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I’m the worst person to ever think about writing tips on blogging. My site has been up exactly 2 weeks now. But I have learned my fair share of tips over the last two weeks. When you dive yourself in to what you want to accomplish you tend to block out the rest of your life until you are comfortable. After the first week I was discouraged. No one was visiting my site except for myself when I would do updates. So I went searching for how to increase my traffic. Some of those services are a pain in the but. I ran across and article on superbloggingtips.com that actually inspired me to keep going. It states that if you become more community involved IE (Visit other blogs and participate people were more willing to come to you site and check things out). The best thing I could say is if you really want to promote your blog comment on other bloggs that you read and become involved. The worst thing I find is if I write an article and no one responds at all. Leave them a comment if you agree or disagree with them. Write a follow up on your site to their article, but make sure you link back to it. Give credit where credit is due. This will give you a little bit more respect in the community, and people will be more apt to visiting your site.
7 Comments Received
October 3rd, 2007 @1:23 pm
I have to totally agree. I had by blog up for maybe a year with very little traffic other than - like you - me going to update it. Then I started going to other blogs and commenting and the like, and my traffic increased, both because the people who ran those blogs now visit my site, but because they often put me in their blogroll and then other people visited my site as a result.
Actually getting out and participating in whatever community applies to what you’re blogging about really does make a difference. Not that I’m getting hordes of traffic yet, but it is certainly a lot more than I had been getting.
October 3rd, 2007 @4:36 pm
This is very true. I had a very similar experience and commenting in other blogs certainly helped me out. If I may, I would recommend for you to become active on some related forums. That was a real traffic booster for me.
Just my two cents…
Ran
October 3rd, 2007 @6:41 pm
Thats a great idea I was thinking about that the other day and havent gotten around to doing it yet. Im really active on a couple of forums but never linked this site to them. Thanks for the idea.
October 3rd, 2007 @7:12 pm
That’s very true. I love using WordPress and SiteMeter because the former tells me when I have comments and when people link to me, and the latter tells me how many people visited. It definitely makes it easier to overlook not getting a lot of comments! I use LiveJournal for my personal blog and it KILLS me sometimes when I post something that is very important and exciting to me and get nothing, not even crickets.
As far as community-building goes, I have found that looking for “blog challenges” or whatever else they are called, and participating in them, is a huge help. There are a lot of these in the foodblog community, like Sugar High Fridays where once a month people make and post desserts, and each month there is a different theme. Different communities have different kinds of challenges, but anyone can participate in any of them. And in return, whoever is “hosting” it that month posts a list of all of the entries, often with pictures or comments about each one, on their own blog. It is a great way to attract readers and comments, although even with that it may take time to build up a community of people who actually comment.
October 3rd, 2007 @7:30 pm
You are right word press is the best platform I have found along with hosting your own site. Instead of going with blogspot or similar products. I really like to go and check out sites that link to me. I usually find some interesting information. Catherine I love the site. My wife and I were talking about setting a meal budget for the week. And We love to cook so this is going to be a great site for us. I have participated in a blog carnival. Though the topic was way out of my reach and i was hosted somewhere else at the time. I will have to start searching for more. I appreciate all the comments this is great. Just think 3 comments in one night when in 2 weeks I have had one. Thanks for checking out my post.
October 4th, 2007 @10:57 pm
Thanks for linking to my blog (except you did leave of the ‘g’ in the url, but no biggie), and I’m glad you found the article useful and inspiring.
Blogging is a learning process. Even the pros are continually discovering new things they didn’t know before. As time goes on you just have to keep working at it and you will learn, every day, how to keep getting better.
Be active in the blogging community, try to write new posts everyday, use social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, write guest posts for other sites, always proofread every single post before you publish it and check for mistakes in writing, images, and urls… Plus a thousand more things.
Above, my name doesn’t link to my site but actually it links to one of my articles titled 75 Ways to Increase Your Site’s Traffic. If you’re interested, hopefully you’ll find it helpful. If you ever have any questions or if you’re ever interested in guest writing on my blog, feel free to use my contact form and send me an email. Thank you so much!
October 5th, 2007 @10:07 am
I’m glad you love it! Congratulations for starting on the adventure of meal planning together. I’m doing it from the opposite direction; I’ve been doing the meal planning part for a while but just recently my girlfriend suggested that we start doing that together because soon she is moving in with me. So I guess you’ll be seeing more in there about how to do this with someone else instead of just for your own needs and tastes!
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