How to Increase Traffic to Your Corporate Blog

Increasing traffic to your corporate blog helps you raise awareness of your company and its products and services. You do have to be committed to your blog to make it successful, though.

Using your company blog in your public relations campaign is not as easy as slapping some copy on your website and hoping people will read your brilliant posts. There are several ways you can increase traffic to your corporate blog and take advantage of the blogging craze so you can attract new customers.

Update Your Blog Frequently
Your company blog is not your personal diary that you can update when it's convenient for you. There's nothing more deadly to any blog than one that hasn't been updated or a post that reads, "It's been a while since I last wrote..."

Set a schedule and stick to it. Not only does this help you blog frequently, your visitors will know when to expect updates on your blog.

Use Your Blog for Info, Not a Sales Tool
You can indirectly promote your company and products through your blog but don't use your blog as a direct sales tool. Keep your content genuine and don't use the space as a blatant advertisement for what you're selling.

Your goal is to build repeat visitors. Using your blog as commercial space will do the opposite. Your blog is a powerful public relations tool, which means it's not a giant billboard for you to spread your advertising message.

Find Your Niche, Don't Generalize
People blogging about their personal lives can be all over the place in their blog. One day they may blog about their favorite TV show and the next day they share their story of how they couldn't decide between a frozen pepperoni pizza or a TV dinner at the grocery store.

That's fine for them. They're not you, a company trying to make a living selling your products.

Do people really want to know what you're up to in your daily life? Unless you're a big name, think Bill Gates or George Clooney, then the answer is going to be no.

Your blog will better serve your potential customers and your business if you use it to blog about topics relevant to your industry. If you own a hardware company, for example, a blog focusing on home improvement projects will help increase traffic. Even following up with your customers about their own home improvement projects through pictures and interviews will also make your blog more popular.

Engage Users
Your blog readers have opinions. You can encourage people to keep coming back and get involved by engaging your users. Type your blog post and then ask readers for their comments on the story or what they think about a certain topic.

Use polls and your message board posts to get people communicating. If you accept reader questions, answer those questions on your blog and open up the floor to others to give their own answers on what the reader has asked.

Spin Searched Subjects Into Relevant Content
What's hot right now? Are these subjects something you can spin into your own blog's topic?

Using our hardware store as an example, hurricane season results in a lot of searches. Spin those searched subjects into content for your blog. Tips on preparing your home for a hurricane or even following a city's rebuilding through your industry's eyes can be excellent content that drives visitors to your site.

Look at the most searched content carefully and be creative when coming up with ideas related to those popular searches. You don't want to go too far overboard but you can spin a lot of subjects you wouldn't normally think to cover. Look to Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz to see what the top search words are this week.

Network
Just as you have to network for your business in your daily life, you also need to network online to increase traffic to your blog. Find other blogs that cover your industry and start participating.

Look for blogs that have a lot of comments and leave comments with your name and blog link. Contact the blogger and see if they would be interested in putting your link on their blog and vice versa. Bloggers who network can increase their traffic and cross-link to each other's posts as well.

RSS Feed
Offer your visitors a way to subscribe via RSS feed to your blog. This means they don't have to remember to come back and check on your blog.

You want to give visitors every opportunity to keep reading. There are a lot of blogs out there and an RSS feed just gives you one more way to make sure your readers don't forget about you.

Search Engine Optimization
It's natural to want to create post headlines and copy that's very creative. A post about how to fix a leaky faucet may make you want to create a headline like, "Down the Drain with that Drip, Drip, Drip in the Night."

A better headline that search engines are going to pick up is, "How to Fix a Leaky Faucet." That's the search term more people are likely to enter rather than the long one that doesn't explain exactly what it is your post will be covering.

To optimize your blog post even further, be sure to use keywords throughout your post. The more descriptive your post is, rather than being over the top creative with wordplay, the better your chances are that your blog post will rank higher in search results.

One last quick tip on search engine optimization for your blog post. When linking to your other posts, use descriptive text as your link and not just "click here." Most people know by now "click here" isn't reader-friendly and it doesn't help your search results at all. However, making your link text descriptive can help optimize your entire post and attract even more readers to your blog.