People start a blog for many reasons, personal satisfaction, a way to keep friends and relatives informed on what they are doing, i.e. staying in touch, as a way to make money, a creative challenge. Most of them however, have one thing in common-they want traffic. And most of them experience the same maddening frustration, the same rubix cube challenge, how to get it. Because traffic is the holy grail, the bubbling wellspring for blogs and bloggers that opens doors, gives validation and may end up paying the bills. Even if you are doing it for the simple reason of publishing your thoughts for friends to see, it soon becomes apparent that blogging is a lot of work and and if you don't put in the work, no one will come, even your friends. Little traffic soon becomes no traffic and the blog dies. No one wants to go to work in a museum vault unless one is a scholar or a well paid janitor. On the other end of the spectrum, if you blog to make money, traffic is a huge consideration. So how does one get it?
The first place I launched my blog was Facebook. After some research, I found that at this time, it is for most people as well. If your blog is a commercial/business blog, Facebook has a unique business page dedicated to talking about your business. Here, you can add links to your site. Facebook was the first place that came to my mind. And why not? After all, its the number one social network site in the world, siting a half a billion active users. As a newbie blogger, I assumed that I would post my brilliant content and ALL my friends, a paltry 92, would come there for pearls of wisdom and scintillating entertainment. And they would share it with their friends and so on. It would start a chain reaction of sorts. In that vein, I also 'friended' friends of friends, (they all accepted) and they would of course be interested in what I had to say. Unfortunately my initial optimism was quickly dampened.
The problem with Facebook is that you can only get so much traffic from it, even if you had 597 friends. And you have to work for that traffic. I would post my content on someone's wall with a catchy com-on to attract them, I would send personal messages with content I thought someone might like etc. My real friends have supported my blog, but very seldom did the 'friends of friends'. And even if they did, you cannot rely on them passing on the word. So, though Facebook is a fine place to launch a blog, establish a brand and work out the kinks, it is not the place that is going to get you increased traffic.
Another way is if you are a member of a message board. I am a member of long standing in a biker board. So I have used that place to post entries on my blog. But, though they are all great long time friends, there are limits. You must target your viewership. My blog is a city-centric theme and my most popular section is food and cooking. And though bike riders love to cook and eat, they might not be that interested in reading about the virtues of a fine French wine. So unless I write about motorcycles, or a great steak, I will get traffic, but only modestly.
What you need is traffic from all over the net, from all over the world and direct uniques. And you want it coming in 24/7, not just when you post a new entry. You want to wake up in the morning and view your stat page and see that during the night while your were sleeping, 60 or 660 people visited your site. You want your blog to become a vortex of energy and information that people you don't know come to YOU.com to see what you have to say and to offer. It has been said that one doesn't get respect in their hometown and unless you are happy being a small fish in a small pond, you must find a way to reach people in other ways. You must venture out to 'other towns' and you must let other sources do the heavy lifting.
I have found that submitting articles in article hubs like EzineArticles.com and Articlebase etc is a very good way to increase traffic to a blog. As a matter of fact, at this time, I can think of no better way. I have seen my stats double and triple in no time at all by simply submitting to these sites. What they do is act as a hub where sources all over the world come to find pertinent articles on any given subject and re-publish these articles on their sites. They are useful in other ways as well. Because of their editorial standards, they tend to hone your skills as a writer and increase visibility of your content on the World Wide Web. On many of them, such as EzineArticles, you cannot post the link to your site directly in the article body, however, they do allow you to in the author bio section, and it is from that section that readers will click on your site if they like what you are saying or what you may offer. One thing they do not do is attract web crawlers, robots or 'bots'. The reason is that when you submit to a hub site, that counts as 1 submission on the web. So, when your article is reprinted, the site that publishes it receives the subsequent bot attention. Robots are useful in that search engines like Google use them to index sites and content. A lot of crawlers lets the engines know that people are interested in your site and eventually a person only has to type in 'JohnSmith.com' and many of your posts will come up by themselves. This will result in more direct traffic, and will also call up articles submitted to the hubs.
So robot traffic is very important in blog building and that IS where Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites do help because your link posted there is always direct to your blog.
A couple of other ways are to ask friends who have sites to add your link to theirs, in a quid pro quo. The more linkage, the more robot attention. Posting on other sites has also been mentioned as a way to establish community and reputation. I have not used this method myself but I intend to. I hear it works very well.
The idea is to do whatever it takes to get your name out there. You must write good content, you must have interesting ideas or a good product to sell, but you must always pay attention to the other part of blogging which is promotion. Even if you have nothing to sell, the very idea that hundreds of people every day from all over the world are listening to what YOU have to say, validates your dream of being a writer. Follow your dreams, but do what it takes to make them come true.
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