I received an email from Aaron of Utah Outings asking me for advice on promoting his site.
I am looking for advice to promote my site. Any and all information would be
much appreciated as I am not as geeky as you. I bow to your geekness and look
forward to your response.
I’m sorry it took a while for me to answer but I’m so flattered I thought it deserved a blog post in my ass-vice category even though it’s actually solicited advice, so here goes:
1. Attention grabbing titles and Content – Not every post needs an exciting title, but if you had a choice between “my boring day” or “George Carlin turned us into necrophiliacs” which would you choose? Whether your posts are funny, informative or a combination it’s up to you and the boundaries of your blog scope, the important thing is consistency and keeping the interest. Some people don’t want to offend so they stay away from dicey topics others love a good debate and jump in the fire with both feet. If you’re trying to sell a product or service, I’d really recommend staying away from politics and religion. Get more tips on blog writing from Blog Bloke.
2. Timing is everything – Obviously if you blog about the news the ideal would be to be right on top of it when the news breaks. What many people don’t know is that Monday and Tuesday are the best bloggy days and it’s best to get your more important posts out in time for the lunch crowd readers. If you’re on the west coast keep in mind that the east coast lunch crowd is three hours ahead. Also somethings are seasonal. I wrote a post in September about my experience with Sears Portrait Studio and the hots for that post spiked in mid November / early December. I’m guessing from people that get family Christmas pictures done.
3. Links and Comments – If you’re getting information from other bloggers link to them in your posts! Leave post-appropriate comments on various blogs whether they’re competitors or possible customers. It’s fine to add your url in the appropriate url space on the comment form and it’s even ok if the url you leave is to a specific post but don’t use the comment space to advertise your product or your blog it’s rude and tacky. Also make sure to remove “nofollow” from your blog so that you may spread link luv to your commenters. To spread even more link luv wordpress users can use the commentluv plugin.
4. Bloggy and Social networking sites – Examples of these would be Entrecard, MyBlogLog, Technorati, Twitter, and StumbleUpon.
I tried Entrecard and got a ton of hits but it was time consuming to stop by enough blogs and dropping cards to buy points in order to advertise my blog. Also, the hits I got were just drive by card droppings. No one lingered long enough to comment, or even read the first post. Sure, I may have picked up a reader or two out of the thousands that did the equivalent of a drive by shooting. I wanted a little more meaning in the relationship than pure numbers so I moved on.
Mybloglog was great until Yahoo bought it up. It was nice to see the faces and pictures of people that stopped by on the widget they provide and it was easy to select other blogs to follow, but Yahoo ruined it for me. I started getting spam on mybloglog profile page and I have an unreasonable general hatred towards Yahoo.
Technorati is another site that I quit. It’s wildly popular but anytime I wanted to make changes their site took forever to load and I kept getting error pages. It was incredible annoying and the only time I received traffic from them was when I closed my account, not terribly useful.
I now use StubleUpon and finally broke down and joined the Twitter crowd. StubleUpon can drive crazy amounts of traffic to you if you know how to use it. The important thing to know about StumbleUpon is that you must be very liberal with your thumbs up and thumbs down and that your ratings will carry much more weight if you also review the page. When reviewing a blog click on the individual post not the site itself that way if the blogger creates another review worthy post you can give them another thumbs up. You can use Stumbleupon to review your own posts too, but don’t do it to every post and make sure to review many other sites in between touting your own stuff.
Twitter isn’t a big traffic driver but I suspect that will change if I can drive up my number of followers. I’m very new to twitter. One thing that helps for Wordpress users is a Twitter plugin called Twitter Tools.
5. Memes – These are a lot of fun. Most of them are weekly games, but you don’t have to play every week. Don’t make it a chore, and if you participate, try to keep the meme within the scope of your blog.
Blog Bloke gives a great overview for building blog traffic. In the middle of that post is a heading, “How TO Drive More Traffic to Your Site”. “Bloke’s Tips for a Successful Blog” Part I and Part II are also very useful and I highly recommend them. 
December 18th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Why thank you so much for the links Erika. You are now an official member of the Blokester Network of great blogs. Good job btw on such a very large topic. Let me know if you would be interested in writing a guest post sometime. (Which is another way of driving more traffic to your blog
.
Cheers,
…BB
Blog Bloke – Helping You to be a Better Bloggers latest blog post… Blog Spring Cleaning for the Fall
December 19th, 2008 at 1:02 am
wow, nice looking blog. and very informative. really quality blog
December 19th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Blog Bloke – Thank you for the complements and for providing so much useful info.
Really? I could do a guest post? That would be awesome! I’m definitely interested.
December 19th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
stephanie numan – Thank you.