Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Week 2 is over and my numbers are keeping steady. I received a few less unique visitors due I imagine to my decreased participation in blogclicker and blogxchange. 517 unique visitors came to my page last week with 17 from Google and 2 from MSN. I had 1643 page impressions from those visitors up from 1543 the previous week. I also continued with getting at least 1 outside link back to my page a day. I have also been able to pay off the web hosting fee for the month with the money generated by just this site.

Although it has only been two weeks I am very motivated from these results to keep up my goal of getting 500,000 people a month to visit my site. I have read and tried quite a few ways to increase traffic to this site. Here are some of the methods that have been working for me.

5 METHODS I’VE USED TO SUCCESSFULLY INCREASE TRAFFIC TO MY BLOG

1. Content, Content, Content.

I have noticed that more content I have the more people arrive at my site through search engines. During the second week of having my blog search engine referrals more than doubled from 8 to 19. I have heard numbers such as 75%, 85%, and 95% of your traffic come from search engines. Even if the number is 50% it is in your best interest to keep on writing. Search engines love content, and you need more content to reach more searches.

Writing continuously takes discipline and time, don’t give up. You should begin by writing about something that interests you. Write about what you know. Doing this will make writing easier and more enjoyable. Don’t just create a blog to make money. Offer help, information, or something useful to others and people will want to read it.

From this will come traffic.

2. Read others blogs and swap links

I am guessing you are starting a blog because you have read others. Those blogs more than likely have link exchanges or might want to write about your blog and include a link in the text. Find blogs you enjoy reading with similar content to yours and just email them if they don’t have a link exchange. Don’t be shy, most bloggers realize the need to get more people to read your blog. They’ve probably been there or are there.

Some pages that I have been hooked on with similar content to mine are Steve Pavlina’s, Yaro Starak’s, and my buddy Cesar’s.

Remember that Google is said to not count towards or count against your rank when links are generated from fraudulent pages. Just make sure the content is similar and you should be safe.

3. Comment in forums

Don’t spam, comment. Finding forums that are similar to the content on your page, or are helping you develop your page can be great places to start. I have commented in running forums, wordpress forums, and golfing forums. If you leave genuine comments that help people out there’s a good chance these people will want more information from you. They might also seek you out learn more about you.

When posting you can leave a link to your page within the comment or in your signature. Just be real with your comments and these can help you increase your traffic. In the last two and a half weeks I received 122 people from adding comments in forums. Those were my first two and a half weeks of this blog!!!

4. Search Engine Submission

Submit your URL to search engines early. I would start with the big three and then work from there. If you want to know where and how to submit your URL here are links to several search engines and their submission pages.

Google
MSN
Yahoo

I would also suggest submitting your site to DMOZ. It’s and open directory project where each URL that is submitted is checked for content by an editor.

Go from there. Look around for blog directories and other less traveled search engines.

5. Clicking for Traffic

Although I don’t think this is the greatest way to increase return traffic to your blog it does get your page out there. I am currently only using two of these as mentioned in the first paragraph. I also describe them in more detail in my first week stats post. You can have both of these pages running in the background while you work at creating content for your site. I have had only one comment come from these but over 700 unique visitors from them in the last 2 weeks. I am going to continue with this method until more people reach my site through search engines.

Use these tips and you can start right out getting traffic to come to your site. It has been less than three weeks and I am approaching 1500 unique visitors for the past month. Keep going and check back for more ways I find to increase traffic to my blog.