Readers and search engines both love regular feed of content. Nothing can be better than daily posting, but if you cannot make it everyday, try to post at least 3 to 4 times a week. I have created a strict posting schedule and now I publish 3 articles per week. Try to publish at least one long in-depth post per week. Regular posting has not only given crawlers a reason to index the content quickly but it has also inflated the archives rapidly resulting in more traffic from organic sources.
2)Written For Audience
Daily posting alone cannot help build traffic on your blog. To make it clearer, let me ask you some simple questions. Why you visit some popular blogs? Do you like the design of the footer? Or you love to watch animated banner ads on that blog? I'm sure almost all of you go there only for one reason. To get answers of your questions and to get vital information related to your domain. So the key is to identify the needs of your audience and serve what they want. This is applicable to almost every business process - "Anticipating Customer Demands And Delivering The Goods Accordingly".
To implement this on your blog you need to do some research. Here's how I did it.
3)Google Analytics - is one of the best sources to identify what kind of content is receiving most traffic. Use the 'Content -> Top Content' report to identify the posts receiving most attention of the visitors. Generate 'Visitors -> Keywords' report to identity the most popular keywords that are sending traffic to your blog. After analyzing these reports, here's what I found out.
Following type of posts was receiving most traffic.
1. Problem-Solver Articles
2. How-To Tutorials
3. Lists of Resources
4. In-Depth Post About A Service/Feature
4)Asking fellow bloggers - in similar niche helped me in getting a clear picture about the type of content that receives most attention on their blogs. The results were almost the same as I got through analysis of Google Analytics reports.
Talking with some of my readers - gave some useful insight about their expectations and the type of content they are expecting from MintBlogger.
5)Updated Old Content
During this period, I updated and refreshed about 54 posts from archives. This whole exercise helped in making posts more readable, stickier and more useful for the readers. While updating these old posts I stressed on 3 important things.
Contextual Cross-Linking - I identified the possibility of cross-linking the posts with relevant anchor texts embedded right in the middle of the content.
Added Relevant Illustrations - This helped me in making the posts more attractive and sticky.
Modified/Added More Content - Some of the posts required updation of text and some of them demanded addition of extra paragraphs.
Here's a comprehensive guide to update and refresh old content on your blog.
6)Updated Archives Page
After analyzing the Google Analytics reports, I saw an alarming trend. Lot of visitors were heading to archives page and exiting immediately without any further navigation. The poor design of archives page was the culprit.
I completely updated the archives page by including yearly/monthly archives, highlighted categories section, list of posts in reverse chronological order and a search box. This drastically reduced the bounce rate. Recently, I've written about creating a high performing archives page.
7)Revamped Sidebar
It is very vital to know which parts of your web page are receiving the most attention and which parts are completely ignored by the visitors. There are some hot click-through zones and some non-performing zones. If you are able to identify them and manage to improve the latter ones, traffic is automatically going to increase.
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