Our best tips for getting more people to your site

“How do I get people to visit my site?”

We get this question so often that we’re sharing our top marketing tips with you today in our Traffic Academy. Best part? It’s 100% free.

Here are just a few of the tips you’ll learn:

• How your personal network can help you score boatloads of free traffic from social networks.
• How to get your site listed in the major search engines, including Google.
• How to start and grow a community for your site.

Topic: Traffic

    Do you want to get more traffic and views to your blog? If so, you’re in the right place.

Getting More Views and Traffic

Tell people in your social networks about your new post.

Promote your posts across your social networks with WordPress.com’s Publicizefeature, which will automatically tell your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and more as soon as you publish a new post. You can find more ideas in our Social Tools support pages.

Make your content visible to search engines.

If you want your post to be indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing, set your blog privacy settings to make your blog visible to all search engines. The internet is full of theories as to how you can raise your post’s visibility in search rankings: none will contest that original, high-quality content with a few well-chosen tags is the best way to get started.

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Bug your real-life friends.

Encourage friends and family to read your blog: send them reminder emails when you update and talk to them about it when you meet in person. Better still, encourage them to sign up for updates using the Follow Blog Widget. Having a small audience of people you care about is better than having a million visitors and not knowing any of them.

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Use appropriate tags.

Attach appropriate categories and tags to your posts so people can find them in the WordPress.com Reader. But be careful not to use too many tags — less than 15 tags (or categories or both) is a good number. The more tags you use, the less likely your post will be featured in the Reader. Read more on tagging.

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Read and comment on other blogs.

Check out Discover to find great blogs and websites on your interests. Then, subscribe to these sites and get to know them a bit. When you read a post that moves you in some way, leave a comment. Read more on comments and creating online conversation

Blogging is all about engaging with others and interacting in online discussions. When you link to a blog post, the blogger will likely find your blog through their stats, Technorati, or a pingback, and come to see what you had to say. They may even subscribe to your site and leave a comment, as we suggested you do above!Link to other blogs.

If you’ve written a post with someone in mind, drop them a short email with a link to it.Let people know about your posts.

NOTE: This approach works if used very sparingly, maybe once a month per blogger. You don’t want to annoy anyone or seem like a spammer.

Blogs that have more frequent and regular posting schedules tend to develop an audience quicker. If you need inspiration, check out resources like these how-tos on editorial calendars or serial posts.Blog regularly.

Web applications like StumbleUpon can bring visitors to your posts with rates starting at $.10 per visit. If you’ve published a great post and you want some feedback from visitors, this can be a good way to get the ball rolling. Companies looking for broader distribution of their posts, including getting their content in front of journalists, may want to try services from companies such as PR Newswire. Read more on paying for traffic.Pay for traffic to your site.