The Commissar offers some advice for bloggers. With that, I’ll follow up with mechanical things that you can do:

Have a blogroll – If you link to other sites, people using Technorati or the Ecosystem will notice you’re linking to them. This may inspire them to read your blog. I find, however, some people have huge blogrolls and massive reciprocal links. Here at SayUncle, if you’re on the blogroll, then I read your site. If you don’t link to people, you won’t get noticed. I have to say that if you’re just starting out, do as I say and not as I do. Link to anyone you find interesting. People appreciate links.

Watch your hits – Whether you use sitemeter or any other traffic counter, figure out where your hits are coming from. People linking to you will let you know what sort of audience you’re attracting.

Read other blogs – And go there from your blogroll. People will appreciate that you read their site and this will get you noticed. Also, leave comments. I’m not saying troll comment sections and shamelessly plug your blog at every opportunity. I am saying that engaging in debate and discussion will increase your traffic.

Have comments – people like to discuss, debate, call you an idiot, or whatever. Of course, some folks’ sites get too bogged down with comments so they disable them but most of us aren’t that big. If people have a platform to express themselves or refute you, they’re more likely to come back.

Enable Trackbacks – Another way to find out who is linking to you. In fact, my page has in-line Trackbacks so that if you link to my site, you’re guaranteed a link back.

Email bloggers – Don’t email everything you write to everyone. In fact, lots of stuff that I personally get emailed as part of a bulk list gets classified as spam by Yahoo. But send well-thought posts about relevant issues. Borrowing from Volokh: Plug the post, not the site. If you have something insightful to say and you want to say it to someone, then email it. I get a lot of email and I’m a small-fry blogger. But I get, at a guess, 50 emails per day (that aren’t spam). I don’t read them all but try to read most of them.

I consider my blog moderately successful. I am a large mammal in the ecosystem. Even though it counts many carnival links for some reason despite emailing TTLB a few times, I still get quite a few links. I get 157 links excluding Carnival links which still places me in the Large Mammal group. I also get about 577 visits per day and 967 page views per day according to Sitemeter. Per Awstats, I get 759 visits and 2522 page views per day. I also have a fairly active comments section. If you’d asked me when I first started this blog (and my only reader was SouthKnoxBubba, and a big thanks to him for plugging me in my early days) if I thought my blog would do that well, I’d have said no. But I stuck to it and am quite happy with it.

That’s my advice. Take it for what it’s worth.

Posted in uncategorized on March 24th, 2004 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |