As a blogger, there is one thing that you should be focusing your efforts on, and that’s traffic.

Whether you are trying to make money as a blogger, or you simply want to become a well-known blogger, the amount of traffic that your blog receives will determine your success.

With that being said, let’s take a look at three ways you can increase your blog’s traffic and propel your blogging efforts to the next level.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging has become an extremely popular technique following Google’s algorithm updates. It is a very lucrative strategy that has the potential to earn you links and exposure to enhance your bog.

As a guest blogger, you should be trying to write for other blogs based on the following:

• The amount of traffic the blog receives. (The more traffic the blog has, the more people will see your post)
• How similar the target audience of that blog is to your blog. (This will determine how likely the audience are to click on your links and visit your blog. It will also dictate how likely they are to click on your advertisements and affiliate links)
• How much authority the blog has been given by Google. (This will determine how powerful the link is)

Promote Your Content across Social Networks

It has become pretty essential for bloggers to promote their content across social networks if they are to achieve any serious amounts of traffic.

Ideally, you want to be promoting your content simultaneously across twitter, Google+ and through facebook or a facebook fan page.

The more time you put towards developing your social presences will determine how much traffic you acquire through them.

However, it is very easy for bloggers to become overwhelmed with this strategy, and they begin dedicating too much time towards social promotion.

It’s all about balance; you need to learn to limit your time on social networks to ensure you spend enough time developing the core elements of your blog.

It is also worth mentioning that you should be using social sharing communities such as reddit and stumbleupon to achieve additional traffic for your blog posts.

Interlink Your Posts

The final strategy we will be looking at is a tactic to retain your visitors, as oppose to directly increasing your visitors.

Whenever you write a new blog post, you should be linking to at least one of your older blog posts. This will ensure your visitors have lots of new content to look through, and direct the flow of traffic to your older content.

This will also benefit you from an SEO standpoint.

Having links pointing to your older posts will ensure they are getting indexed often, and it will direct the link juice through to them. This will increase the chance of your posts being found in searches in Google and Yahoo.

If you have any questions, or would like to discuss any other techniques for increasing, or retaining blog visitors, please leave a comment below and we will get a discussion going. Also remember to check out my blog where I share more information such as the viral marketing tools I am currently using.