Monday, January 30, 2012

Driving traffic to your blog

Most people nowadays have a blog where they simply express themselves, bitch about daily issues or offer w4r3z for download. However, it’s pointless if nobody knows how to get to your blog.

After struggling to get my blog in the results, I thought why not point the N00B's in the right direction without having them know all the technical stuff. We’ll start with the easy tasks and then gradually move on to more involving ones.

Set your blog as homepage

Attempt to set your blog as the home page on as many computers that have access to the Internet as possible. For instance each time you visit a cyber café, make sure you make your blog the home page so that each next person that uses the computer gets to see your blog first before they embark on their business. Just don’t get caught by the cyber café assistant.

I also found telling people by word of mouth is also effective in getting people to visit your site. In addition people that you tell also have other networks they are connected to. This means that you can access very many people by just telling a single person.

Spamming

Send all your email contacts the URL to your blog and hope they will follow and hear what you have to say. You may also join mailing lists that connect you to thousands of people without the need to know their emails. A good place to start is to spam back all those people who fill up the spam folder in your email.

In addition create an email signature with your website along telephone number, title and/or disclaimer.

Leverage social media

After each post to your blog you can announce it on your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook status and get more people to follow the links and land on your blog. If they like what you blog about, they will explore and comment. This has a big impact since links from the highly ranked sites to yours will improve your page rank resulting in your site moving a little bit higher in results.

Furthermore, update your profile to show your blog address so that people who view your profile and want to know more about you can also see you have a blog and visit it in order to pique your mind. Still on social media, Follow buttons and options to subscribe by email or feed can help retain followers who want to follow your posts.

Commenting on websites with your signature

Often you may read articles on the web and leave you comments. You may append your blog URL after your comment and maybe even your twitter handle to get new people to check out your blog. If the sites rank higher than your blog, it might improve your page rank if people follow the links.

For example if your blog is about Technology, frequent comments (with a backlink to your site) on articles in Technology sites such as TechCrunch may lead a considerable number of visitors to your humble website.

Submit your URL to all major Search Engines

Don’t wait for search engines to discover your site. If your site is getting a lot of visitors already you need not lift a finger. However if that’s not the case you need to manually submit the URL to your blog. Just type “submitting a website to search engines” in the Google search box and explore.

Webmaster tools

Sign up for webmaster tools. They are free and help you discover interesting statistics about your site. The point is to know where the most traffic from your site comes from and optimize for these visitors. Both Google and Bing offer these tools. You just sign in with your Google or Windows Live ID and follow instructions.

If you find you enjoy using webmaster tools especially from Google, you can go on and try Google Analytics and Google Adsense. If you can get the crowds to visit your blog then you can also get them to earn you revenue every time someone clicks on advertisements on the blog.