffic to your business blog, but don't stop there. Following are 10 ways you can get more people to visit your company's blog.

Remember, more visitors means more potential customers! Turn your blog into a sales tool, and you'll be well-positioned to reach your goals.

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1. Publish High Quality Content

The most important step you can take to increase traffic to your business blog is to publish high quality content. The reason is very simple. If you publish terrible content, it won't matter how many people visit your blog because they'll all click away and never return again. They might even tell people they know about how terrible your content is. That negative impression of your brand and negative word-of-mouth marketing will doom your business blog and your company to failure.

2. Link to Other Great Content from Your Blog Posts

When you link to content on another blog from your company's blog, the other blog's owner or managers will know it. They'll see the incoming link from your blog through their blog trackbacks and their web analytics tool. Getting your blog on the radar screens of other bloggers who have the eyes and ears of your target audience is a great way to start building a relationship with them. Popular bloggers can be very influential with your target audience.

3. Leave Comments on Related Blogs and Forums

Get involved in conversations happening on other blogs and in online forums where your target audience already spends time. Don't self-promote. Instead, add value to the conversation by contributing useful, meaningful information. The audience will get to know you and start to trust you. In time, they'll click through the link in your blog comment or your forum signature to visit your business blog and website to learn more about you, your company, your products, and your services. In other words, they'll be one step closer to making a purchase.

4. Share Your Blog Content Across Social Media

You can use social media to increase traffic to your blog. For example, share links to your useful blog posts on your social media profiles and pages, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. However, your social media streams shouldn't be filled with self-promotional content. For every two self-promotional updates you publish (such as a link to one of your business blog posts), be sure to publish about eight updates that are not self-promotional. You don't want your social media profiles to look like a compilation of ads or no one will follow you or listen to you.

5. Get Active on Other People's Social Media Profiles, Pages and Groups

Silo marketing does not work online, which means you must spend time actively engaging on other people's social media profiles and pages. For example, find Facebook Pages and LinkedIn Groups that your target audience already spends time on and join the conversations happening there. Don't forget to keep self-promotion to a bare minimum.

6. Include Your Blog's URL Everywhere You Can

Add your business blog's URL to your business cards, email signatures, social media profiles, invoices, promotional items, packaging, and anywhere else you can think of.

7. Syndicate Your Blog Content

You can syndicate your blog content to drive additional traffic to your blog through online and offline syndication services. Explore the options available to you based on your blog's topic, your publishing frequency, your audience, and your goals.

8. Write Guest Blog Posts for Other Authoritative Sites

You can write guest blog posts for other blogs that your target audience reads.

9. Hold a Blog Contest

Blog contests are fun and very useful to drive a burst of traffic to your business blog.

10. Use Search Engine Optmiization Techniques

Of course, this list wouldn't be complete without mentioning search engine optimization.  However, never sacrifice the quality of your content for search engine optimization.