How To Drive Traffic To New Blogs
Welcome to Dan On It! I encourage you to comment, refer to others and follow future posts. Dan HarrisHow I Drive Traffic To My Blog
During a conversation with a colleague at work about our blogs, he asked me how I was driving traffic to my blog, www.danonit.com. I started by explaining that I was doing my best to write a post at least once a week, and include links to relevant content from other blogs. I also mentioned, I started posting meaningful posts on the high traffic blogs that I read on similar topics. I promoted my blog posts to my friends, family, and co-workers through Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, a Tumblr blog of the same name, and bookmarked my posts on Del.ic.ious and Digg. With every post, I encourage people to comment. I ask them to answer questions. Add to my content based on their experience. Last but not least, I always end with a “what’s coming up next” closing so readers may want to subscribe to my blog to read about future posts.
Dan On It - The First Thirty Days
Has it been successful? In the blogs first 30 days, doing these basic things, resulted in 268 unique visitors, 606 page views, and the average time a visitor stays on the site is just over 7 minutes. 20% of my traffic is coming from search engines, 31% is coming from referring sites, and the remaining are direct links to www.danonit.com.
For a one month old site, I’m pretty proud of those results. Now, I need to step it up a bit. So, I started reading up on a few additional tips and techniques from top bloggers. If you’re trying to increase your new blogs traffic below are a few things I will be trying over the next month. I’ll check back in during late October and let you know how they worked.
16 More Ways to Drive Traffic To Your Blog
The following 16 tips are from an article written by Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnerships, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services.1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.
Http://www.bloglet.com
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)
http://www.my.yahoo.com
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.
http://www.pingomatic.com
5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines:
http://www.submitfire.com
6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.
9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.
10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.
12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to.
The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.
To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm
13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts
14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.
15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).
16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.
I would like to thank Denise and Patsi for this great list of tips. You read more from Denise and Patsi on their blogs listed below.
http://www.coachezines.com and
Up next, I’ll be offering a profile on a marketing and branding firm my company is considering working with.
Until next time, stay tuned and stay in touch.
07 October 2008, 9:02 am
Traffic is always the hardest part of any blog or website for that matter. SEO sucks and is too hard to keep up on the algorithms of Google, Yahoo and others. So I try to write for humans first and search engines second. If you write things people want to know about then your following will increase over time. Your links will also increase and people will start passing the word either by telling someone about your blog or if your lucky you’ll get dugg and the world will know about you.
Good tips Dan.
08 October 2008, 7:50 pm
Jason, Great point. Like any good thing it takes time. I’m learning from a great group of veteran bloggers that content is king. Subscription go up when people find value in your message, links or references. I appreciate your comments, your continued interest in Danonit and your insight. Keep on keeping it on.
Dan Harris