I browse the blogosphere for entrepreneurship, small business and make money online blog posts, and I am surprised to learn that many top notch blogs are not well-visited.

Of course, I can only estimate about the number of visits – I usually use Alexa Rank to learn whether a blog is well-visited, well-reached and well-searched. For example, Noobpreneur.com’s Alexa Rank fluctuates around 110,000 – 145,000 – That’s roughly about 1000 visits or more a day.

It is unfortunate to see such quality business blogs lack visitors (I can’t tell you names, of course, for ethical reason.) Lack of visitors means less effectiveness in getting the messages across to readers and less blogs’ revenue for those blogs that are monetized.

So, yes, content quality is often not related to how many people will visit your blog – “Just build it and they will come” won’t work in blogs. You need to implement some basic yet effective SEO, link building, and traffic generation strategies to help you

I’m not an expert in search engine optimization (SEO) that can offer you a tip to rank #1 on search engine. However, I understand enough the ways to bring my sites and blogs go (way) below 1,000,000 in Alexa Rank (which means about 50 or more visits per day.)

5 tips to expose your small business better

As long as you can write quality content, I can offer you these 5 ‘secrets’ that can increase your small business blog’s traffic and visibility – Guaranteed (Yeah – I guess I suppose to write an ebook on this and sell it to make some money out of it :D)

Just kidding – These are actually no secret – only for Noobpreneur.com readers, though ;) The tips are easy to implement by a non-techie small business blogger. Without further ado, here are the tips:

1. Use catchy title and keywords on your article title
   ‘List’ type of blog post often works wonder (e.g. this blog post title: 5 easy ways to…) Use the targeted keywords on the title (e.g. this blog post title: ‘small business’ and ‘blog traffic’)
2. Write blog posts for human first, search engine second
   Of course, you should write great article to attract people to read yours. But you also need to write for the search engines – Use terms and keywords related to your title (e.g. this blog post content: small business blog, etc.) Note: Don’t over do and over stuff keywords.
3. Tag your blog post well
   You should tag your blog post well. Highly related tags will help search engines find your blog posts.
4. Be narcissistic: Submit your own content to social bookmarking sites
   Tweet your blog post on Twitter; Post your own blog post on LinkedIn; Submit your own article to Digg; Do this each time you write a new blog post (don’t worry – Unless you write 5 articles a day, bookmark your own articles on daily basis won’t make you a spammer.)

   I recommend you to submit to at least 5 social bookmarking sites, especially the business-related bookmarking sites. Hint: LinkedIn and BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange bring the most traffic to Noobpreneur.com.

   Also, submit your blog post to ‘dofollow’ social bookmarking sites (dofollow means pass some value to help you rank better on search engines, in this case, Google) – My recommendations: Diigo and BlinkList. Please visit SocialMarker.com for a good list of social bookmarking sites.

   Doing these, hopefully, will help you to rank well on search result pages, thus bringing your blog more traffic, automatically (e.g. Noobpreneur.com’s 2009 Top 10 Small Business Ideas ranks #1 for the term “small business idea 2009″ on Google; it is bringing us tens of thousands visits this year, effortless.)

5. Use images inside your blog post
   Images make your blog posts more pleasant to read; Images also help visitors to ‘visualise’ your article. Another benefit in term of search engine – An image gives your blog post page more keywords to tag.

   This is important: Save the image using a keyword-optimised file name (e.g. this blog image: small-business-blogging.jpg) – Why? So your images can be searched in search engines’ image search (i.e. images.google.com), and visitors will likely to be exposed with your blog post’s content, instead of just the images.

   If you take the images from Flickr, SXC.hu or other similar image sites, make sure you link back to the source and leave a comment on the photo page with a link to your blog post – This way, you can get visitors from the image sites.

Doing the above right, I guarantee you will see a significant increase in your blog traffic, and hopefully can give you more opportunities to get the message across and ‘convert’ them – Whether you sell products/services or any other endeavours you have.

If you need any help, just comment on this blog post and I’ll help you with what I know. Good luck on increasing your small business blog traffic!

Ivan Widjaya
On increasing small business blog traffic
Image by Marinela.

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