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Best estimates suggest that there may be as many as 500 million active blogs by the end of 2013! This quite a dramatic increase from the 3 million or so blogs that were online in 2004.

If nothing else, this proves that you have your work cut out when it comes to attracting visitors to your particular blog. What do you have that hundreds of millions of others don’t?

It seems impossible to believe that you can stand out amid the sea of bloggers but it’s not nearly as difficult as you might think. There is a fine line between being just another blogger with a dozen hits a month and one that becomes well known with thousands of weekly visits.

Below we explore some tips that will place you firmly in the top 5% and attract record levels of traffic to your blog.

Create Lengthy Posts

Virtually every article on this subject suggests that you need to write high quality content. This is hardly a Eureka moment! It’s akin to suggesting that we need light in order to see! What these articles don’t often mention is the fact that ‘quality’ content involves lengthy and detailed posts that provide unique insight and offer up tidbits that the reader was not aware of.

Despite the fact that the Internet generation tends to have an ever-shortening attention span, blogs with detailed posts statistically get the highest traffic. Continue creating blog posts that consist of 300-400 word opinion pieces and you will never get much traffic.

Which do you think is more interesting: A rant about the global financial recession that is little more than a page stating how much you hate banks or a long post about how the recession began, historical examples and how it is possible for the economy to recover? People like it when you do the research for them. Then they can quote your blog post and pass it off as their own information when chatting to friends!

Have Visual Stimuli

As well as creating lengthy posts that are extremely well-researched, it is also important to offer up a feast for the eyes, or at least make your posts easy to read! This means you must have links not only to your sources, but also to visuals. Linking to the infographics where you received your information is a good start. Sprinkling images relevant to the content throughout the post also helps break up the lengthy text.

When it comes to the actual text, ensure that the font is large and the line height is sufficient to allow ample white space. Georgia is one of the best fonts for computer screens when it comes to readability though most fonts look the same onscreen. Finally, create a new paragraph every 70-80 words if you can to give the eyes of your readers a much-needed break!

Distribute Like Crazy

There is no point in spending hours creating epic blog posts if you are unwilling to take a little extra time to share your content with the Internet population. Simply put, readers need to be exposed to your blog posts if you wish to see them being shared. Clearly, this means getting acquainted with social media sites and gaining followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook.

Readers need to be aware of a blog post before they can spread it so you need to find a way to get them to read your Facebook page or open an email you send. Additionally, readers need to be motivated by your content; otherwise they will not spend time sharing it on the Internet. It is amazing the lengths people will go to in order to spread information they agree with.

If you have a limited number of followers on your social media sites, you need to become more active and also submit blog posts to sites like Reddit and Hacker News. There are a host of widely visited sites of this nature so getting your blog posts seen there will help them become known. Obviously, the content itself needs to be top notch if you want influencers to pick up on it and share it around the web.

This is where writing lengthy posts comes into play. If you spend hours creating a post that provides real value to readers, you will be rewarded. Of course it never hurts to continue actively adding followers on your social media sites and email lists. Although people tend to despise popup adverts, a surprising number of people subscribe to email newsletters through them.

Namedropping

It’s important for you to remember that Internet influencers have massive egos! They LOVE having their name mentioned because it confirms the fact that they are important. Successful publications are experts in the art of namedropping. Make sure you reference companies and people in your posts and also let these businesses and individuals know via social media that they have been mentioned in a post of yours. A lot of the time, they will share this post to massage their own ego which naturally helps your cause as well. Everyone’s a winner!

Attracting a record amount of traffic to your blog will undoubtedly take time and effort but it does not have to be a difficult procedure. The tips we outlined above take advantage of human nature and if you implement these strategies, you can be sure that your blog will benefit from a significant spike in its visitor numbers.

Author Bio:
This article is by Sara Carter. I like social networks, Google android, and psychology. I'm interested in IT services, computer upgrades, computer repair, different computer apps. Love travelling and skiing.