great read!!

you forgot about commenting on these sorts of blogs and leaving your URL…and when you have the cance to includie it so they only have to click on your name(like the one you see of me) it’s even better!hehe if you post a good, rational idea people usually will check out what you have to say on your site and it drives people even more to your site(I know this out of personal experience)^_^

Yeah ipsofacto, I do that a bunch myself!

interesting, you mentioned digg as a good way to drive traffic to your blog. well i found your blog on digg ;D

Great write-up. I get traffic due to some of the articles I have written with technical solutions people sometimes look for, but not a lot. I followed your advice as much as possible. We’ll see how it helps. Thanks for the great info. Keep it up!

**shameless plug**
Also, anyone who likes some of the features of Shaun Inman’s Mint (mentioned in the article above) but who don’t have the $30 for every domain, you can always Inman’s free stats tool, ShortStat, and while you at it, go check out my add-on for ShortStat called ReferrerRSS. It generates an RSS feed of referrers to your site (one of the coolest features of Mint, IMO).

Cool stuff. And again, thanks for the useful article!

Nice article Paul (I’m “Eschatonik” from DIGG, btw). Very sound advice you’ve complied here!

The only thing I would add is:

Webloggers who are using CMS software that does not auto-ping can do mass pings manually via http://pingomatic.com/ or http://pingoat.com/. Both of these services do a great job of driving traffic to your site that really wants to be there. You can even set up your own bookmarklet for ping-o-matic that fills in your info, allowing for quick, 1-button ping action.

Woah! Thanks for another excellent article! Now, if I only had something useful to write about I could be teh uber blogger dude!

Another useful tool I’ve found is trackbacking.. If you do read other blogs, and feel compelled to comment on it (assuming they provide trackback urls) — your post will be often be referenced as a comment which other people can then go and read.

I, by no means, have a lot of readers to my site.. but I find that on days when I post comments or trackbacks, I end up with more traffic.

The WashingtonPost actually has a reverse technorati lookup now, where if you link to a story on the post, it’ll include your blog in the “Who’s blogging about this” box linked within the story.

Paul - Thanks for the great post. I think it’s hard for blog newbies to know what to do after they get their blog up and start posting. Many of the people I talk to don’t even know about Technorati. The kind of info you’re offering here is invaluable to that group.

I’m compiling a list of resources as part of a series I’m doing more geared towards my niche audience (ironically on a brand new blog). This one’s defiantly going on the must read list!

Great article. Funny, I did a lot of this stuff when I started blogging but got lazy and stopped linking and leaving comments. Thanks for the reminder…

Paul,

As always, spot-on! As the new kid on the block, it’s nice to see that guys with experience are always willing to share. My site is only about a month old, and driving traffic is a daily challenge. By reading articles like this and honing my writing, I hope to make a positive impact.

It’s interesting that you mention Technorati. Am I nuts, or do Technorati and WordPress not always play nice together? Numerous times, I’ve posted an article, only to find that Technorati has not acknowleged my ping. I have to go to the Technorati site and manually ping them. After two or three times, it seem to “take”. Funny…

You’ve been a daily read for me for the last month or so, and I’ve placed a permanent link to your site on mine to encourage my readers to do the same.

Best of luck to you, Paul.

GG

Thanks for a great list of suggestions. I’d like to add another; namely “leeching” :-) By this I mean keeping a track of blogs similar to yours in taste and higher up on hitcounts and commenting on them to make your name (hence your blog) more visible…kinda like what I’m doing right now :-)
A greenhorn blogger like myself gets easily tempted to set up as many free chatboards, trackers, aggregators etc. as he possibly can soon as he starts. Its absolutely vital to evaluate the horde of resources out there before letting your name depend on them. To that end comprehensive lists and advice postings like these are indispensable.

I think content should be the main method to make your blog popular

the second tip should be patience: blogs don’t become popular in a month.. it takes a year (or so) of hard work to make a site popular these days since there are so many of them out there

I also agree with the poster above… keep a list of all the sites/blogs that are in your category and post comments on a regular basis… not splog but acutal quality comments

Great stuff and very up to date… been trying to compile a cheatsheet to boosting blog traffic but you did a nice job already! :)

Great article gained quite a lot from this

thanks :)

Very nice read … One thing I would also like to point out .. Most of my readers come from search engines .. So Search Engines are also big source for getting traffic .. And if your content is attractive, the user will notice it and will come back .. Its these returning visitors who make your blog popular .. So submit your blog to major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN … For Google, you should submit your

Sheesh .. I pressed enter it submitted {Please add this content to the above post .. Thank you }

For Google you should submit Google Sitemap to have your site indexed by Google ..

nice read, learned some new things & got some interesting links.

keep up the good work

cheers
Nick

Some great tips. Thanks!

My experience has been that content is king. I used to update my blog AT LEAST once per day, and had the traffic to show for my hard work. After a period of extreme business (new baby, moving across the country, new job, house, etc.) I stopped publishing regularly and people stopped reading.

Now that my life is getting back to normal, I am making a conscious effort to get back to regular posts.

Happy blogging!

thanks a lot! i love it.

many greetings from Germany!

domi - freieszeichen.de

Thanks for the great tips! I’ve recently just started blogging and found lots of great ideas.

Good article in boosting traffic however from past experiences, the majority of visitors I receive leave without bothering to read the content. They simply throw a quick glance in your direction and depart. Granted your site must be out of the ordinary to elongate a visit however I find the design does not amount to a significant figure. As long as your content is legible but interesting, your viewer numbers will be high. And you must either be very convincing in the practice of concocting fictional tales or retell your day in a “She/he did what?!� sort of fashion.

I would also add, comment compulsively, especially on blogs with high traffic. The more times your link appears, the better for your site. Your comment however should be worthy material. Nobody is going to visit a spammer. But your main focus should be the content. Frequent updates are advised but you need to have a focal point in your entries. Select a mood may it be serious, witty, comical or the like and adhere to it. Don’t be bouncing off the walls unless you are chasing after the wonky title.

Thanks for the great artcile! Cleared up some things I never understood before! Thanks! :P

Extremely useful information. After reading this and another article on Adsense, I feel much more in control of my Blog and have noticed an increase in visitors and “clicks”. If you are new pay attention. Thanks!

You read CNET and Tom’s Hardware Ads?

I’ve been in Press Rooms with the CNET writers, when they have trouble with their PC or the Network they shout for a Tech-guy!

Lol .. See its already working for you .. :) .. Just post good content and there you are .. :)

Great article. You’re a legend.

Wonderful article! Two related things that should be paid attention two, though, are themes and compatibility. It seems like everyone is moving to Wordpress nowadays, and more and more are using the same old themes. When average Joe goes to a web site that looks like like all the others, the thinking is that the content won’t be much different either. So taking the time to design your own theme is beneficial. And point #2, this theme must work in *all browsers*! Too many people test with just IE or just Firefox and IE — and Opera, Safari, Konqueror, etc users see a trash site. The internet’s too big and time’s too little for people to decipher dirty content. But if trashy IE doesn’t have all the desired effects with your CSS code (and as shameless promotion) you can always do something like this [blog.magicbytom.com] ;-). (Go with Internet Explorer, and you get a nice.. “suggestion”.)

Paul,

Thankyou very much for your article. Also, apart from gathering heaps of info from the article itself, I caught some nice tips from the comments.

Comment Away! Heh heh.

Also, noticing the little Ajax functionality when typing comments. Awesome. That is cool.

Again, thanks.

I don’t get nearly any traffic from the sources you mentioned. I tried some of them but not deep enough. i’m working on to build the site and content and this helps traffic too much. Lastly you can find some similar info here:
http://www.problogger.net/

i hope it helps.

Best way to generate links and traffic on your blog? Write a really excellent post on generating links and traffic on your blog. It’s infinitely regressive.

Thanks for the beneficial tips. I will try to follow your suggestions ~

Thanks for this, nice layout too.

Wow, what a great article! thanks for all these information.

Wow, great article! I am definitely going to put these ideas to use! Thanks!

You can also install the Google Sitemaps plugin and keep google up to date with your latest posts instead of waiting for your site to be crawled. You can get the plugin at http://www.arnebrachhold.de/

great read, definatly a good guide to users that are new to blogging and want to go “bigtime”.

Hi everybody.
Having some experience in SEO and being aware of how current the blogging is for this market, I’ve got an idea to launch a service that would provide bloggers with custom written topic-specific articles. These articles would be composed according to the requirements - keywords, their density, relativity etc, and I can even organize a feed that would allow to subscribe and integrate the posting directly into the sites that need to be updated.

What do you think, is there any demand for a service like that?

if you are in need of such service, or have some ideas, just write me muraha@gmail.com
thanks

One sure way to boost traffic is to submit your posts to various carnivals and if you have the time and energy, to even host them on your blog. See here for more details.

I have to second the notion that the site needs to be clean and usable. Besides having your site hosted on your own space with your own domain name, I highly recommend that you seek professional design help to create the “theme” or look-and-feel of your site.

Thank you so much for this article. It shed some light on a few questions I have had. I have been doing a few of the things that you mentioned, but not to their fullest. I do have a quick question, however. If you publish multiple blogs, does claiming all of them on Technorati hurt your authority or rank? What I mean by that is if I claim two blogs that link to each other will Technorati not count that link because I own both blogs?

Thanks.

I imagine a lot depends on what your purpose is, but visibility certainly wont hurt in most cases, thanx for the tips – and hope it generates the kind of traffic your after :- )

Excellent tips! I’ll be implementing as many as possible. But I’m just getting the hang of this thing, so my @aol.com presentation may be around for a while.

wordpress is constanly changing and i cant configure it through technorati…prob. they do it implicitly.
n get ur blog and rss submitted to as many engines as possible.
rss engines like technorati, rss locator, rss network, feedster, daypop, pingomatic, easyrss, pubsub and blog engines like blogarama, blogwise, blo.gs, blog search engine, blog street, blog universe, blogtastic, or boingboing if u have really cool site….

and leave good comments to articles you read. it doesnt take much time to get a few visitors now and then.

or find similar blogs like yours and exchange links which works most of the time.

Paul-

Thanks for this article. I’ve been spending more time in the recent past learning the Wordpress publishing platform and less time on content. I’ll be done soon releasing a new design template, and only after that will I resume really adding links. Thanks for the great advice, helps out a lot!

I am wondering how big a factor it is to have a free blog site? Is it more for the people who visit your site and your credibility or is it more for the search engines?

All the best
Jason

Having a non-free website is more about credibility and lets your users know you care about your website.

Thanks for the information. Looking forward to the traffic now!

Great advice.
About 6 people post on my blog/site and I’m not entirely sure If I’m running it correctly. You certainly gave me some Ideas for running it.

Good work. I like your site.

This article was very informative and helped me out quite a bit. Thank you so much!

For generating a RSS feed from virtually any web page, try FeedTier ( http://feedtier.somee.com )

Interesting that you cite Nielsen with approval. Put his article’s URL in Technorati to see the overwhelmingly negative responses from the blogosphere.

Having own domain is something I see old-time techno-snobs keep insisting on. It used to be true. It is not any more. As blogosphere democratizes and is not the province of techno-geeks who know code any more, having a Blogspot blog, or even a LJ is not a point of derision any more. After all, MOST blogs are hosted on these services, including some of the most popular blogs out there (Atrios anyone?).

Related to that, having a simple, generic Blogspot template/skin is just fine if you provide quality content for your readers instead of cheap gizz-wizz bells and whistles.

Writing quality content is rule #1. I agree with you on the perils of re-blogging and neccessity of developing your own voice. A narrow focus is not neccessary, though. An ecclectic blog can do just fine if the content is of high quality.

Commenting on other blogs is #2 strategy. Make your comments unique, provide novel insight, write it in literate Standard English, and be polite. Do not be afraid to blatantly blogwhore (you may test the mood of the owner once before making it a habit on any one blog). Trackbacks are going the way of the dinosaur - old technogeeks like them, but new bloggers (which is 99% of bloggers) cant’ care less about them. With Sitemeter and Technorati in place, trackbacks are unneccessary for engendering two-way communication.

Sending entries to (and ultimately hosting) blog carnivals is #3 strategy. Most of the blogs on my blogroll I discovered via carnivals. Those are the people who have the same interests as I do, after all. This is most important when thinking long term as the archives of carnivals will be the GoTo place for the archivists, historians, students and journalists of the future as they do research on the blogosphere of today - a one-stop shoppiing of the BEST blog writing on any given topic at any given time, all well organized and packaged.

Everything else are technical gizmos that will help only if you follow the above rules #1, 2 and 3. Without quality writing, quality comments on other blogs, and joining blogging communitites via carnivals, no technology can help you.

thanx for the info, I’m a newbie in blogosphere..it helps!!

Great post. Very useful since I’m starting a new blog.

yeah,,blog is rocks!!

Thanks for the tips. They were very useful.
I have a question and a comment.

1. Does inclusion in someone’s bloglines feed have an impact on how easily your blog is discovered?

2. I found this resource very interesting how pervasive blogs are what that means for marketing:
http://www.comscore.com/blogreport/comScoreBlogReport.pdf

Best Regards,
Zachary
http://www.quiverandquill.com

Great tips that are really useful. I was already doing most of what you mentioned, but there are some tips there that I hadn’t thought of. Thanks for the info.

Great article. Heck I didn’t even know about the multi-ping sites!! (yea, I’m an out of touch blogger). Boy do I have a whole new list of favorite haunts :) And, as a thanks for all your info, I’d like to also contribute too. I added a plug board to one of my domains. I’ve got a nifty way to bring traffic to blogs - found it on some teen sites originally when my own daughter was reading blogs. All you do is add your own button and it immediately shows up. Everyone is welcome to plug their blog - it’s absolutely free and takes like 2 seconds. plug your blog here all you need is an 88×31 button.

Great article!

Have to figure out how to get those technorati tags in b2evolution next…

One resource which I don’t see mentioned which I found excellent was Robin Good’s list of 155 blog and feed directories. It took me about a day and a half to submit to all of them but people are starting to find the site and it is possible to get listed on quite a few high page ranked pages on the list.

Thanks!

Another great resource I have come across since my last post is this extension for firefox:

Firefox - Webcomments Extension

When you have this extension installed, it displays a little popup window at the bottom right of the screen which shows you which blogs have commented upon or linked to the page you are currently looking at. This means that if you just go about your normal day looking at the sites you are interested in, webcomments will show you which blogs are talking about those sites you are interested in.

Its great for connecting you with blogs that are relevant to your interests. I highly Recommend it. If you’re a firefox user I also recommend the extensions for tabbed browsing - they make a big difference…

Thomas

Thanks Paul,
Great information.
Dee

I found that on my personal blog where I blog about lots of things , I had the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album on my page for a while and the number of people gonig to my site went through the roof… things like that really help boost traffic.

Maybe Paul, you could give us some tips on links?
I thought that if you put links on your blog,
that those links count, but I went to tech, and pinged
and no links. Do you need to change code in your blog?
Dee

I think it was said earlier but putting some of your more interesting posts on Digg/Reddit.Oks/leve1/shoutwire and even fark can get you some needed traffic. This is especially important when first promoting a brand new site.

Thanks again Paul,
I have another question? If you have good content,
and rank high on Google, MSN, Yahoo, but have few
links, having good content will it be enough?
Dee

great read - lotsa info!

Terrific article, there is an interesting article on the Google algorithm at
http://www.akamarketing.com/google-ranking-tips.html

Wow! What a wealth of helpful information! I’m just getting started with my own blog and am looking for any help I can get with increasing traffic. Just set up my feed with Feedburner, which I never would have known about had it not been for this great article. Hopefully, with some good ol’ fashioned hard work and patience, my little tech help site will be running with the best of ‘em in short order. Thanks for taking the time to help out us new folks!

Very useful article, especially for those new to blogging like myself.

I’ve just dumped my old site (was getting stale) and started again using Wordpress. I’m trying to spend as much time as I can trying to familiarise myself with it and blogs in general, so stuff like this is great for me.

One point in the article maybe needs re-wording. You say: ‘If you are still on a free blog, get rid of it!’ I assume you mean the free blogs that host it for you as oppose to free blogs like Wordpress which you can host yourself. Not everyone will get that point and free doesn’t have to mean less in quality.

Great article, its like an add on on article i wrote, i coverd other interesting ways of building succesfull blog-webpage please review it thin yull like it!! feel free to check it and use the material in your own articles if you want to update them….

Paul,
If someone links to your site and they go to
ping-o-matic and ping their blog, will it
automatically ping your blog? The reason I am
asking is because I went to ping my blog and it
said to slow down, that I or someone had justed
pinged, So what’s up with that? I had only pinged
once.
Dee

I’m just a return visiter to your blog This is a great article and very useful to first time bloggers like me.

Excellent article :)
I exactly follow this instructions

Can I try to translate this post in French and publish on my blog ?

how to post links?? realy i don´t have no experience in blog but i would like to make my blog more nice. Can you help me?? Saying how to post?? what´s means tag?
i´m completely lost ; ((
; ))
thanks
patricia

Thanks, it’s a very good article.

The FeedBurner website is very slow and requires your name and password everytime you click into a new window. I’ve been unable to do ANYTHING beyond burn my feed. Not even retrieve code to copy into my blog template to advertise FeedBurner to my readers. Useless!

Paul, I found your article useful and informative. Thanks

I got to your site via a link in Technorati and found your site very interesting, helpful and interesting. It feels good to see that there are people like you who are concern with helping out other people enhance their web blogging experience than focus on how they could make their own site more popular. As for me, my primary motive in blogging is to harness my writing skills and it is just now that I am learning to tap the vast opportunities and resources that I could do and have with a blog. Paul, I must say, keep up the good work and for sure, you will be able to achieve your ambitions.

Oh, btw, I like to add you on my links. May I have your permission Paul to put your site on my blog links? Thanks in advance. In return, you may also add me to your links if you find it a good idea as well.

I’m really thankful for articles like these. It was a good help into a fresh start with blogging. Thanks, mate.

Nicely written. I am returning to blogging after a long off period, so I plan to follow some of these practical suggestions.

As for design - I’m absolutely crap at design, drawing, designing, layout, etc. But I find that flickr.com is a good source for illustrative photos which you can ue as eye-catchers in your posts. Look for the images released under Creative Commons / Attribution License. And of course make sure you link your use of the image back to the flickr image for attribution — it’s just the fair thing to do! There’s a lot of talented people on flickr!

Oh, and P.S. - One of my pet peeves as a reader: If you’re not just reblogging, but writing long and potentially interesting posts, *please* make sure your Blog stylesheet supports clean printing. Print(ed) matter(s)!

Great article. I have 2 blogs and I was making changes as I read your article. By the way, I found your blog over at technorati.

You mention links get your rating up and therefore your traffic. I’ve been on Technorati for 4 weeks, have at least 4 links yet they say I have zero links. How often are links checked and why are they not listed. Any clue?

I beg to differ on the statement Technorati is your best friend. More like my worst nightmare.

I am here because of it. 95% of my traffic is depending on them due to the Washington Posts “read what the blogs are sayin” I am slowly developing other bases but you can’t sneeze at 300 hits in two hours over one tiny post.

HOWEVER Technorati has some problems. They don’t spider when pinged. They have attempted to correct this several times with my blog all ending in me frustrated and finally deleting my claim and reclaiming. The error always occurs again down the line.

I am not the only one. I wish they would either fix this ongoing bug or that another service could rival them right now.

It isn’t only my lost traffic, I have to wonder when I in turn read what the bloggers are saying how many are saying something I don’t see that I might want to see.

Excellent and educational. Thanks for taking the time to write this to help others. I don’t entirely write off blogger.com addresses of a blog as being less serious. Sure, it can mean the person is not doing it as a committed blogger but some great intelligent people can post comments on their blogger.com site. And, I think they are more worthy of being taken seriously than people who still have aoHELL.com as their email address. :-)

Imran
http://imran.TV

Wowee… Great post. It looks like I have a lot of work to do. I still don’t understand all of what you said, but I’ll just dive in and see.

Cheers,

Jason

GoldenProse.com

Thx for the great tips. Found many useful info in your post.

I’ll definitely look into that. Thanks for the tip.

Thanks for the great article. Just a couple of things extra that I do to boost my blog traffic: 1) I belong to the StockXchange (a site where photographers, like me, share their digital stock photos - most of them royalty free), and whenever I use another person’s photo, I email them with a link to my blog. Sometimes I get hits from them, and their family and friends when they view the photo. 2) If I use a photo, quote or text from another site, I always write them to ask “permission to use site content”, again with a link to my blog. I’ve gotten some great links to my site by doing this. I even got an invitation to pilot a Gravity Car (designed by Ferrari) in an attempt to break the speed record. (I know writing lots of letters may sound time consuming, but it’s not if you use form letters, and just copy/paste.)

I’m really thankful for articles like these. It was a good help into a fresh start with blogging. Thanks!

Hi Paul, thanks for the great article. Just to add on, Ordered List has a FeedBurner plugin for Wordpress that redirects entry feeds to your FeedBurner URL. I’ve found it quite useful since it means I don’t have to mess around and make changes to core files in Wordpress.

Hi Paul, thanks for the great article. Just to add on, Ordered List has a FeedBurner plugin for Wordpress that redirects entry feeds to your FeedBurner URL. I’ve found it quite useful since it means I don’t have to mess around and make changes to core files in Wordpress.

Oops sorry forgot to add the link.

http://orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-feedburner-plugin/

I followed your steps and my site traffic has gone through the roof!! Thank you so much Paul.

Love junglejamie

Thanks for the tips! I’m a new blogger and have much to learn more on how to generate traffic. I’ll try the feedburner idea. Didn’t know about this until I came across your blog!

The only article i like :-)

Great Post, very helpful.

If you like viewing other peoples posts, I recommend BlogMad. Its a link exchange site thingy where you get credits (and views in return) every time you view another persons blog…like I said worth a look if your interested in other people blogs.

Great advice and very clearly presented. Thanks! I’ll apply a lot of these ideas to my blog right away.

Alan
http://www.alanbaxter.info

Helped me a bunch! Thanks big time.

(And moi is still lost in this world of blogging, among many other worlds :-S ).

These tips and tricks are cool and I am going to try them out on my blog too.

I add my kudos to the huge pile. Thanks, Paul! I’m always trying to find resources that can help Know More Media’s 50-plus authors.

Thanks for the useful tips. I found that digg has become my major source of new visitors and am constantly looking for more services like it to direct more traffic to my site.
Does anyone have recomendations on it?

Thanks for the great info. I find that PageRank does not help us in the positoning in Google Search Pages. How about you?

Here is another site that has a series on Blog Traffic tutorial:

http://www.johntp.com/2006/03/24/how-to-increase-your-blogs-traffic-part1/

Excellent article! Reminds me I need to get fix up my “default” wordpress theme and add a better looking masthead. Good read…I’ve posted a link to your article on my blog.

James

Great article on such an important thing.
Thank you so much for writing this nice article, very helpfull.
regards.

Paul,
Just had a quick thought.
I am constantly referring to other posts I’ve made in the past when posting a new item (only if rellevant of course). this gives me an additional space to pitch my older posts as well as to allow readers interested in my post to navigate my site for more data. I see that almost all sites use this technique, yet no one discusses it.

Thanks for that, it was a very nice read.

Off i go then to find out about all these new things!

S

great tips! thanks!

Very useful stuff! Thanks for the help.