After spending much time yesterday preaching about setting up your site and/or blog, some of you may be saying; “That’s great information but who’s going to actually read it?” So let’s talk about some fairly easy traffic drivers to your content, website and blog. I use the words fairly easy because there is a little work involved initially to get your system in place.
One of the best pieces of advice came from Mark Alan Effinger who runs a company called Rich Content. The advice was for every blog post that I write, I should comment on three other blogs. Since I was so new to the concept of blogging in the first place, this step was a little tricky for me. I had no idea where to go and find other blogs. Luckily I was put on to Google Alerts. For those who don’t know what Google alerts are. It’s basically a system to that tracks key words that are important to you and delivers relevant websites, blogs etc to you. They are e-mailed once a day in the form of a list. You can can then review and comment on posts that you liked.
Commenting on blogs is a great way to build relationships with other people who share interests. It’s also a good way to drive traffic to your site as your name shows up on the comments as a link that goes back to your site. The higher the traffic of the blog that you comment on, the more chances someone will see your comment and click to your site to check it out. It’s important to make sure that you comments are meaningful and relevant. The “atta boy” or “good job” comment isn’t going to fly. You can also trackback to another site by posting a link on your site. This will also show up on the other blog.
Getting your blog listed in blog sources also increases your blog’s exposure. The first place I would get listed is Technorati. A couple of other good places to get your blog listed and build connections are Blog Catalog and My Blog Log which is a service through Yahoo.
These are tools that I have used to double the traffic on my blog since I started it 5 months ago. They are “fairly easy” and best of all free. What other tips have you used to make your blog successful? I didn’t even touch on the social media aspect of promotion. How have you been able to use social media to drive traffic?
Brandon- Great info as usual. Let me ask a question, when using Google Alerts are you ‘picky’ about the blogs you post on? Do you concentrate on a few blogs or many?
Just wondering if it’s a shotgun approach that has worked for you, or if you hone in on a few prevalent blogs and post on those frequently?
Derick,
As far as selection. I really just comment on posts that I enjoy and think are well done although I have commented where I disagree as well. There are some blogs that I continue to run across where I like their info and so I subscribe to their content rather than have to search for it. As you blog, it’s important to comment and build relationships with the top bloggers in your space for 2 reasons. The first is that you start to build a relationship with that blogger which could lead to collaborations down the road. The second is that you increase the chances of driving traffic on your blog when you comment on a popular blog site. At this point I have a handful of go to blogs that I comment on regularly but I still keep my eye out for others.
Good idea. I actually started out by posting comments all over the blogosphere, before I was a serious blogger myself. But as I kept reading blogs, I thought it might be a good idea to work on my own. I got serious about it when I wrote my first great post and then decided it was time to learn how to network. I post fewer comments on other blogs nowadays, I suppose because I’ve already been down that path. This works the other way around as well: when I first decided it was time to network, I immediately started clicking on the names of all the blog commenters I wanted to network with. What actually happened was that I discovered a bunch of amazing, obscure blogs on my topic of interest, clicking on the blogs followed or written by commenters. I read those avidly before eventually creating a new blog on the topic.
Louche,
Thanks for stopping by. Great to hear your story with building relationships in the blogosphere. I think it’s a great example of how you can do this right and it helps to reinforce the point that blogging is not just about the individual blogging but more about having conversations.