I wrote before about how writers approach blogging a bit differently than straight up Blogger-bloggers, and about how building traffic and a readership outside your usual audience for your books could help to increase book sales. But how do you build blog traffic?
Well, I’m just a baby blogger myself, but I’ve made a study out of traffic-building recently, and I have learned a few things. Here are some of the best ideas I’ve gleaned for traffic-building. (And I’m open to your suggestions!)
Write Quality Content. This is the first and most important task for every blogger. If your content is crap, you simply can’t grab and hold the eyeballs. Consider your audience and write pithy, entertaining, relevant posts. Save your rant about the outrageous thing that happened at work with the unnamed coworker that you can’t talk about for a social occasion, and instead use your writerly toolkit to create a good blog post. And here’s where professionally published old media writers have an advantage. We can totally bring it. So bring it! Write good posts. (But don’t kill yourself trying to make each one perfect. Quantity is important, too.)
Write Every Day, Or As Often as You Can. Blog audiences want you, NEED you, to save them from the drudgery of their day jobs. You are a source not only of entertainment, but procrastination. That means you need to be reliable. You need to be there for your readers when those TPS reports are stacked up to the ceiling and threatening to eat their brains. Every day is tough. If you can’t blog every day, do the best you can.
[Interlude: I have this theory that you could build a successful blog with high traffic without doing any additional traffic-building stuff, if it was good enough. Like, you could start the blog in secret, and never give out the URL or tell anyone it existed, and yet readers would show up, like ghost baseball players in Field of Dreams. I don't have the patience to test the theory, though.]
Set Up Google Analytics and Watch Your Traffic. You can use Google Analytics or some other traffic-monitoring tool, but once you start watching your traffic, you’ll see what’s popular and where your traffic is coming from, so you can do more of the same stuff. Recently, when I saw a lot of traffic was coming from Yahoo Shine, I went over there and set up a satellite blog where I can mirror some of my posts, or parts of them, drawing yet more traffic. (More on this below.) And when I see that a certain post is getting more hits, I can infer that people like it and want more.
Read Other Blogs and Leave Comments. Every comment you leave is a free advertisement for your blog. That’s why comment spam exists. Most of us block comment spam pretty aggressively, but your comments won’t be blocked because they’ll be relevant, and appropriate, and helpful. Right? Right?!? Your relevant, appropriate, helpful comment may include a link to a relevant, appropriate, helpful blog post, too, if the blog owner permits. I’ve seen reasonable traffic effects from blog comments, anywhere from 5 hits to upwards of 20 or 30. If you’re a new blogger, like me, that’s traffic worth chasing. Eventually, it may not be worth it, but it’s a pretty painless and fun way to promote, and it makes other bloggers feel loved, so why not do it? If you’re going to read a blog post anyway, it only takes an extra minute or two to leave a comment saying you loved it or whatever. (Just be specific, or you’ll look like a spammer yourself.)
Use Blogging Networks. My most popular post got picked up for the front page of Blogher, and drew a lot of traffic that way. From there, it got noticed by a blogger at Yahoo Shine, who wrote her own post on the same theme. It got a lot more traffic that way. I think it got around a hundred hits that day from Yahoo Shine alone, and I saw increased traffic from it for a couple of weeks altogether. Again, this is small potatoes for a big blogger, but for us little fish it’s valuable. The best way to use blogging networks, I think, is to have them as a sort of satellite blog. I don’t repost every piece from So Shiny over at Blogher or Yahoo Shine, but if I write one that seems like it would appeal to their audience, I’ll copy it over there. There are two ways to do this. One is the “click through to see more” method, where you chop it in half and ask people to click through to your main blog. That’s sort of a brute force way of pulling in traffic, but it burdens the reader with the extra effort of the click through. The other way is to just copy the whole post, and leave a link to your blog. I like that method better, as it seems more elegant, and then you get visitors from people who genuinely liked your post and are looking for more. Though fewer, those are probably more valuable visitors. They are probably the type of people who might subscribe to your feed or become regular readers.
Use Social Media. You don’t have to, and probably shouldn’t, Tweet and Facebook every blog post. (At least not if you’re blogging every day.) But you can use social media to highlight your meatier posts. If you’re tackling a tough topic, or making an effort to write a landmark post, go ahead and tweet it up. That’s what those services are for.
Use Social Bookmarking. Frankly, I am not very good at this yet, but I’m learning. If you’re active on social bookmarking services like De.lic.ious, Digg, Reddit, etc. you can bookmark your blog posts so others can find them. I’ve heard that Squidoo is particularly useful for traffic-building, because Google likes it. I’ve not done very much of this, so I don’t have much to say about how to make it work.
Make the Most of Keywords. Search engine optimization. Ack! Ptooey! It is the tool of the devil. And yet! You can use it for good, too. Tools like Google Keyword Tool make it possible to see what terms people are searching for in a subject area, how many people are searchng for them, and how much “competition” there is in search engines. Again, this is a relatively easy way to pull traffic to your blog posts. It only takes a few minutes to check the keywords around your intended blog post, and if you turn up a keyword combination that has a lot of searches, but not much competition, you can put that right in your title to maximize the chances that people will find it. And this is not just blog traffic whoring, either. Consider that crap-SEO content is proliferating all over the web using this same strategy. You’re doing a huge favor to readers if you help them find quality content for their search term, instead of yet another uninformative plagiarized piece of junk full of cheap google ads. In fact, by using search engine optimization strategies, you’re pretty much saving the world. Do it!
Link Other Bloggers. This is a nicely subtle way to get their attention. If they like what you write, they may link back. If they really like it, they may become readers. If they really, really like it, they could become your new best friend, and you could move in and sleep in their basement! Okay, that last one, not so much. But it is a good way to make friends and find readers. And you know what? Once you put a blogger’s name in your blog post, you start poaching some of their search traffic. No kidding. I get searches for other writer/bloggers all the time. I got one once from someone who apparently thinks that Jim Hines might drive a Mercedes Benz 300 SL Gull Wing. (Confidential to googlers: yes, he totally does. The guy is like LOADED with goblin wealth.)
Join Forums Related to Your Interests and Be Fascinating. If you have an interest you frequently blog about, you can join a web site community devoted to that interest and include a link to your blog in every post you make. This is not so easy to do if you don’t really care to connect with other people with the same hobby or interest, but if it appeals to you, it will create traffic. Just remember to include a link in your sig line.
Blog Carnivals. A blog carnival is a themed blogfest, usually scheduled on a certain day of the week or month where people share blog posts on a particular topic. There’s a tool called Mr. Linky that you can install in WordPress (and I’m sure there are others), that will let people add links to their own blogs. Typical blog carnival ettiquette is that you add your relevant blog post using Mr. Linky, and then include a link back to the carnival host on your blog. It’s fun and easy, and whenever I participate, I get a dozen or so visitors, even if there’s quite a long Linky list. For successful linking, make sure you include a descriptive title. It also helps to separately make a comment on the carnival post with an excerpt or teaser from your linked blog post. Make sure to read the rules before you link. Many blog carnivals have very specific guidelines for linking. Some blog carnivals travel from blog to blog, giving different people a chance to host. I think we could use some writer blog carnivals, and I have thoughts of starting one up some time soon. (Besides, I really want to play with Mr. Linky.) (Did that sound dirty?)
Are you monitoring your blog traffic? Do you have any tips for boosting it?