SETTING THE STAGE FOR YOUR BLOG

Regardless of the stage of your product or service, getting your landing page is the most important first step – so good job on doing the right thing. But you’re probably thinking, “now what?!” This post will help you attract more visitors to your page. 
Most of our customers follow the promotion lifecycle of create landing page > blog about product > build out full website. 

Before we start diving in to ways of getting more traffic, we should get a couple things straight about search: 

• Search engines are tools designed to provide search results (sites) that they have determined are the best answer/response to the user’s search.
• Winning at the search game is all about ranking for specific keywords. And the sites that rank for these keywords have proven to the search engines that their site is the most relevant result for a given search.
• The search game is always changing, so be prepared to be in this for the long-haul – increasing traffic is an ongoing effort.

As you get ready to begin blogging as much your fingers can type, you need to complete some necessary groundwork: determining your keywords. 
Use Google’s keyword tool to find keywords and key phrases with the largest search volume related to your product or service.
Be sure to select ‘exact’ (instead of broad). This will display monthly search volume locally, or in your country, and internationally. This tool will be your best friend when beginning to create your blogging plan.

Get-more-traffic Phase 1: Create your blogging plan

Blogging is one of the best ways to begin promoting your product or service, and driving people to your landing page. It goes without saying that you need to create quality content. Generate topics around your keywords, and mention the keyword in the title of the post (H1 tag), and about three times in the body of the text. 
It goes without saying you should create quality content. Give people a reason to want and need your information – make it useful, interesting, and worth sharing, saving, and linking to. Write about your product or industry, but also mix it up with some interesting formats. These ideas can help you provide a little variety – 

• How-to articles. Reading about your perspective is interesting, but how-to articles help readers do something, which can often lead to sharing.
• Free giveaway, such as a white paper or eBook. ‘Free’ has such a nice ring to it, and it’s great to provide your readers with a thorough resource—and it can be much more pleasant than reading small pieces online.
• Infographics. I think everyone is having an infographic phase right now… it’s a pleasant respite from all the text we consume.
• Interviews. People are interesting, stories are interesting. And stories about people—and their particular pain points and how your product can address them—is far more interesting than reading over-polished marketing copy.
• Contests. Don’t forget that contests and giveaways are very ‘sticky’ when it comes to buzz-building.

Aim to post a minimum of one post each week, but work on increasing that if your schedule allows time to produce and promote more than one post. 
And once your blog is up and running, use a service like Ping-o-Matic, which alerts the search engines that new content is posted and needs to be indexed. 

Get-more-traffic Phase 2: Promote your content!

Launching a business, planning and developing a site. Blogging when you can. It’s a busy time for you. But simply blogging is not enough! Here are some top ways to promote your site… because site promotion leads to increased traffic. 

• Social bookmarking submission. Delicious is a social bookmarking site that allows users to keep their bookmarks in one location. Countless people use Delicious to uncover great content. Submit your articles and content, and tag it up with your relevant keywords.

A note on submissions: In years past, it was common practice for a site owner to blast their articles to any taker on the Internet and see their traffic soar. These days, with the notion of maintaining a reputable link neighborhood, it’s wise to be choosy.

• Connect with communities. LinkedIn and Quora allow you to answer questions from users, which doubles as a way to engage with potential customers…and get them flooding over to your site. Quora allows you to connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts, which can speed up your following.
• Leverage social media. Social signals are impacting search like never before, so you can’t afford not to be active in social media. Interact, share, discuss, post, discuss some more. It’s worth your time.
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+
• LinkedIn
• Get listed in relevant directories. Do some research about the directories that are relevant to your industry or product and create a profile. Remember to aim for trusted, relevant directories.

For more detail on online marketing and promotion, see our post on increasing traffic through link-building.
These steps will help you increase your traffic while you’re in the stages of product or site development. Once you do have a full website, the basics discussed here still hold true, but there will be a lot more detail to cover to make sure your site is optimized for your keywords. Learn how to optimize your landing pages for search engines.