The Open Source Marketer

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