There’s nothing wrong with wanting more readers for your blog. (For the record, “Alas” gets 900-1000 visits a day – which makes us fairly respectable as smallish blogs go, but chump change compared to folks like Atrios and Calpundit). Blogging can take a lot of effort, and it’s natural to want more people to read and appreciate what you’re doing.
So how do you get people to link to you?
- The best way to get people to link to you is to write interesting posts and update frequently. I know, “duh,” but it’s still the best advice. I hate to say it, but unless you write as well as D-Squared (and almost no one apart from Billmon or Jeanne D’arc does), frequent updates are probably the best thing you can do to increase your traffic.
- DON’T send people “hey, want to exchange links” emails. I receive several “reciprocal link request” emails a week, and I almost always ignore them (especially when they’re obviously form letters sent to a gazillion bloggers). It sounds harsh, but I don’t have time to add a new blog to my blogroll every time someone emails me. Neither will you, once your blog has grown a bit.
- Link to other people! Nearly all bloggers check to see where their hits are coming from; you’re far more likely to get a blogger to check you out by linking to them than by emailing them. Link to bloggers you find interesting, whether or not they’ve ever linked you.
For instance, I just checked out “Alas, a Blog’s” stats. (Hey, I got 1500 visitors on the 17th! I wonder what that was about?) Looking at referrals, I see several blogs that I haven’t looked at lately (or ever): Keywords, which seems like a very smart lefty blog that I’ll definitely be checking in the future, the beautifully-written Across, Beyond, Through, where I read that “joy is a force of nature,” and My So-Called Lesbian Life, a blog that I’ve linked to frequently in the past but have forgotten to check lately, which was my mistake because she’s got a lot of great stuff on same-sex marriage (including a photo of her best friend’s wedding).
- If there’s a blog you’d particularly like a link from, try linking to and discussing their posts. If you can bounce off one of their posts and add new thoughts, that’s more likely to generate a reciprocal link than a post saying “go read this post, it’s great” is.
- If you’re a political blogger, and there are opposition blogs you respect, go ahead and start up inter-blog debates with them (but be polite!). A nice, long blog war can do wonders for your stats.
- If you do a post responding to someone else, it’s okay to email them to make sure they see it. Just say “FYI, I’ve responded to you on my blog, and here’s the URL.” It’s also perfectly acceptable to post a link to your response in their comments (if they have comments).
- Proofread. Spell-check. Use an easy-to-read blog design (no white print on black backgrounds!). It may seem unfair, but being “professional” in your approach will attract more readers.
- If you must send out a “please check out my blog” email, wait until you’ve written a particularly great post, and send out a “check out this great post” email.
- Stick with it. Unless you luck out, it can take a long time to build an audience.
- Have fun and don’t obsess on your stats. A blog with twelve readers is just as valid as a blog with twelve thousand readers. Do material that pleases you, and trust that your audience will find you.
I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what occurs to me offhand. Anyone else have any suggestions?.
I played one game that drew a trememdous amount of traffic, culminating in a few days of over 10k visitors a day.
I used “blogshares” to “advertise” my blog (it was the Sept 11th Photoblog @ http://www.aboutitall.com/septphotoblog.php). I got lots and lots of juice from it, more then I would expect. That traffic spread across all my active blogs (at the time, had the Oregon blog, the Privacy blog, etc), and some of it persisted. So a short term project can be a very good traffic draw too!
Jack Bog has had some success in getting new readers by some use of timely, topical and funny images. He got mentioned by instapundnt, which launched him from the short season minors, to a AA caliber blog.
So there are other techniques.
I used the old “head over to Alas, A Blog and give the trolls the good-old fashioned spanking they deserve” technique. That’s the only explanation I have for the relative and growing popularity for Raznor’s Rants.
I’m particularly fond of surfing and leaving snippets here and there. The occasional curious email never hurts, either. I always answer the emails that I get from lurkers and the like, even without much free time on my hands.
I’m very new to blogging, so what I have to say on this might be of limited relevance. But it seems to me that the numbers in themselves mean nothing. If someone comes to my blog because Google has decided that I write about women having sex with snakes, well, that someone will be sorely disappointed. It’s much more fun to have those people reading who you are writing to, and in that sense I feel incredibly blessed. I’m learning from the comments threads.
Also, most blogs are not little newsstations or chatrooms, and those are the blogs that are going to be really popular. To compare the average blog to those is really not meaningful IMO. In general, comparisons across blogs is like comparing the New York Times circulation to that of the Journal of American Mathematical Association to that of Shakespeare’s Collected Works to that of Hot Sex in Hawaii (if such a thing exists). They all may be great or not, but they are not in the same market.
Also, if I e-mail another blogger, without ever specifically blog-whoring, I add my blog url under my name. I have no idea how effective that’s been.
#11: Make posts with titles like, “How to get more hits for your blog,” and make sure they hang around the top of the ORblogs list for a while…
I don’t really know if I’m entirely qualified to give advice on this matter seeing as how I’ve only ever blogged at Alas and so started out with something of an established readership. (And, really, I’ll post a lot more often when my life has settled down a bit.)
A few thoughts, though… First, comment at other blogs. It draws attention to who you are, what you have to say, and how you write. There are a lot of bloggers who have become daily must-reads for me because I loved their comments so much that I wanted to know what they had to say about other things.
Second, and some may disagree with me, but be tasteful in the way that you present your blog. I find it to be rather rude whenever someone writes a comment that consists of little more than “I responded to this post at my blog.” I’d recommend doing one of two things in a case like that: write the author of the post an e-mail to let him or her know that you responded to his or her post, or write a substansive comment in the comment thread with a note at the end saying that you’ve written more on the subject at your blog. (An important note: don’t end all of your comments with a front-and-center link to your blog, just on posts where you’ve written a relevant response.) Also, don’t forget trackback pings.
Third, if you’ve written an e-mail out to people to encourage them to check out your blog (or, much better, as Amp said, a particularly great post at your blog) don’t mention that this or that top dog blogger has linked to your before. I’m much more interested in the content of your post, the subject of your blog, than I am about whether or not you’ve ever been linked to by the Daily Kos.
Quick question, while we’re on the subject, how do you check trackback pings?
At Alas or at your blog?
At Alas, and most Moveable Type blogs, you click the “Trackback” link next to the “Comments” link at the bottom of the post. This will open up a new window that not only displays the information for pinging the trackback but also those sites that have tracked back to the post in question.
On BlogSpot… I have no idea. I believe that they only just recently started doing trackbacks, so I have no experience with them.
Raznor, Haloscan has a very good tutorial on how it does trackbacks. Click on the News logo to find it or go to the forums section. If you use Haloscan, that is.
If you blog on a particular theme, find other bloggers on that theme and comment/link.
Keep a list of links to your very best stuff, and good research material, especially if you touch on contentious issues a lot like I do. That’s more of a traffic thing than a link thing.
Also, not just participating but collating a cross-blog discussion draws links and traffic. From personal interest I picked up on a question (“What does it mean to be a Black blogger”). I answered it, searched out other people’s answers from trackbacks and comments and blogged about them, making a brief summary, a reaction and a link to the response. Everyone I linked to linked back. Great numbers of interested parties linked for their friends’ sake. And when non-Black folks joined the party they were included since they essentially answered the same question. A TON of great stuff, and I got credit just for collecting it all.
Echidne, thanks.
As a reader of Blogs, I can say that I’m more likely to check out peoples’ blogs if I come across good comments by them at other blogs. Of course, references to specific posts from bloggers that I read also gets checked out.
One good way to increase traffic is to sign up with various services, most of which have cute little buttons that I’ve put on my sidebar. :)
I have a question on how referral data works.
Does it only list the occasions on which people come to your site by following a link, or does it list the previous web page they were viewing however they then came to yours, even if it was by pulling down a bookmark or typing in the URL?
What seems to work great for getting more people to read my blog is being listed in so many places in the sidebar of the famous Alas, a Blog! I’m very grateful and extremely pleased. Thanks!
Simon: my site host’s logs list referrals as the last page a visitor was on, regardless of whether they actually clicked a link there or not.
e.g., I have recurring referrals from iaea.org (not huge numbers, but enough that it’s noticeable, esp. early in the month) I’m pretty sure the International Atomic Energy Agency doesn’t have a link to bigfool.com ANYWHERE on their site–I suspect I have a reader who works there, so that’s his/her home page, but after opening the browser and loading the home page, s/he types in my URL.
Sorry, double post. To follow on Ampersand’s first point, update frequently and well: if you have MT or another system that allows for multiple authors, consider adding a co-blogger. Find a friend or frequent commenter who really should have a blog but doesn’t, and bring ’em on board. It will immediately increase the frequency of new posts at your site and give people more incentive to revisit. I recently asked an old college buddy to post on my site, and within three weeks he had gotten a specific post linked at Orcinus, tripling our traffic for a couple of days.
I know that I would likely get more hits if I spent more time putting witty, well-written and insightful comments on other people’s blogs. The problem is that I have an unfortunately minute supply of wit, insight, and time and energy to write well. I save that up for my own blog.
In fact, two-thirds of the time I start typing in a comment on a blog, I re-read it, think ‘gosh, that’s a waste of any reader’s time, and certainly won’t get me any more readers’ and delete the thing. I ain’t particularly diffident, but I am aware that if I’ve dashed off a comment in two minutes, the odds are pretty good it’s crap.
I spend a bit of time on most of my blog notes; I am trying to write actual mini-essays (such as the terrific one I’m responding to now), rather than post a quick link to the same story everybody has already read.
On the other hand, it’s a good point that I should email a person when their blog sparks a post on my own. That doesn’t take much time, and is only polite; in future I will do so. Thanks for that.
Redintegro Iraq,
-V.
Pictures of naked marmosets getting married via secret Republican rituals in Branson, Missouri always spins my sitemeter.
Friday economic-graph blogging works, but only when drawn on Greenspan’s droopy buttocks with day-glo paint.
Snarky, unhelpful comments never boost traffic, however. Don’t even think of it.
hey all. great suggestions, which have been duly noted.
slightly OT, i guess, but Amp can rap my knuckles if so…
anybody care to offer some opinions on Movable Type to someone who’s weighing all the technical options before starting a new blog? (i’ve already ruled out the free blog hosts for various reasons; pretty much committed to MT or similar plug-and-play solution.)
mainly, i’m interested in first-hand issues with MT; perhaps mistakes you wish you hadn’t made the first time that you’d recommend i avoid? tech-y or otherwise…?
i’m a web developer and perl scripter, so i’m not scared at all by configuring MT on my own server. i’m mainly more interested in its usability from a blogger’s viewpoint.
One item I’d like to add is the old adage “slow and steady wins the race.”
What’s the point of relentlessly marketing your stuff if your blog is barely in its infancy?
For me, I plan on building up my archives before I start doing my William Randolph Hearst impersonation.
Thanks again for some great tips!
CN
Well… movabletype seems great when the spam blocker is working! (It wasn’t much fun when it wasn’t!)
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