You finally have your blog up and running. You’ve added a nice theme and lots of good content. What do you want next? Lots of visitors, of course! The most valuable visitors will of course come from search engines, when people type in a certain phrase and find your blog. Unfortunately when you first start a new blog it can be hard to get search engine traffic. Don’t fret–there are other ways to drive instant visitors to your blog, and they are all free.
1. Social Bookmarking
There are loads of social bookmarking sites online, but my two favorite ones are Digg and Stumbleupon. Social bookmarking sites are designed for users to submit their favorite stories and links from all over the internet and share them with other users. If you are lucky, social bookmarking can drive hundreds of visitors to your blog.
2. Blog Commenting
Go and find other high traffic blogs in the same niche as yours and post some comments. Make sure you thoroughly read their blog post first and make your comment meaningful. Otherwise your comment may not be published by the author of the blog. Some blog owners use “do follow” for their comment links, and this will help with SEO.
3. Forum Posting
Find high traffic forums related to your niche and register for them. Again, don’t spam your blog link everywhere! Just a simple link in your signature will do. If you do spam the forum you may risk having your account banned and you will only earn yourself and your blog a bad reputation. However, if you post meaningful and helpful posts, you will get plenty of clickthroughs to your blog.
4. Social Networking
Sign up to some blogging social networking sites like MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog. This is where many bloggers hang out and check out each other’s blogs. Fill out your profile information to attract other bloggers who might click through to your blog from your profile page. Interact and socialize with them.
5. Submit Your Blogs RSS feed to RSS directories
Your blog’s RSS feed usually looks like this “http://www.YOURSITENAME.com/feed”. Look online and find as many RSS feed directories as you can and submit away. This will increase exposure to your blog and its feed.
November 25th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I get about half my traffic through blog commenting, just keep in mind that you never want to spam other people blogs, if you can’t contribute … don’t. As for forum posting, I’ve been looking at a few but I never find a good reason to get into the conversations.