A number of you have asked me how to increase traffic to your blog. Now I will candidly admit that I’m no expert on this, but I can share with confidence the following tips that will help you in this area:

1. Join Twitter, follow the people you know and like to read, and tweet your blog posts. I’m still amazed at how many people who use Facebook, read emails, but who aren’t on Twitter. Twitter is a microblog. If you’re a blogger, you shouldn’t be without it. It’s free to join. You can follow my tweets here.

2. Subscribe to other people’s blogs and make comments. These two go together. If you look at the blue text at the bottom of yesterday’s post, I talked about why you want to subscribe to the blogs you like. Case in point: Yesterday, many of you got free publicity for your blogs to thousands of readers because you read my post and commented. There are many bloggers who regularly read my blog, but they didn’t see my post yesterday. Why? They haven’t subscribed yet. Making comments increases your blog’s visibility because you’re participating in the conversation.

3. Don’t make the mistake of blogging about random things, but find your passions and write about them. People are looking for information, insight, resources, encouragement, and content on a given topic. They are also looking for someone who has passion behind what they write about. For example, people who are interested only in technology or nutrition or politics won’t come to my blog. Because that’s not my specialty. On the other hand, those who are interested in the deeper things of God, or God’s timeless mission and eternal purpose, or the changing shape of evangelicalism frequent my “Beyond Evangelical” blog.

Will Rogers said, “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” So don’t blog about what you’re ignorant about. On the other hand, every Christian is a leader in some sphere, intelligent on and passionate about some topic. So that’s what you want to focus your blog on.

4. Blog from 3 to 7 days a week, one post per day. For new blogs, I recommend posting 5 days a week once per day. Once you hit a nice inflection point, I suggest reducing to 3 – 4 days a week if you want. If you’re a veteran blogger with a large and loyal audience, you can cut back considerably from any of these rhythms. Consistency is the main key, however. So stick to your blog rhythm.

5. Try to keep your posts between 300 and 800 words. Because I use this blog for re-publishing interviews and articles, I don’t always meet this standard. But you will get more readers if you keep your blogs within this word count.

For many, many more tips, check out the Buzz Seminar.

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