Blog Traffic Through Blog Commenting - 7 Tips

People often recommend building awareness and traffic to your blog through leaving comments on other blogs. This can work well, but will work far better if you consider the tips below, which greatly build on the "write great comments on lots of blogs idea."

1)    Write great comments

The typical advice is to leave intelligent and insightful comments that add value to the reader. This is solid advice, but just a beginning on blog commenting strategies.

2)    Leave controversial comments

Controversy gets noticed, and you can build interest and traffic by politely offering different points of view in comments. Don't be controversial just to stand out, but only where it's reasonable and adds value.

Opinions are valued in the blogosphere, and as long as you have a legitimate differing view and can back it up, don't shy away from controversy.

3)    Use a consistent commenter name

Always use a consistent name when you leave comments. For example if your name is Robert James Smith, don't sometimes use "Bob Smith," sometimes "Robert Smith," and sometimes "Robert James Smith." Pick one consistent representation of your name so that people will get to recognize you.

4)    Append your blogname or other tagline to your comment name

You can append your blogname or other tagline to your name when commenting. For example, if you're Bob Smith and your blog is called "Feline Health," using the name "Bob Smith, Feline Health" will get you lots of notice on cat blogs. Make sure, as mentioned above, you use a consistent name, whether you include a tagline or not.

5)    Comment early

Early comments attract more attention than late comments. It's better to have the first or second comment on a popular blog than the 5th or 25th. The later comments tend to get buried and not read as often.

6) Comment often on the same blogs

Regular readers will be more likely to notice you if you regularly leave comments and will be more likely to visit your blog.

7) Leave comments on related blogs

It doesn't matter how great your comments might be, if you are a cat blogger your comments will work better on other cat blogs than on political, ,marketing, or other unrelated blogs!

Leaving comments is a great way to build blog traffic. By considering the tips above, you'll build more traffic than by simply using the common "leave great comments"strategy.

And for over 100 more tips on successful blogging, I invite you to grab your free copy of my ebook Secrets of Successful Blogging at http://www.secretsofsuccessfulblogging.com

Building Traffic: 6 Tips to Publicize Your Blog

You need to publicize your blog. Write it and they will come won't work. Even if you are famous, even if you are Madonna or Osama Bin-Laden or Bill Gates, if you start blogging no one is going to read it if they don't know about it.

1) One technique is simply to tell people about your blog.

For example, email them and tell them about it. Guy Kawasaki e-mailed ten thousand people when he started blogging. Now Guy is a best selling author, one of the original Apple employees who evangelized the Macintosh, and is a columnist for Forbes.com -- you probably don't know as many people as Guy and neither do I. However do let your friends, colleagues and other contacts know.

2) Use your email signature. 

An email signature is a little block of text that is appended to every email that you send and all modern email programs allow email signatures. You can include your blog information in your email signature. I suggest you experiment with different text. Some people may be more likely to visit something that says that it's a blog, while others may be more likely to click on something like "Ted's thoughts and opinions on whatever" you are blogging on. 

3) Link prominently from your website.

If you have a Web site, link prominently to your blog. Don't make it hard to find. It always amazes me when companies or individuals start a blog and it is very difficult to find.

There was a local gourmet food shop whose blog was written up in a local paper and it was almost impossible to find. They should have had a link from their home page on their website and from any other pages that were appropriate, but they didn't. With some difficulty, I found it via Googling around and I shouldn't have had to gone to that difficulty. They certainly didn't do themselves any favors.

4) List your blog anywhere you list your website.

This includes online as well as offline materials such as letterheads and business cards, in any advertisements, on your fax header page and so forth.

I don't currently list my blog on my business card although I probably should. I notice a lot of people do, but some don't. Most people which don't are pretty much in the same boat as me. I printed a couple of thousand business cards about ten years ago, and I simply don't go through them that fast. But the next time I print business cards I am going to guarantee you my blog will be prominently featured there.

5) Another way to build traffic is to enter carnivals. Carnivals can really help to publicize your blog.

A carnival is a "best of list" of posts on certain topic, and carnivals move continuously to new host blogs - that's the carnival aspect.  Examples include Carnival of the Capitalists, Carnival of Entrepreneurship, Carnival of Marketing, Carnival of Business, and so forth. The best way to find them is via the Search Engines or blogcarnival.com, which currently lists 787 blog carnivals. There is probably one your blog could be included in. And every time I get listed in a blog carnival, I do get some additional traffic.

6) List yourself as the author of your blog and include it your bio and other places. For example, let's say you are a petunia consultant and have a blog called Petunia Power. You could list yourself as Ted Demopoulos, author of Petunia Power (assuming your name is Ted Demopoulos, which is probably isn't).

Now that sounds impressive! What is Petunia power? Is it a book? Is it a website? Is it a blog? Well, it really doesn't matter. It sounds impressive and it is because you're writing regularly on a topic.

Write it and they will come won't work. You need to let the world know about your blog. These tips will help you get the word out.

And for over 100 more tips on successful blogging, I invite you to grab your free copy of my ebook Secrets of Successful Blogging at http://www.secretsofsuccessfulblogging.com

Blogging: More Traffic through Highlighting your Greatest Hits

Highlight your most popular posts, make them easily visible to visitors, and your blog will be more valuable, and it will be more likely that visitors will return and become regular readers.

All bloggers will find that some of their blog posts more popular than the rest. These are arguably the ones that readers find most valuable, and I call these classic hits.

For example you might have a most popular post section in the sidebar as I do. I have a most popular post section and list my most popular there. Other bloggers do it slightly differently. For example, Brian Clark at copyblogger.com has a "Popular Articles" in his sidebar and under that he lists his most popular blog posts. Yaro Starak, at entrepreneurs-journey.com calls his most popular posts "Popular Articles" and lists them at the very top of his blog. You might do something as simple as create a category called most popular and include them in that category.

You will be surprised at which posts are your most popular. All bloggers are! Sometimes a post which is fantastic and incredible in your mind will receive very little interest, and a post you found almost not worth publishing will have massive interest. What your readers like is what is most important, not what you think they should like.

How do you determine which articles are most popular? Most blogger determine popularity by the number of readers. They consider their most popular posts to be the ones with the most traffic. Another metric to determine a post's popularity is the number of comments. The more comments a blog post has the more popular it is considered. Some bloggers, including myself, factor in both comments and traffic to determine popularity.

It doesn't matter how you chose your most popular posts, your "classic hits," as long as you highlight them somehow. This makes your blog more valuable to visitors, and makes it more likely that they will return and become regular readers.

And for over 100 more tips on successful blogging, I invite you to grab your free copy of my ebook Secrets of Successful Blogging at http://www.secretsofsuccessfulblogging.com

10 Blog Traffic Tips

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else''s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that''s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major "pillar" articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good "how-to" lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don''t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that''s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger''s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it''s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it''s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it''s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it''s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your "Resource Box". You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it''s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time. You may have read about him in my latest book, What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting, where I called him the "Blog Traffic King."

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

Chris Brogan on Promoting Your Media

How do you promote your stuff? Your blog, your whatever -- performance art anyone?

If you like it (it's good), it'll benefit more people, including you, if more people hear about it, see it, experience it.

Here's a great list from Chris Brogan on Promoting Your Media.

Conversational Media Blog Traffic Tips

Conversational Media, not only blogs, but things like Twitter, Facebook, MyBlogLog, etc. can be used to grow traffic to your blog.

Admittedly, I use all three mentioned, but certainly not optimally!

Paul Chaney has a great post where he lists 5 additional steps you can take using conversational media to build blog traffic.

He ends with his sage advice:

If you don't do anything else, at least do these two things (make that three things):

1. Write exceptional content that's of interest to your readers.
2. Do it everyday and keep it keyword optimized and topically-relevant. Google will absolutely love you for it. So will your human audience.
   
3. Actively participate in topically-relevant communities and blogs (emphasis mine).

Find Your Blog Demographics Easily!

Who is reading your blog or Web site -- what are your reader demographics?

Young, old, male, female, bald, hungry -- errr, you get the idea.
The best way is to survey your readers, which has challenges itself, but a super easy way to estimate your demographics instantly is with Microsoft adCenters Labs:

Demographics Prediction Tool

How accurate is it? Who knows for sure, but it's amusing and perhaps useful

This blog? 63% male, 37% female, 22% 35-49 years old, 21.5% less than 18 years old, 20% 18-24 years old, and 20% 25-34 years old.

I would have guessed more female readers based on my emails from readers and fewer "less than 18" years old -- and of course I may be right and it may be wrong.

How's it work? In their words on the blog/Web site demographics prediction tool:

You can use adCenter technology to predict a customer's age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior-that is, from search queries and webpage views. General Distribution is the breakdown by age of MSN Search users-based on a one-month MSN Search log-regardless of search query used. Predicted Distribution is the predicted breakdown by age of MSN Search users for a single search query, based on the adLabs predictive model.

Blog SEO Tips from Aaron Wall

Most Internet Traffic comes from the search engines, so paying attention to search engine optimization (SEO) when you blog makes sense.

Many Blogs and Web sites get much of their traffic from the search engines. For example this blog got 25% of its visitors from search engines, primarily Google, last week. Some weeks it's much more!

Search Engine Optimization Aaron Wall has a two part interview at Problogger:
SEO Tips  and More SEO Tips. I also had the good fortune to interview and include Aaron in my book What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting.

Aaron's blog is well worth reading and his SEO Book ebook simply rocks!

Seeing The Forest AND The Trees: The Magic Of Metrics

Guest post by Shawn Chambers, a passionate plastics blogger who is having great success, and fun, blogging. In his own words:

As a WordPress.com user, it appears that I've got a bit of a luxury over TypePadders and BlogSpotters in that I'm provided with detailed, real time metrics right off my blog's dashboard explaining not only how many people are visiting but how they got there and what search phrases they used to find the blog.

It can be frustrating to watch day-by-day, minute-by-minute charting the number of people that read your articles.

You see good days. You see bad days. But, not all days are created equal and it's important that you recognize this to avoid taking up virtual cliff diving.

I've been at this about 2 months now. I've landed just over 5,000 visitors.
That sounds like a lot and it is to the novice. However, I'm just like most aspiring bloggers out there who sees a slow-read day and begins wondering how much value they're really contributing to the blogosphere and whether or not it's worth the investment of time and faith.

Consider your blog like publishing 7 different magazines. After a while you'll see that each day has a unique traffic pattern demanding different types of information.

For example, weekends typically attract non-business minds that now have some free time to think and explore new ideas - they might even be the same people that were looking for business-related stuff earlier in the week. Mondays - people want to get caught up over the weekend and are looking for both creative stimulus and a reason to get re-excited about their jobs. Fridays - well, people just want to make it through the rest of the day and, like Mondays, are looking for creative stimulus to bide the time. So, focus your publishing efforts based on what people are asking for on a particular day.
Remember - read the little charts that tell you what people are clicking on AFTER they've read your article (I usually put a source line at the top of each article referring to where I found the content) which will give you some insight into what is grabbing the interest of your readers.

The bottom line: Measure your success by the weekly increase in daily visitors: This Sunday vs last Sunday, Friday vs last Friday, etc - regardless, don't lose the faith.

If you have something worthwhile to blog about then someone will find it.
Blog On!

How to quickly get 100+ more readers to your blog

First the general technique, then specifics for August.

Join writing projects like ones Problogger and Ben Yoskovitz occasionally run. You write a post following the writing project guidelines and get a link back.

My last two have generated well over 100 additional visitors each.

For example right now, Darren Rowse at Problogger is running 31 Days to Building a Better Blog. You can participate (and get a link and traffic back) by posting a blogging tip and submitting via this form (read the rules first, OK?)

Tips do not need to be profound! What's obvious to you may not be to others. Something bizarre that works for you may also help others too. For example, do you find that posting first thing in the morning before even going to toilet results in your best writing? Well, blog about and then submit it.

While you're at it, why not submit your post to some blog carnivals and get additional links and traffic back (although probably less traffic than a link from Darren!)?