I am going to share with you the many secrets which I have used to not only direct traffic but keep traffic visiting my blog.
For me getting back into web development after many years on hiatus was a sobering experience. Gone were the days of easy traffic due to the fact that the competition has increased by a number so great I can’t even wrap my head around it. A lot of the competition are in the form of spam blogs which take popular content from other blogs and republish it as their own by changing just a few words. The market is diluted in most cases and trying to make a living running a single website is near impossible unless you have a very specific and unique niche.
For me, taking on the “Nerd World” of computers, video games, RPGs, and Sci-Fi TV shows was brutal. My niche is ultra diluted with massive amounts of blogs just trying to drive content with poorly written stories and on the other side the big guns with their massive audiences garnered through backing by powerful tycoons. Because of this I have had to learn the hard way how to get a blog up and off the ground. I have dedicated the past few months of my life almost entirely to NERD TREK, barely getting any sleep and still I struggle. I have come a LONG way from where I started though, and I will spill the secrets on how I did this and how you too can become successful at blogging. Well, let’s get straight to it, shall we?
Tip #1: Before you drive traffic
Before you drive traffic to your blog you want to make sure everything is perfect. Give your friends your URL to the new blog and don’t tell them anything about it- not even the name. Just ask them to do you a favor and visit the blog and then email or call you with feedback. I guarantee they will have a LOT to say. Don’t ignore them, your friends are giving you very valuable advice and you should log it all away until you collect all the feedback. You don’t have to act on every suggestion, but if you say “Yeah, I did notice that but thought it would be OK… and it’s a lot of coding to change…” CHANGE IT! Change it now before thousands of people stumble upon a weird glitch or unslightly error in code that makes your blog appear less than professional. You want everything to be perfect before you launch, this includes content. Take your friends advice and run with it, improve anything and everything. You will never stop improving. I still spend about 20 hours a week just tweaking things on my blog to make them better. Just don’t change your header or anything that makes your blog familiar after becoming established. You want people to recognize your header, your favicon, and your image.
Tip #2: Content is King
You must write killer articles to spearhead your unknowing victims and keep them visiting your blog in the future. Make sure you provide content you would want to read. I try and grab things that make me excited like a new video game, movie, or computer news and give my take on that. I keep is personal and know that some people may agree and some may disagree. Regardless of which it is they will still read the article if they are passionate about it and are actually more likely to comment if on the radical side of either spectrum. If you ever saw the movie “Private Parts” they said that half of Howard Sterns audience listens because they like him and the other half listens because they hate him. The most common answer when asked why they listened was “I wanted to see what he’ll say next.” That was both the pro and con sides! That alone shows you that no matter where you stand on your articles you’ll benefit more from taking a stand than just sitting there quoting other material you found on the internet. My most viewed articles are the ones where I get passionate and personal. I’ve been told my friends and co-workers that those posts are by far their favorite. Don’t be afraid to let the content flow and let it flow often, a blog can quickly become sterile. If I don’t post for 2-3 days I lose dozens of email subscribers and my visits take a HUGE plummet.
Tip #3: Social Networking is in, USE IT!
Sites like Facebook and Twitter are not just for keeping up on what your friends are doing, they are for meeting new friends and connecting with people passionate about the same things you are. This is called NETWORKING! This is something larger businesses do to a degree, but you have something going for you that they don’t- you’re small time and personal. You’re probably running your blog alone or with a handful of friends. You can take the time to get to know new people on Facebook and Twitter and refer them to your articles. Honestly, some of the people I met on Facebook have already influenced me or were long time heroes of mine. Most of the staff from TSR and Wizards of the Coast who worked on various versions of Dungeons and Dragons are now my friends and I highly enjoy reading their posts on Facebook and enjoying their pictures. They too are sometimes interested in my articles and even Monte Cook commented and shared one of my blog posts regarding the upcoming Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim game! When I started on Facebook I had around 50 friends of which were personal friends who wanted to support NERD TREK. Then I started branching out and adding friends at Wizards through my friend’s connections (he was a cartographer and illustrator there- 3 time ENnie Award winner as well). The list grew and then people started adding me. Before I knew it I was at 600 friends! When I would share a new post of my blog on Facebook I would reach out to 600 people! If only 10% checked out the post that’s 60 hits! Not bad! Today my friends number around 800 and new people ask to be added everyday. If you want to be a friend just search for NERD TREK on Facebook and there we are! 
Twitter is equally as easy and one of the biggest secrets there is a program called TWEET ADDER. At first I was quite skeptical and thought it might be a scam, but this program really works and helps you reach out to a similar audience in your niche. I’ll explain more about how that works if someone would like, just ask me on the NERD TREK FORUM and we’ll continue the conversation there. I’ll provide a link to the Tweet Adder website so you can check it out for yourself. If you decide to purchase please let them know that NERD TREK referred you and we will both obtain a price break.
Tip #4: Don’t be afraid to promote your blog!
Ask your friends to tell their friends, post in forums, on other blogs, on facebook, twitter, myspace, anywhere you can! Don’t be afraid of backlash- there are always complainers and jerks out there and that’s just something you’ll have to live with. Don’t spam people, but inform people about your blog. What do you have to offer? What are your newest articles? What do you have that the next blog doesn’t?
Tip #5: Reply to comments ASAP
If someone posts a comment make sure you have a system setup to notify you on your mobile and respond IMMEDIATELY. Readers are 10 times more likely to return and tell others if they feel appreciated and respected. I make it a point to go above and beyond for my readers in hopes that they stick around. I’m not making much money off my readers, but I want them to come back because this is my blog and I’m proud of it. Plus if they keep coming back and their friends keep coming back and so on- I will eventually make some money. The ultimate goal would be to blog from home would it not? I sure would love that. I would write and respond all day on all things “nerdy” in a heartbeat!
Tip #6: Create a system which generates Keywords for SEO
SEO means Search Engine Optimization- something you’ll want your website to be ready for. If you’re running WordPress try programs like SEO Keywords, SEO Searchterms2, and SEO Ultimate. There are a ton of other programs out there to help you with SEO, and at the very least you should be listing your keywords at the bottom of each post. Although it looks a little silly, those keywords that are links at the bottom of my posts help drive up my rank on Google which in turn increases my visitors which also helps my status.
Tip #7: Start a Forum
Start a forum so that avid users who constantly comment on your posts have a place to call home. Although it is very difficult to get people to comment and even harder to have them post in a forum, it is something that is better to setup in advance so that it is available when needed. Help prepare your forum by creating some topics and posting in them yourself. Post content that is useful that people often search online for. Make sure it is in your niche and link it to your blog and your blog to it.
Tip #8: Create an Email List/RSS Feed
The easiest way to do this is to use a WORDPRESS install linked to a simple RSS feed at Feedburner. It’s free, sent daily, and run by Google so it’s stable. Users can opt to sign up via email or RSS, whichever they prefer. Then when your posts go out they reach a wider audience.
Tip #9: Run a Contest
Make sure you research the legalities behind this, but one of the best ways to get extra traffic is to run a contest. Use some of the revenue generated through ads to buy something- say a Xbox 360 and a game. Then take some high res pictures of it, spice it up with some colorful text and display a contest on your site that people can sign up for by agreeing to be a part of your email list. This will increase your visitors, spread your name, and grow your email list which is one of the most important parts of a successful blog. Even if you lose your website, facebook, twitter, and everything else you can always retain your email list and start over. If you don’t have an email list you are starting from scratch should you lose anything along the way.
Tip #10: Be honest
By being honest you will create a good trustworthy name. This is a lot harder to do and takes a lot longer than creating a spam site that generates huge traffic for instant profit, but in the long run is much more successful and reliable. You will obtain the most loyal fans this way and you’ll sleep better at night knowing you’re doing the best you can. Everyday I try and remind myself that the best way to write articles is when they come naturally and I am honest and helpful to my readers. Instead of posting a million useless posts I would rather take my time and give you something worthwhile in hopes that the information helps you.
Thank you for visiting and I hope this information at least helped give you some ideas on ways to increase your web traffic. If you have any questions or comments please do so below and visit us on Facebook.
Your blog is skilful and intelligent,
and I want to read your articles
like these 10 tips.
Thank you! It is always nice to hear positive feedback. How did these tips affect the way you present your blog posts?
hello I have just read your 10 tips I have a blog http://therichestpeople.blogspot.com/ visit it and add me on facebook “Admir rimda” Tell me your opinion … Thanks and regards
This was exactly what I was looking for! Just launched my new site, and I am really excited to implement some of your suggestions. Thanks!
Thank you for reading! I like your site.
That’s cool you’re interested in vegetarianism or veganism. My wife and I are vegetarian and after some vitamin supplemental adjustments are happy and healthy!
One more thing- Tweet Adder really does work. I was skeptical at first, but just look at my followers on Twitter. I get more every single day on auto-pilot! Free traffic and re-tweets!
You know, I’ve been doing all these things, and I was attracted to your article because we’re pretty much in exactly the same niche market you are. The only spin on it we’ve got that you don’t is that we’re a radio station too, but I see that one of the things you’re doing that we haven’t done yet is polish our interface to the Nth degree. Some of the interface stuff we’ve done so far I think is incomplete or not as good as it could be, but one thing we added that has made a huge difference is an automated feature in WordPress that automatically adds links of related articles in our own web site so that readers remain more engaged. This took our bounce rate from just about 100% down to about 65%, and for a news site this is pretty good – major newspapers don’t have as good a bounce rate as this. So while our visitor count has remained fairly constant since the change, our page views went up noticeably because people are now staying on the site longer and reading a few pages with each visit.
The big problem, really, is getting ranked high enough in Google that we get the traffic we want, and we’re nowhere near there yet. And after several months of Doing All The Right Things and not seeing the huge benefits we keep reading about, we’re getting a bit frustrated with it. We’re climbing upwards, and we’re doing well and have a growing fan base, but at the same time we’d like to be seeing stronger growth, and I keep feeling that we’re missing something important.
- Gene Turnbow
Krypton Radio
The best advice I can give?
Be persistent. I have tweaked my website little by little every single day for the past year. I run contests, meet new friends, and write quality articles. I use Facebook and Twitter to maximize exposure and most of all I just be myself.
Please let me know if you have any questions or need suggestions. My Alexa ranking has been climbing over the past year, but it’s not that I’m “lucky” it’s due to lots of hard work in the right direction and writing quality articles almost every single day!
I won’t say GOOD LUCK, because it should really be: GOOD WORK!
Thanks, Jonathan – so far we have over a thousand fans on Facebook, and more are coming every day. We’ve just gotten listed on iTunes, so that’ll help – and we’ve got some great stuff coming in the way of original programming.
For anybody else reading this, don’t just trust Google Analytics. Look at StatCounter too, and compare both of these to your own server logs. Not everyone sees a wild disparity between what one service says your traffic is and what another says it is, but we do. We determined that some of our traffic was coming from what’s called “referral spam”, where commercial web sites browse your site and appear to come from theirs so that they get automatic backlinks that show up in your server logs! It’s devious, but it boosts your page rankings by creating backlinks. The tip-off is looking at your server logs and finding on-line medical sites in your list of referrers that logically have nothing to do with your content.
Once we locked down our server logs, the referrer spam stopped within a couple of weeks and we started getting more rational numbers – but even so, AwStats still reports about 10x the traffic that Google Analytics and Statcounter do. There are potentially several reasons for this:
* Some people browse with Javascript turned off. This breaks a lot of content, but they do it anyway. Google Analytics and Statcounter both rely on scripts that run on the client side that report the traffic you’re getting to these services. When Javascript is turned off, your visitor isn’t recorded.
* Sometimes the logging service just hangs or fails to respond. When that happens, your visitor isn’t recorded.
* Some people use Norton Anti-Virus while they browse – in fact a lot do – and this blocks calls to many metrics sights, and again, when a user has this his or her visit is not recorded.
If your gut is telling you the numbers from your stat service are way off, there’s probably a reason, and it may not be your fault or anything you’re doing wrong.
hello I have just read your 10 tips I have a blog and i will use it:d