Recently I was asked by a friend of mine to talk to someone who’s just started a new blog and hopes to help it spread. I wrote 5 things that I believe are the way to go when you’re just starting out to get visitors to come to your blog. Actually, I believe all of these are good even with existing blogs if you’re not doing them, so I’ve decided to post what I wrote here, with a few modifications of course, and it will be added to my Blogging Tips at the top.
1. Post each blog article to Twitter. Of course this means you have to join Twitter and have followers who will see those posts, and some will retweet them, which gives them the opportunity to be viewed by a much larger audience. Blogging packages like WordPress has many plugins that can help you automate the process; I don’t know if Blogger allows blogs to do it, in which case you’ll have to copy and paste your link every time, something I don’t have to do. As a sidebar, I hate Blogger! lol
2. Set up both Facebook and LinkedIn to grab each blog post. On FB there are multiple apps that will do it. On LinkedIn, you can set it up within your profile.
3. Comment on like-minded blogs. This one is the most time consuming, but the truth is that, unless you’re already famous, the best way to get visitors is by commenting on other blogs, mainly blogs that are similar in content in some fashion to what you’re writing about. People get used to seeing your name and will follow you back to your blog to check you out. Of course, commenting on other blogs works pretty well also, especially if it’s something else you’re interested in.
4. Add the link to your blog in every correspondence you send out, and of course to your website if you have one. In email, if you send email to someone who opens their mail online, it helps provide a link that, if they click on it, helps build up web prominence a little bit. Of course, being on Blogger, it won’t help as much. However, just to say this, by being on Blogger you’re going to get some random traffic because of that link thing at the top where it says “next blog”, but it’s not targeted traffic so you might not get many comments, or people who will stay long enough to read what you’ve written.
5. Send out one big email to all your friends and business associates, if you’re comfortable with that. Those are pretty much considered “friendlies”, and they’ll visit at least once, and some of them will subscribe and tell others. It’s a great place to start.
Theres also a thing called ‘Tags’ in wordpress and a firefox addon called wordtracker. Type in key words into wortracker and it will give you numbers of searches for those words which you then insert into your tags. This will help get exposure from Search Engines
.-= Peter Davies´s last blog ..Internet Marketing Or Internet Selling? =-.
Good addition, Peter, but I didn’t go that route because I was thinking of a brand new blogger who would have no idea what any of those terms meant. Don’t want to be scaring people off. lol
You should be sure to tell them Linkedin is all business, especially if you list it next to Facebook.
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog ..DEDC Remains DoFollow – BUT… =-.
True, I guess I always assume most people will know that, but I guess they wouldn’t until they tried to go there.
#3 has always been the best way for me to drive immediate traffic. After time though you start getting some excellent traffic from Google.
.-= Brandon Connell | Make Money Blogging´s last blog ..The SEO Book for Bloggers… Make these changes for greatness =-.
Thanks for sharing, Brandon. I’m with you, because not only does it help with traffic, but it gives one the opportunity to build up relationships, which also helps with traffic.
I have used the first 3 strategies and also tried guest posting as well.
I like blog commenting because it takes less time, and it’s something I enjoy doing and therefore I can do it more consistently. In turn it gets results.
Guest posting takes more time but it’s really effective in traffic generation.
Actually Janus, I did a test back in late summer where I compared different ways of driving traffic to this blog, and blog commenting overwhelmingly beats every other method. If you end up on a super popular blog maybe there’s a benefit, but I didn’t get it as much as I had expected I would, and that guest post had more than 120 comments.