From—Dana's Blog - Internet Marketing and Sales Technology Ideas From the Trenches—this is a good follow up to my earlier post here on this topic. Dana gives some more suggestions after this intro…
Driving Traffic To Your Weblog
I responsed to a query on
the AMA's B2B Marketing SIG on how to drive traffic to your blog and
thought that I'd post here as well...maybe an idea or two that you can
use, and a few good articles on blog promtion in the links...
Dana’s suggestions with my comments in bold.
1. By default, your weblog should be pining technorati.com, blog.gs, and weblogs.com. If not, you may wish to engage the service at www.pingomatic.com to get your blog to ping other aggregator sites that can help you out.
Yeah. Most hosted systems will do this. If you rolled your own, you might was to double check your settings. FeedBurner says they can connect with Ping-o-matic too. And on that note, I recommend trying FeedBurner. There’s good insight to be had there.
2. Setup a technorati feed for keywords that are prevelant in you field or industry - get on those bloggers blogs via comments & trackbacks from your blogs. Blogging is all about the relationship and the community. You need to participate to get maximum results.
This is a really good suggestion…I’d suggest using PubSub and Feedster though as the primary sources of information. IMHO
3. Use your keywords in your post titles, which ultimately show up in the URL - this will help with your search engine rankings & drive targeted traffic.
And…make sure that the title of your blog matches what you actually what to be found under. As I recently found out.
4. Have a look at IT Toolbox - you might try to work with them, get in touch with their bloggers, or guest blog for them for additional traffic.
Don’t know these folks, but guess who I’m Googling for soon…
5. Write stuff that people will actually read
Well there’s a balance here isn’t there? Write what, and how, people want to read, but also be yourself. If you have to have your shout, and it isn’t your most popular article, so what? You’ll probably feel better.
6. Get off the blog to get people to your blog. When we were trying to generate interest in the AMA's HotTopic blog event, we did direct mail, email and, of course, blogged about it...but when you're driving traffic to a new blog, it pays to step off the blog to do it.
For many events and companies and blogs this is good advice. The blogosphere is still a pretty small community, compared to even the rest of the Internet-using public.
7. Check out this article on ways to generate newsletter signups - many of the same principles apply to blog traffic and RSS subscriptions http://www.danavan.net/29ways
Hmm, another weekend read…
8. Read Dave Pollard - http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/03/23.html#a674
Always read Dave!
9 Read Blogger's own promo tactics written by Biz Stone - they are a goldmine of ideas. - http://www.blogger.com/knowledge/2004/09/promoting-your-blog.pyra
Boy, my reading and research list is getting long!
10. Link like crazy to other bloggers and other sites in your sphere of interest and influence. Bloggers watch their trackbacks and their inbound links - some of my best connections with people have come because my blog showed up in their referrer links over and over.
Yes, this is completely true. Bloggers and the Blogosphere is a very social network. Spread the linky love (as Chris Pirillo likes to call it). But be cool about it. Don’t spam people with lots of comments that don’t add to the discussion. Think before you submit.
One final thing to remember we’re all learning this together, so share the what works, what doesn’t work. It will help us all.
