Traffic Generation Archive

One of the ways I mention in "11 Free, Easy Ways to Get Visitors to Your New Blog" is blog carnivals. Well, carnivals aren't always just grouped by blog topic. Mother Jones has a great post today listing a few carnivals in categories you may not have thought about.

Back in February, I mentioned that the MyBlogLog widget could possibly be something that would generate traffic to your blog all by itself just by virtue of you using it. Well two and a half months later, MyBlogLog (MBL) becomes more and more valuable to me every day so I wanted to revisit it and talk about why I've developed such a fondness for it. Keep reading »

We all know that search engines can bring us free traffic, so last week we covered the basics of how to SEO a blog. That's where you should start if you haven't already. The next step, though, is to start ranking well for terms that you already rank for somewhere in the results. Pages in the top 3 results can get ten times as much traffic (or more) than ... Keep reading »

In my first post about the 90-Day Challenge, I forgot to mention that one of the things that made me want to give you motivation for blogging consistently for 90 days was Al Carlton's answers in this Bloggers Face-Off. I was stunned that someone who had only been blogging for 18 months could have 30,000 page views every day and more than 20,000 feed subscribers. Think about that: 20,000 subscribers. Unreal. Then I read that he writes 10 to 15 posts a day, has 5 writers on staff and blogs 5 hours/day sometimes. That's the first time the light bulb really went on for me: unless your content is ground-breaking, miss-at-your-own-peril kind of stuff, you've got to be consistent. And even if your content is that vital, you'll still lose a ton of people if you don't blog regularly. Keep reading »

A month ago yesterday, I made a open attempt to start ranking for "Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan" as part of an example of how important <title>s are. Well this morning I discovered that that was an even better idea than I thought it was. Not only am I now ranking fourth in Google (as of this writing), but 14 of the last 100 visitors to ... Keep reading »

For those of you who are new to the site this week, I keep a list in my sidebar of the great things I've read through Google Reader. They have a Share function that makes it easy to -- well -- share particularly interesting posts. I try to always put them in a post when I've built up 10 or so so that you RSS subscribers see them as well, but regular readers will tell you that ... Keep reading »

You've probably heard many times about all the free visitors you can get from search engines. Well SEO, or search engine optimization, is the science -- and art -- of getting a site to rank well in order to get as many of those visitors as possible. The great thing for you as a blogger is that you don't have to been an SEO expert to see quite a bit of search engine traffic to your site because most blogs are tailor-made for ranking well in search engines. Just take a look at the top ten search engine ranking factors and notice how many are naturally inherent in blogs. I count seven to nine, depending on how strict you want to be. Since blogs are almost always text-heavy, very community-driven and interlinked heavily, it's hard to find your blog not ranking for lots of things if it becomes popular. However, there are a few easy things that you do need to do to ensure that you're set up for search engine success. The basic principle behind all of them is that SEO, first and foremost, is about so much more than your homepage. Especially with blogs, you'll find that most of your search engine visitors come in on anything but your homepage. So almost all the basic SEO for a blog has to do with your individual pages. Keep reading »

So you've got a great blog with great content -- only no one knows it yet. Not a problem, because getting visitors to great content is one of the easiest things you'll ever do. Here's how to get started. Take Advantage of Your Network If you've been actively getting out and meeting your neighbors, you've built up a pretty good network of blogging and website-owning friends. Drop them an email to let them know about your new blog ... Keep reading »

Oops. For those of you who are reading via RSS, I forgot to post my shared links once I hit 10 new ones like I promised last week. So without further ado, here's the new 14! Keep reading »

Google Reader has a Share feature that allows you to mark items in the RSS feeds that you subscribe to. When you do that, those items are then made available for public consumption through a custom URL and through a custom RSS feed. Well I read things all the time that I want to share a link to, but it's frequently a chore to write a full post about them, and I just never seem to get around to ... Keep reading »

I'm an admitted Iron Man nerd.  I saw it three times in the theater, and I almost never go to ...

Mark at Business is Personal generates more genuinely great content consistently than any other blog I know of.  He hits a homerun just about every time up to bat.  ...

Love this post by Alan today.  Here's my favorite part: Gurus claiming they make money from the net or whatever line they’re using is like saying the guy we buy ...