Tips for Translators: How to Increase Blog Traffic (I)

Whether you have just recently launched your blog or have been maintaining one for years now, this article provides you with a few tips on how to increase blog traffic. From familiarising yourself with SEO techniques to gaining exposure via social networks, it is our hope that this article will help you generate more website traffic for your blog than you ever imagined.

Living in a world where technology has managed to penetrate virtually every sector of business, the world of freelancing and professional language services are certainly no exception. Having said that, it is absolutely necessary to educate oneself on how to generate website traffic for your blog if you wish to carry your business with you into the twenty-first century. This article offers advice and ideas for translators on how to increase blog traffic. This is the first of a two-part series on the topic. The second article will be released in a week.

Below are some tips on how to generate targeted traffic for your blog:

Write your content with SEO in mind

While search engine optimisation (SEO) may have a tainted reputation these days, it is only bad press and poor experiences that have made it so. Do not underestimate the power of SEO to help you generate website traffic and catapult your blog to success. Search engines place a high premium on SEO and writing your content with SEO in mind can help you attract targeted traffic for your blog.

Platforms such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla make it particularly easy to utilise SEO techniques.

Some useful resources include:

• → Blogger’s Guide to SEO (from SEO Book)
• → The Beginner’s Guide to SEO (from SEOmoz)
• → WordPress Blog SEO Tutorial (from Yoast)

Get into the social networks

With the plethora of benefits that social networking provides, spreading the word effectively and efficiently about the professional services one offers is definitely one of the highlights. Social networks provide a convenient avenue for you to give your blog exposure, and therefore generate website traffic for your blog in the process.

• → Twitter has 465 million accounts.
• → Facebook has 850 million.
• → Google+ has nearly 100 million.
• → LinkedIn has over 130 million.

Services like FollowerWonk and FindPeopleonPlus allow you to find people that share similar interests to you.

You can share content that you find interesting; whether yours or your colleague’s.

On Twitter, you can use hashtags such as #xl8 (translate), #t9n (translation) and #l10n (localisation) to engage in conversations with other translators or with prospects. You can also post the URL of your blog and add the said hashtags to the tweet.

Sign up for a Google Analytics account

Google Analytics offers free membership and is helpful for finding top-notch sources of traffic. Here, you can discover which sources can bring in high-quality website traffic for your blog and concentrate on them.

Research your keywords whilst writing your articles

One fundamental tip to keep in mind when learning how to increase blog traffic is to perform thorough research on the correct keywords to use. In order to achieve targeted traffic for your blog, it is essential to use the specific terms and phrases your audience will be typing in the search field.

Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool is a free resource you can use to help generate website traffic for your blog. Experiment with it and find out which terms are the most popular with regard to the topic you will be blogging about.

Use the keywords you find in the title and the headline of your post, then proceed to write high-quality content on the topic.

These are only some of the tips you can use to help achieve targeted traffic for your blog. Feel free to share your experiences and some of your own tips to educate other translators on how to increase blog traffic.