Recently I’ve noticed quite a few people on the forums I that frequent asking the same two or three questions over and over again. They are all variations on “where is the massive traffic I’m supposed to get from my blog?” and/or “how do I get my blog noticed and read?”.
Patience, folks. I’ve visited a couple of the blogs people were asking about, and they seemed to have one thing in common. They contained one recent post, no links, and most likely were not listed in any directories. In a couple of cases, the blogs appeared to have been in existence no more than a few days.
Somehow people seem to be getting the impression that a blog is like “field of dreams” … just build it and the traffic will come. Maybe that’s partly the fault of us blog evangelists, or maybe it’s just a reflection of the “free lunch” mentality of the internet and the idea of making money online.
Actually, there is a bit of truth to the “field of dreams” analogy, since blogs do tend to attract both human traffic and search engine spiders rather quickly. But you have to announce it, and it needs to contain more than one post!
I wrote a blogging guide back in 2004 for exactly this reason – to help people learn how to do this, and take advantage of the many benefits of blogging. I’m not going to give away the store here, but what follows is a few basic pointers.
First – Come up with a series of half a dozen or so posts that you can either “pre-load” your blog with, or can polish up and use on a regular basis during the first few days or weeks of your blog’s life. They don’t have to be “war and peace” … just a few paragraphs of genuine content.
Second – Do a little basic “search engine optimizing” of your blog. Use appropriate key words in the title of the blog, the titles of the posts, and in the anchor text of any outgoing links that you post. Also sprinkle the key word into the post itself. You should probably also get an SEO plugin for your blog if you’re using WordPress
Third – Try to keep the majority, if not all of your posts, related to the overall “theme” of your blog. Just like a website, a blog needs to be given some forethought. If you expect to get it noticed by either the search engines or humans, it needs to have a “theme”, just like a website.
Fourth – You need to list your blog and RSS feed in some of the major directories. Take a few minutes to manually submit your blog URL to each of them, or just set up automatic pinging to Pingomatic. And don’t forget to add your RSS feed to a “my Yahoo” account, and also your Google Reader account, as well as at NewsGator.
Fifth – Take the time to submit your blog to some of the less well-known blog and RSS directories. Then spend some time visiting other people’s blogs, and try to do some link exchanges with blogs whose content is related to the theme of your blog. Actually, you can often get good links back to your own blog by posting tasteful, relevant comments on other blogs.
It isn’t that difficult to get a blog noticed and indexed by the search engines, and to get some traffic to it, but it does take some time and patience, and a modicum of effort on the part of the blogger (you).
If you’re putting up a blog solely for the “free traffic” you expect to get, you’d better re-think your strategy. Even if you initially get a small blog noticed, if you don’t update it regularly, and keep it growing, it will eventually lose any significance, both to search engines, and to human visitors.
One of the big reasons a blog can be a traffic magnet is because of the frequent updates to its content. Absent that, it loses most of its magnetism. But if you post relevant content at reasonable intervals, your blog will be a “traffic magnet” for both humans and search engine spiders.
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