A Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Blog and Getting Traffic
First off - as I am writing this, I am pretty much a newcomer to the wacky world of blogging. It’s been a fun learning experience so far and I know I really haven’t scratched the surface. My first goal was to learn some of the technical stuff - since I have a Wordpress blog I needed to learn the ins and outs of the control panel, etc. Standard stuff.
Once the blog was up it was simply a matter of writing posts. I really never have a shortage of things to say, so that’s the easy part.
After a couple of weeks I turned my attention to seeing how to get traffic to my blog - what’s the use of posting unless somebody actually reads it, right? Well… it turns out that getting traffic to your blog is a science unto itself.
Having your blog set up correctly is one of the first steps you need to take before driving traffic to it. One critical component to this is to have an RSS feed on your blog so that you do get traffic, the visitors have the opportunity to sign up via feed or e-mail notifications so they will know when you post something new. This will help you build a solid base of readers for your new blog. I have had great luck with the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin - easy to use with a self hosted Wordpress blog and compatible with just about all types of feed readers.
The next thing I did was to start registering with social networking and bookmarking sites. Some of the major ones I would recommend are Technorati, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Digg. Get familiar with social bookmarking sites because they are critical in helping you gain popularity for your blog.
What I am in the process of doing is starting to generate traffic by posting comments in other people’s blogs. The benefit to this techniques is two-fold. Actually three-fold if you want to get technical. First, by reading other blogs on this subject in particular, you can pick up a lot of information about writing and publishing a successful blog. There are a ton of great bloggers out there. Bryan over at One Man’s Goal has a ton of awesome info on the topic of blogging as does Darren at Pro Blogger.
When you read a post that you like or find helpful (on any kind of blog, not just blogging blogs…), leave a comment. The trick with leaving comments on blogs is this - make the comment meaningful. Contribute something other than “Great post!” Remember that people will be reading your post and judging you by what you write and their decision on whether or not to visit your blog can be based entirely on the content of your comment. If you are commenting on a blog that is a similar subject to your blog, keep in mind that the traffic you can get is VERY highly targeted traffic and can be very beneficial to your blog.
The third benefit of leaving comments is in the area of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. The search engines love it when you have a ton of incoming links to your site and having those links are one of the key components to ranking high in the SERPs.
A word of caution… too many people take this technique and go crazy with it, trying to get as many incoming links as possible by posting the same useless crap in a bunch of different blogs, forums, or other sites (known as spamming). This will not only get you banned and your links removed from said blogs and forums, but you will also get a reputation for being a spammer and isn’t building a good reputation one of the reasons for starting a blog in the first place?
Commenting on other people’s blogs can generate some great traffic and the best part about it is… it’s free! It’s a very solid way to build traffic with a little sweat equity.
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