CornerScribe

Increase Your Site Traffic

Here’s an interesting article, which describes 30 ways to increase your blog traffic.

Some of the techniques are good, but I think you also have to be careful. For example, the article recommends leaving comments on others’ blogs with your url. That’s fine, as long as you’re leaving a REAL comment, and not just posting something gratuitous to get a link to your blog. I love how the yarn harlot puts it… a person’s blog is like their living room. They invite you in, and you need to show a bit of courtesy (well, maybe more than a bit…). Trying to push your own blog on someone else’s site without offering something constructive for theirs is a little like going to a stranger’s yard sale and setting up a table with your stuff in their yard.

Another suggestion that I think can come back to bite you is the recommendation to be controversial. If you like that, and it works for your blog, fine. However, don’t go for the controversial topics just to boost readership. Your regular readers will quickly figure out what you’re up to, and you’re just as likely to alienate them as gain new readers.

In my opinion, the best thing you can do is to provide good content, and keep it coming at a relatively regular pace. As many others, I’ve failed to do the latter on more than one occasion. Whether the content here is “good,” I’ll leave up to you.

Ping the blog tracking sites when you update your blog. You should be able to set that up automatically, so that’s a no-brainer.

Post worthwhile comments on others’ blogs, with a link back to your own. This works best if you’re posting to blogs that are somewhat related to your own. It probably wouldn’t do much good for me to post to an car-enthusiast blog, but blogs about writing, reading, knitting and organization are good choices based on what I write.

Time is on your side. Post regularly, and you’ll see your traffic grow steadily.