If you want to build and increase traffic for you blog (and who doesn’t want that?) and are searching the web for helpful suggestions, chances are that you’ll find tons of sites that promise you to have found the number one secret for more traffic overnight… but with everything that sounds too good to be true, this one is probably as well, and building a bigger audience comes down to hard work.

While many factors come into play when trying to increase traffic, I believe it really comes down to three:

1. Quality content is everything! If you are not able to provide quality content, it does not matter how fancy your website looks, how active you are on social media, or how often you blog (then this is only going to increase your bounce rate). The key to quality content is your purpose of blogging, if you are blogging for more traffic and more clicks on Google AdSense, you’ll not be successful in the long-run and probably run out of ideas. But if you write about your passion and want to share your knowledge and expertise with others to help them improve, you are focused on the quality of your work, and the traffic will come by itself.

2. Once you have quality content, you need to be able to blog more frequent and on a consistent basis.  While I believe five times a week is too much and not necessary, the ideal dose is probably to publish posts three times a week. But even if you start with blogging once a week, you have consistency… and try to resist the urge of publishing your post the moment you finished it, and rather schedule it for consistency purposes (it’s more effective to publish one post once a week than four posts on one day and then nothing for the rest of the month).

3. Engage with your audience! If blogging is about leading and influencing people to learn from your experiences and knowledge that you are sharing in your posts, then you need to engage with your followers. The easiest way to do so is by engaging in comments! If someone is interested in your blog, asking questions, and seeking advise or challenging your point of view, it is an opportunity for you to increase the audience of your followers.

Question: I understand that there are tons of suggestions out there on how to increase traffic, what do you think are the three most important?