Thursday, May 10, 2007

Three Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

So you have set up your blog with great content and graphs. Now how do you get people to read your blog?

First, you want to post, post, post to your blog. Writing and posting to your blog is like blood circulating in your veins. The more new content is circulated through your blog, the stronger it will be.

But you can't write:

Of course you can. Just set aside time in your day to write and start putting anything down that comes to mind. That way, you are getting the juices started and soon more ideas will come. Then the article will be done.

If you have no time to write or simply don't like writing, you can hire a ghostwriter. They can be found at Elance.com or Craigslist.com among others.

Second, social bookmark your blog. So, what is social bookmarking? Simply, it is people online sharing their opinions, insights, experiences and etc with each other. This sharing can take many form such as chat forums, blogs, podcasts, and message boards. It is anything that brings people together so that they can interact with each other.

There are many social bookmarks to be a part of. I will briefly discuss four of the most popular sites:

1. Digg (http://www.digg.com) started off as community-based website emphasising technology and science articles. It has now become so popular and large that it includes almost anything.

2. Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) is a close second to Digg in the backlink community. Del.icio.us main focus is to store your bookmarks online. This encourages cross-linking among those who share similar interests. resulting in the creation of backlinks . All posts to del.icio.us are publicly viewable by default, although specific bookmarks can be marked as private. Imported bookmarks are private by default.

3. Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) is the award winning authority of weblogs. The primary purpose of Technorati is monitoring your online visibility by monitoring linking, other sites mentioning you, your site's progress and competitor's progress.

4. Furl (http://www.furl.net/) allows members to bookmark, annotate and share web pages. Users may view lists of other members who have made comments or furled a website. Members can subscribe to a user's archive to get email notifications when a new item is added.

Third, you can write a press release to drive traffic.

There are many press release companies. One of which is PRWeb. They were one of the first companies to allow almost anyone to write and distribute a press release online. Earlier before the advent of the internet, mostly large companies and corporations distributed press releases. However, PRWeb charges for their service. There are many press release companies that are free. One advantage of press releases is that they do not have to be very long. A couple of hundred words in several paragraphs is enough.

With a little creativity and practice, you'll soon see your traffic growing. These three simple steps will allow you to attract and retain your readers as your blog develops.

1 comment:

Nancy said...

Thank you very much for your advice. I will try Yahoo Answer.