Newbie's guide to increasing blog traffic

So, you have started a blog. You have been blogging on your blog for quite some time now and the only one who reads it (apart from you) is your spouse or your sibling who you force to. But, that is not why you started blogging for. You wanted to reach out to the world through your words and wanted to exchange ideas, thoughts with the blogging community. But, no one seems to be noticing your blog. Here are a few tips to help you get through.

This guide is based on my own experiences with maintaining this site. I have been having my site for a little more than a year now. Initially, i used to be happy when my statcounter hit went into double digits. My site is in a much better position now. This is not a copy-paste work, but an attempt to jot down the various measures i took which i felt contributed to increase in traffic to my blog.

This is not a guide on

• How to make money through blogging
• How to increase search rankings of your blog/site (yes, indirectly to reach people, you have to do this)
• How to implement SEO techniques on your blog
• How to increase your site's google Page rank

If you are interested in any of the above, search on google and you will find hundreds of sites. This is a guide to increase readership for your blog, in all the legal, ethical ways possible. So here goes:

• Original Content: Readers need content. So, the foremost thing to do is to have good content on your blog. The definition of "good" varies. We are not looking at writing content just to bring in readers. So, what is good content? Content about which, you are passionate to write about, content which interests you enough to write about. I once started a blog on reviews of the latest mobile devices, but it didn't go anywhere, as i realised that i was just doing copy-paste work and not really interested in writing about it. You can write about technology, politics, entertainment, sports or anything else you like, but write original content. Copy-paste content might get you some initial traffic, but rest assured that they won't come back. Original opinions, be it controversial or neutral are appreciated by the blogging world.
• Frequency of posts: Posting entries on your blog shouldn't happen once in a blue moon. Neither should it happen dozens of times in a day. Don't neglect your blog. If a visitor comes two or three times to your blog over a span of a week and doesn't find any updates, he will most likely de-favourite it. Don't get over-enthusiastic and spend your entire day on the blog. Readers should not get lost amongst too many things you write. Write often, write original content and you should steadily, but surely see your readership base grow.
• Submit to search engines: Go to google, yahoo or major search engines and blog directories and submit your blog. This doesn't guarantee inclusion, but there is nothing in doing it if there is such an option in the search engines. The link for submitting your blog to google is this and to yahoo is this.
• Implement technorati Tags: This is probably the best thing i have done. Register your site with technorati and for each of your posts, add a section with the related technorati tags. Many readers prefer to read content of their liking ( a particular topic or a news item) by searching on technorati and then going to the returned links. I use the Technorati Tag generator at Fintan's, which is simple and easy to use. The advantage of this technique is that the same tags are used by many other sites like icerocket which can get you more readers.
• Talk about your blog to friends: I do this shamelessly, of course to the closer circle of friends. If we attend a party, i put the pictures up on my blog and share the link with my friends. I do this rather than sharing photos on my PC.
• Add your blog link in your email signature: I don't do this, because i use my official email id for practically all my communication and it wouldn't be right to do this on my official id. If you have a gmail id or any other, put the link in your signature. But, a word of caution. I have seen people writing to huge mailing groups with their blog links prominently in a bigger font. Yes, if you are genuinely writing to the group on a related topic, this is fine, otherwise don't do this and get classified as a spammer.
• Visit other blogs and leave your comments: No, not comments like "Nice blog, visit mine" or "Do find time to visit my blog". Yes, if you do that on a very popular blog, you might get at least a few clicks to your blog, provided that the blog owner doesn't remove your comment. Visit blogs, leave meaningful, related comments to topics which you have an opinion about. Don't flood anyone's blog with your comments. That is an obvious sign of a spammer.
• Implement a counter on your site. I use sitemeter and statcounter. Doing this will give you an indication of your most popular posts. It also will give you the "search strings" using which people land up on your site.
• Customise your blog template such that the page title of the individual post pages have the title of the post in them and not just your blog's name. Also, make your post title link to this page.
• Link to other people whose blog belongs to the same domain as yours. If your blog is good enough, some of them might link back to you, thus getting you some visitors.
• If you write on something specific, look for wikipedia pages on the same topic and add your blog to the external links section. If your blog is not good enough, the link will be removed by the moderators. I maintain a page which has lot of quizzing links and i get lot of visitors from the page for Quizzing in India.

This is not an exhaustive list, but a few things which i felt might make the difference to a blog. Hope this helps. Feel free to add more.

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