How would you like to increase your blog traffic by making a few simple changes to your blog? Of course you would. Visitor traffic is the life blood of any blog and knowing what works can save you a lot of time.

To help emphasis some of the common mistakes that bloggers can make I am posting this video case study from Yaro Starak over at BlogMastermind.com. In the video Yaro reviews the blog over at AquaristsOnline.com to give them advice on how they can increase their blog traffic by making a few simple changes to what they are doing today.

In this review the blog is getting 250 unique visiters a day with about a 10% return rate and a 60% bounce rate.

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StumbleUpon Ads are suppose to be the hot thing these days right? Well, to prove the theory I decided to place my own StumbleUpon Ads to see what the big deal was all about. After six ad rejections what I discovered will interest you so read on.

The process of placing a request for my Stumble Ad was pretty simple. With my selected domain name in hand I headed over to StumbleUpon, signed up as an advertiser, and followed their step by step process to place the ad.

StumbleUpon’s idea of an ad is actually just the inclusion of a link to your website in their index of sites that are part of the regular Stumble rotation. The “ad” works the same way all other Stumbles work except a green button will appear on the StumbleUpon toolbar that says “sponsor” when your site is shown. Other than that the visitor is suppose to have no other distractions, just a full view of your page in the browser.

As part of my desire to sample Stumble Ads I placed a request to get 100 visitors at .05 cents per visitor. I chose a StumbleUpon predefined category for my content and submitted my request. Everything was very simple. The category I selected was “Christian” which at the time had a “(67)” next to it. According to StumbleUpon that 67 is suppose to mean, “Category name (thousands of users subscribed)”. So, I felt confident that everything was okay and my request was placed into a que as a pending request. According to StumbleUpon’s FAQ it would take 24 hours for the request to be processed. So I waited.

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BlogCatalog Groups are here. BlogCatalog.com recently released “Groups” as part of their ongoing effort to bring bloggers together and create value among the blogging community. BlogCatalog is already a very active community of bloggers, so before you get confused about what’s going on, let’s review three reasons why you want to join a group and three things you should do once you have joined the discussion.

BlogCatalog’s Groups are another way for bloggers to connect, build relationship (maybe even joint venture partnerships), and learn from each other according to their topics of interest. BlogCatalog Groups are forming right now so this is a great time to get in and be active. You will get definite exposure and blog traffic by contributing now.

Here are three reasons why you should consider getting involved in a BlogCatalog Group.

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A few really good questions about how to get blog traffic have recently come in my email so I thought I would share the answers with you.

To answer the questions I am drawing from my own personal experiences so if you have other suggestions or ideas, please share them in the comments for this article. I am sure others will appreciate the community feedback and my blog doesn’t use the nofollow tag so your comment link will benefit you as well. Here it goes.

Question: How did you build up visitors to your site? You have a lot of readers, and I was wondering if you actively went to other blogs and added comments or if MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog served to help with this.

Answer: I use blog commenting, forum posting, forum signatures, Meetup.com profiles, del.icio.us bookmarks, StumbleUpon submissions, email signatures, blogCatalog and MyBlogLog listings, and I joined Yaro’s Starak’s BlogMasterMind Course. That is all I can think of at the moment. There might be a few other things, but I think that is most of it. I use all of these methods in combination with offline events, and blog search engine optimization techniques. That helps me get search traffic as well as link traffic from multiple sources.

Question: Your content is a good reason for visitors to return, but how do you get them to show up in the first place?

Answer: I always suggest writing good articles that have attractive headlines and high value to the reader. Then link to that content in as many places as possible. Also, be sure you have multiple ways for the reader to stay connected to you when they get to your blog. For example, make sure you have options for RSS subscriptions and email updates. Then just keep pushing out value.

It helps me to think of blogging as one long continuous conversation. Each person I meet and each place I go is part of the collective voice of the reader I am writing for. It helps me to stay focused (though some days are easier than others). Overall I want people to find real information on the blog and not just filler. The idea being that this will keep them coming back and encourage them to spread the word. That’s what keeps me motivated during the journey.

I hope these tips help. It really is a lot of work to make an overnight success. So try to stay motivated and keep your focus on enriching the lives of others. It really is more about the journey than the destination. Even a ride on a first class flight can stink if you drop an engine along the way.

Aiming high,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Which is better, BlogRush visitor traffic or StumbleUpon? This is a good question and one that has several possible answers. Let’s look at the traffic types for both visitor sources and then compare them both to get a better understanding.

BlogRush was launched over the weekend and I signed up as soon as I heard it was open. Immediately I started seeing visitor traffic to my blog, OpenSourceMarketer.com. The result was a sharp increase in mailing list subscribers, RSS subscribers, and blog comments. In fact, I am continuing to get visitors from the BlogRush widget on the blogs, though it has slowed down just a bit. Some of the slow down might be due to the overwhelming response that BlogRush has received. I bet John Reese didn’t anticipate such a great response, even though he founded the project.

BlogRush has enjoyed great success so far because it is context sensitive so it display blog posts from other blogs that are relevant to the content on the page. That means if your blog is part of BlogRush then your blog posts will show up next to relevant keywords on another blog. Ultimately that means that if someone is looking for information on a specific topic and they are searching blogs for that information then a link to your blog posts are going to show up near those relevant keywords. This is how Google runs their entire Adsense program so you know this is a proven method of getting readers to click on links.

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