Be Seen and Get Involved
Well, officially the Blogged out Project commences this coming Monday, but I wanted to share with you some early stats. On Saturday I added live Blogflux Mapstats on to the blog to analyse the traffic patterns prior to Monday.
The number of unique visitors has slightly increased as you can see from the table on Blogflux, and all I have done is visit my three favourite webmaster related forums [Digitalpoint, Web Talk Forums and V7n] and helped fellow members with their blogging issues and questions.
Have a try yourself. Look at your blog niche, e.g. entertainment blog and use similar techniques. Visit entertainment forums and help fellow members, discuss entertainment news, and get involved.
People will see your blog link within the forum signature and visit your blog, and you will see a steady increase in visitors. This type of promotion is not going to bring you thousands of visitors, but it is a good way to slowly build up your readership. Give it a try and report back with your feedback, both positive and negative.
Look at my traffic for today – this has come from various sources and tomorrow I’ll go into more detail how blog networking can increase your readership and raise the awareness of your blog.
Most Commented Posts
Filed under: Blogged Out Project on March 14th, 2007
Hi Darren,
Have you considered showing the various places where the Blogged Out Project is being talked about? I know I’ve found one good blog just in the comments section of the last post, and I originally found out about your site from Chris Garrett’s coverage of this experiment.
Besides the networking advantage, showing your readers who else is talking about you could provide valuable “social proof” (read: testimonials) that can generate even more interest in what you’re doing. -j
Good Point John.
I’ll be writing about a post tomorrow [today] about networking and I will include a link to the sites that have mentioned the project.
Just to prove the point on how important networking can be for a blogger, today I have received 231 uniques, yesterday I had 60 uniques. It’s nearly quadrupled.
Hey Darren -
Another good method to increase traffic and site visibility is to use free advertising and link exchanges. I have used a couple of these since I have been blogging and found that they bring in a good amount of traffic without requiring much upkeep or money (always an added bonus). One of the better services that I have used is http://adgridwork.com because they allow content targeting and work with both Wordpress and Blogger. I’ve also dabbled with http://bla.st and found it to be a good directory as well. Hope these help.
-Nick
Nick,
I’m not a lover or link exchanges where blogs are concerned. I look at it that if your content is interesting people will link to it.
Free advertising is good though - anything free is
I don’t have a marketing budget so everything I try out on this blog will be free or very low cost. Thanks for the links I will check them out.
Has anyone tried visiting a forum within their niche [theme] and help fellow members? Did this work for you or fail?
Would appreciate peoples feedback because it seemed to work for me.
Hey Darren -
Ya, traditional link exchanges can be bad for blogs if you are just swapping links with other webmasters (you can get flagged as being in a ‘bad neighborhood’ by Google and be penalized in the rankings). However, whats cool about these new generations of link exchanges (as in the ones I listed), are that they are using those new ‘2.0 widgets’ so no link juice is being swapped among sites (you get the benefits of site exposure, without the penalties associated with reciprocal communities). Anyways, I think they are good options for bloggers like you and I who don’t have boat loads of money to dump into a large advertising campaign.
-Nick
Darren -
I have found that blog networking works just like networking in business. My blog is of a personal nature, but I would still like to learn how to increase traffic because I plan on starting a professional one in the future. My blog traffic went up when I started even just talking to people about it. I encouraged them to pass my URL along to anyone they wanted, and that has helped.
My next goal is to get involved in some communities/groups where I can connect personally. Do you think that is fair, seeing as a community like that would probably be the first to find my content interesting?
I appreciate your help, and enjoy your website. I added it to my Google Reader and will link to it from mine.
Laura