How many of us have thought that when we first started out? Well, Dr. Dennis Leary is here to help with increasing your blog traffic, whining blog freaks. Go from zero to hero in like, eight months with a few tricks. I’m huge in Budapest now thanks to them. Several people have given good advice, such as B.L. Ochman’s column. I first learned from Ben Popken, editor of Consumerist.com. If you’re using Blogger, go here too.This advice is mostly for the newbie trying to increase views once you have your blog set up and have a unique ‘voice’ for what your blog is all about. I can’t help you there, that part’s up to you. So, if you have a well-known name with a built-in audience already, or you pulled a stunt to help launch a blog, you probably don’t need my advice on traffic. Otherwise, the average blogger will find it takes a fair amount of time to build site traffic.
1) Blog Self-promotion. Start treating the whole process of promoting your blog like any other thing you do to promote yourself, (especially if you’re a freelancer.) Blogs need love too. Remember kids, 32.1 million blogs and counting. Poor grammar here but, you won’t get noticed doing nothing amongst numbers like that. For any of these tips, it really comes down to out of sight, out of mind. What are you doing to make sure people see your blog?
2) Start posting at other blogs too. Not just comments for comment’s sake either. Post only on those blogs that match what your blog is all about. Make sure you put your blog’s URL in the username section.
3) Then, link to others. In addition to sites I really like, my blogroll to the right includes names of blogs who have either linked to me, or who are popular. Reference any article you find with a trackback link if you can. People on other blogs will see your blog links to what they’re reading, and just may visit you. A lot of sites like technorati will also display who links to who. (And follow up with blogs who link to yours, like a new one I discovered today linking back to me, Adverb, run by Mack Simpson: Adman of Action. Thanks Mack, the check is in the mail, just don’t cash it right away.)
4) Get a sitemeter account. Or any FREE site-monitoring tool to show you who is viewing your blog from where. Once you see where people are viewing from, you can show up at their blog and leave a post, which might spur them to stop lurking at yours and post.
5) Register with blog directories. Look at my “HELPING SPREAD BLOG LOVE” list. All those are FREE directories I registered my blog name at. Go to each one and fill out a directory listing for your blog. Add relevant tags for each that accurately describe your blog.
6) Ping your blog. (Keep it clean.) Right after this is posted, I will go to my bookmarked page, and it will automatically ping all the servers I selected when I registered with Blogflux.com. This refreshes your blog listing and lets their servers know new content has been added to your blog.
7) Use Tags. When someone goes to technorati to type in “Barbie,” or some other term, and you have “Barbie” as a tag, your blog shows up in their search results. Make your tags relevant to the topic at hand though.
8) RSS feeds. Make sure there are both RSS and email subscription links for your blog displayed at or near the top of your page. I use feedblitz.com for email subscriptions. Don’t make readers work too hard to get in touch with you or link. Keep all other contact info like a regular email address above the fold, (for the rooks - that term means keep stuff on the top half of a web page, like a newspaper, hence 'fold.')
With so many blogs out there, you have to make it easy for people to access yours. This stuff will help.
Tags: blogging, promoting blogs, site traffic, tags
2 comments:
"Nobody reads my blog, wahhh." Too funny. You do know you've got at least one reader. Now, of all the tags you could have mentioned, you chose "Barbie." Is that the secret to your success? :-)
Now that you mention it, that title does make it appear like I’m complaining. Guilty of being former whiner, how's that? ;-p Hence the reference to Leary’s alter ego.
Funny thing was that I had been blogging for about seven months before I got some good advice on increasing traffic. Now, some of it may have been there already and I just had no way of recording it before, but since January, making the changes above has dramatically improved site traffic here.
As far as Barbie goes, I could have said Ken, but that would’ve been wrong on a few levels.
;-p
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