It's almost the end of the year and with the kids being off from school, they are staying up later, cutting into my computer time. Anyway, I was expecting to see little traffic on the website, but surprise I have good traffic. In fact, I've had good traffic for a while now. It couldn't possibly be the Reagan/MSN post I did from a few days ago; what I thought was going to be a good post, didn't even make the cut over at Marketing Prof's Daily Fix Blog. So what gives? It is a combination of the Z-Lister Meme and my content popping up in search results; this experience should be helpful to new bloggers. Of course, it is meaningless if you already have a name for yourself out in the real world.
One of the keys to getting traffic is to have momentum with your fellow bloggers. Sure you might start out to attract other readers, but at the end of the day you need the blogging community to link to your articles to boost your ability to be found. Personally, I haven't focused too much on Technorati, but with the boost in links from the Meme, my rank has dropped from around 195,000 to 47,113 which is great. The links also help with your search rankings.
The second tip I'd give new bloggers is to focus on trying to get associated with a larger blog or network. That was a tip someone gave me a long time ago and I can vouch for it. I can't tell you how many links, emails, and comments I've received from folks that read my posts over at Marketing Prof Daily Fix. I can't thank Ann Handley enough for inviting a year back when she started it.
Also, focus on your own content. Write your own material. Constantly commenting on others blogs won't do it and will not build an audience. If you want to link to articles that you think your readers will like, then just make a post of links and don't waste people's time with comments. I like using Del.icio.us to auto post to the blog.
Finally, don't make the same mistake that I did and have two URLs pointing to your blog. That's the single biggest mistake I made in the past year. What this did was split the blog traffic between pardonmyfrench.typepad.com and www.ericfrenchman.com. I didn't think it would be so critical when I moved over to Typepad from Blogger, but it has. Pardonmyfrench.typepad.com has a ranking of 362K probably from all the search results while www.ericfrenchman.com has an Alexa of 483K. If I only had one URL pointing to the blog, it is quite possible I'd make Mack's Top 25 Marketing Blog list further helping my traffic.
That's it for today. Check back tomorrow night. I have a What The Vonage Post on the way for you fans of my Vonage series.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
how do i get content and make money with my blog
Posted by: joe | October 07, 2009 at 09:52 AM