How to get traffic to your blog

I began blogging on 15 December last year. My four and a half months experience in the game have been both time consuming and demanding. Good content is not enough. It is even more important to engage in active promotion. Increasing blog traffic is paramount to being able to sustain the blog, obtain reasonable search engine ratings and to earn advertising revenue.

Over the time I have gradually discovered a number of ways to increase blog traffic. I tried Digg but it didn't work for me. I am not really a great social networker so Facebook and My Space were non starters.

Firstly a few essentials. Yahoo's MyBlogLog is an essential. It provides an opportunity to develop relationships with other bloggers and to explore other sites. You should be able to get some traffic from here. Blog Catalogue provides a free service that lists your sites and picks up your latest postings. Then there is Technorati which provides a blog rating based on traffic to your blog.

Then there are sites which work on a type of credit system. You include a widget on your blog and visitors can explore other similar blogs by clicking on the widget. BlogRush is one of these.

Webring has worked quite well for me. Ling to the site, set up an account and begin joining rings. As with most sites there is a free and a subscription based service. I have now joined over 70 of these webrings and they do bring in traffic on a fairly sustainable basis. Traffic can be increased by paying a small fee for promotion.

Blog Explosion works on a slightly different basis. Sign up and submit your blogs for approval. Then you can surf through blogs to earn credits and assign these credits to your blogs. Surfing through these blogs exposes you to many blogs of varying quality. If you discover a site that interests you then simply click the BlogMark link and you are free to revisit the site at any time. Blog explosion shows significant and fairly immediate results, but requires frequent surfing to keep the traffic flowing.

I have signed up with del.icio.us, but have not used it extensively. Stumble Upon provides a similar service, but from my side totally underused.

Of course another key way to get traffic is through the search engines. Try to optimise each post for key words. I use Google Adwords for that, and it makes a difference. But it still isn't easy. Your rating and existing traffic affect how far you get.

After four months of blogging I have not yet received my first Adsense payment - but I'm over 60% there! My traffic is increasing - hopefully too the earnings!

I would like to build up a knowledge base here on increasing traffic - genuine ways only, not untried and costly promotional schemes!

Please use the comment facility to post any traffic generating schemes that have worked for you.

Getting traffic to your blog!

This blog was started in December 2007. It has been quite an adventure! My time has been split between writing and trying to increase blog traffic! Attempting to cause a blog explosion that would provide me with thousands of daily visitors to click on the ads and use my affiliate services!

The Internet is full of blogs and free offers on how to make money from your blog. How to increase traffic to your blog and Internet marketing. Of course all these offers are totally free!

The offers include free ebooks, marketing tools and advertising. Each claims that the other sites are total garbage. Only this one has the true secret! The secret of how to make money from your blog.

I soon discovered that on the Internet "free" has very mixed meanings. Usually it involves spending money – sonetimes quite a lot of money. A down payment of $89.99 and a monthly subscription of only $29.99 – “guaranteed” to bring thousands of new visitors to your site every day!

My quest for traffic also took other routes. Blogosphere is really free. Display your widget and your site is displayed on other member sites. Yahoo offers some facilities to help promote your site. The I discovered Webring. Webring is a website containing hundreds of rings. Copy the widget, add your site to the rings and behold! More traffic.

My most recent attempt has been through Blog Explosion. Similar to the Webring, it is more open and blogs are not limited to small rings. The site works on the principle that you earn credits by browsing through the featured blogs. These credits can then be used to 'pay' for your site's promotion! A wonderful idea. Although I am still awaiting the approval of my blogs on Blog Explosion, I have come across at least one blog that really stands out.

I have also listed on Blog Catalogue and Technocrati. All of these are genuine sites offering a great free service. Not the type of free that you have to pay for. Their widgets are spotted around the blog. Click on them for more information.

So far, the most successful of my attempts to increase traffic was to take up a special offer from Bidvertiser. $20 of free advertising. The money lasted for four days. Yes, it did bring in traffic. It also generated about $5 in advertising revenue. Not a good enough return to actually pay for the adverts!

Of course there are always Key Words. These are very important to get onto the search engines! Google adwords has a free facility to generate key words, and there are many other free offers to get key words on a paid subscription basis.

Traffic to my blog is gradually increasing. I have also started a local blog in South Africa - Breathing Space , and have joined a get paid to blog site - MyDigitalLife.co.za - also local, and they do attract some traffic with little effort!

So generating site traffic is tough! Getting people to return is also tough - and maintains the pressure on to produce regular new material!