Damien Riley

I’ve developed some good habits that bring blog traffic and wanted to share them with you today. Pre-1995 thought tells us that people visit a website when they see it advertised or if they find it through a search. The advent of Google and blogs has brought about a different thinking since 1995 and that is this:

People will come to your blog through text-links, blogrolls, social media (I know of at least 150 big players) direct reference in a post or in a review … and many more ways.

A related issue is advertising. We used to think advertisers paid when you had good roadside real estate that a lot of people saw. That is still somewhat true but now there is a whole new internet advertising market that pays to be effectively “linked” and picked up by Google. My dad recently asked me how I make money on my blog. When I told him about the reviews and ads he was surprised that I didn’t get paid only when people clicked on a product like they used to c.1995 when the affiliate stuff was just starting.

Here’s the point of all this folks:

The more links there are to you the more traffic you get.

I care about the content I publish more than most people, but I also recognize that blogging without an audience and SEO to bring people is rather pathetic. I read on the web constantly how people say “I don’t care if people read my blog, I don’t care about traffic.” I think I either don’t get their comment and need to hear more about why they say that or I think they are pretty much idiots. I mean why would you spend the time to publish your words when you didn’t care who read them? The fact is peeps is that all bloggers care about what people think of their words and all bloggers want their analytics and circulation to be as big as possible. If anyone starts telling you their “purist” routine, link them here ;) I’d love to take them on in the comments.

Here’s a few ways I use to get my links read as much as possible. I am always trying new things. That is part of the fun of this for me. In August, for example, I set records partially as a result of using these techniques. Try them out, but remember, your first priority every day you blog is to make sure you have the best content you can muster updated:

In-Series Plugin (WordPress)
This takes about 10-15 minutes to figure out but after that you can use it in seconds to string a table of contents along with a big thought you break into several posts. If on post gets picked up by SU or DIGG, guess what, they all come along … automatic.

Simple Tags
Allows automated tagging. Suggests from your internals as well as from Yahoo! and Tag the Net. These are like bait that can hook folks searching out there for your content.

Alex-King’s Popularity Contest
Update: WPGuy offers solution for this plugin’s error msg.
Use the feature to make a “Top 50″ page. When you maked a post, put some of your best/most popular posts in as text linking. This is called “deep-linking” and it is just as important to your traffic as linking out. BUT do that two. I have a minimum rule usually followed of 3 deeplinks/3 outlinks (usually from my blogroll). It’s been a good strategy for several months and helped traffic immensely. When you draw from these, you are theoretically drawing from what people enjoyed and will enjoy.

Final Link out: If you’re new to my blog or new to blogging, you may not have read this helpful interview I did where I give a lot more tips on how to generate traffic:
My FuelmyBlog Interview

Is your blog read as much as you want?