Image credit: webtreats

Some of the most effective methods for increasing page views on your blog are also some of the easiest to implement. Here are three quick changes you can make that will send more traffic to your blog.

1. Add Sharing Buttons to Your Blog Posts

In the age of social media, it sounds obvious to recommend putting sharing buttons on your blog. However, I have visited many professional blogs that either don’t feature their sharing buttons prominently or simply don’t have them at all! Including sharing buttons on your blog posts is important. When a current reader chooses to share your content on their social profiles, they will likely send new traffic to your blog.

It’s important not to clutter your blog with too many options. A basic rule of user experience is that keeping options to a minimum prevents people from feeling overwhelmed. My philosophy for sharing buttons is what I call The Core Four rule. Choose the four social networks your readers are most likely to be active on and provide buttons for each of them on every post.

In most cases, Tweet and Facebook Like buttons should be included. These are the largest and most recognizable social networks, and there’s a strong possibility that your current readers are active on them. It may surprise you that Google+ is becoming increasingly important to include as search results are now influenced by social media sharing.

The last slot should be tailored directly to your audience. If you’re audience is primarily women, you would likely consider Pinterest. If it’s professionals, you may want to include LinkedIn.

Do some research. Survey your readers to find out how they use social media. Then implement your findings on your blog.

ShareThis, AddThis, and Sharebar are all great tools for adding sharing buttons to your site.

2. Prominently Feature your RSS Feed

Your blog likely has an RSS feed whether you are aware of it or not.

An RSS feed allows your readers to read your posts in the RSS or feed reader of their choice without having to visit your blog each day. The second someone leaves your blog, they may never come back. However, if you can convince them to subscribe to your RSS feed, you can then put your content in front of them each time you post something new. If they are engaged enough to read your content daily, they will likely visit your site more often and participate in comments and sharing.

One common method used to increase engagement on blogs is to feature only snippets of your content in the RSS feed so that your subscribers must click through to your site to read the full post. ‘Experts’ will argue whether or not this is a good strategy. Do what you feel is best for your blog and your readers.

Do a Google search on how to find your feed url. Add a large icon to your sidebar that links to it, and let people subscribe to your content.

3. Link to Other Posts on Your Blog

Interlinking is one of the easiest ways to get readers to be more active on your blog. Interlinking means to link to from one post on your blog to another. Not only will this generate more page views (and therefore more revenue when you choose to monetize), but it provides and easy way for readers to find content that may be relevant to them.

If you have content that is related to a post your are currently writing, include links to those posts, either in sentence form or as a list at the bottom. Try to do this every time you post something new.

There are many WordPress plugins and widgets that automate this functionality.

Test, Measure, and Refine

There are dozens of tactics to increase engagement on your blog. These three common approaches are proven methods. As with any change, test different implementations of these tactics, measure the results and refine your strategy.

Image credit: tonx

So you’ve got a blog. It’s really coming along – the content is solid, you’re gaining readers and you’re inspired to write on a schedule. Maybe you’ve even invested a little money and purchased a premium WordPress theme. However, you have blog envy. Everyone’s blog posts look better than yours. They have amazing pictures! A quick iStockPhoto search will reveal that buying pictures for every blog post can be an expensive habit.

Where To Find Free Images

Flickr offers one of the best-kept secrets for free blog post images. Let me introduce you to Creative Commons-licensed content. Here’s how it works:

A photographer decides, “Hey, I don’t mind if someone uses my pictures online. In fact, that will give me exposure!” Meanwhile, you are beating your head against your desk because you just ran out of iStockPhoto credits and you can’t take a picture of Mt. Everest from your backyard. The photographer uploads his picture to Flickr and assigns a Creative Commons License to it. There are several types of licenses. For this example, he chooses to give you the right to use his picture, as long as you don’t modify it, use it to make money, and you give him credit (this is a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, in case you are wondering). Perfect! That’s just what you need. So you find just size you need, put it on your blog, and provide a link back to the picture with the photographer’s name in the caption.

How to Search Creative Commons-Licensed Images

Type http://www.flickr.com in your browser address bar. Using the search box on the homepage, enter the subject matter you need for your blog post, and hit ‘Enter’ or ‘Return’ on your keyboard. On the results page, click ‘Advanced Search’ as seen highlighted in blue below:

When the advanced search page loads, scroll down until you see the options for Creative Commons-licensed content (it’s the last option before the Search button). Select ‘Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content.’ Then scroll down and hit ‘Search.’ Here’s what the options will look like:

The next set of results will show you images that may be used by anyone, as long as the borrower abides by specific guidelines that the creator has assigned. On the results page, click the image you would like to use. After the image loads on the following page, scan the right sidebar for the licensing information. It will look like this:

Click the icons to view a page that tells you exactly what you are free to do with the image, and under what conditions.

It’s That Easy

Boom. Now you have a resource for free images that you won’t be sued for using.

Where else do you find images for your blog posts?