Increasing Blog Traffic with Interviews and Guest Posts

Image by Emma Larkins

Every blogger wants to learn new ways to increase traffic to his or her blog. After all, what's the fun of writing online if no one is going to read your stuff? You might as well chisel it onto a block of marble and drop it into the ocean if you can't develop a readership.

Publishing interviews and guest posts on your blog serves to increase visibility immediately, and also to increase number of visitors over the long run.

Interviews

Interviews are great for a variety of reasons.

• They let other people in your industry know that you exist.
• You can learn terrific new things about publishing houses, other authors, techniques for getting published, etc.
• They increase the traffic to your blog, because the interviewee usually posts one or more backlinks, and helps to promote the interview in other ways as well.

If the interviewee is a well-known internet presence, i.e. blogs, tweets, and updates his or her website frequently, they drive a lot of traffic on the day of the interview. If the interviewee is well-known for their work, you can even receive hits over time from people doing internet searches for that person's name.

Best of all, once you become known for posting interviews, people will start to offer their time in order to get in on the action.

Guest Posts

Question: How do you get other people to provide content for your blog free of charge?

Answer: Get them to write guest posts!

Okay, so that was facetious. But the truth is that there are plenty of bloggers out there looking to increase their exposure who are more than willing to write amazing content for your blog.

You should know, however, that adding guest posts and interviews to your blog isn't necessarily a "cheap" way to build your content. After all, you still need to edit and format the provided entries, and often tweak the writing so that it better matches your blog's tone and style. And often these projects work as exchanges in which you provide a guest post or interview for the other person's blog in return.

The most important thing to do when requesting interviews and guest posts is to think of the activity as developing relationships with others in your industry. Get to know people before contacting them. Comment on their blogs. Retweet their tweets. Join their Facebook groups, Even meet them in person, if you get a chance. Not only will you get more traffic using these methods: you'll also gain mentors, confidantes, associates, and friends.