First of all a big “thank you” for every one who participated. As I said before the number of entries surprised me (and the quality as well, I will definitely apply some of those tips myself).
Now, without further delay, the 30 Traffic Generation Tips:
1. Sridhar Katakam
Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. A good way to keep the conversation going is to install a MyBlogLog widget and visit the blog of people visiting your site.
2. Ian Delaney
Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Consider writing posts with resources or explaining how things work. Useful things get linked to and they get onto del.icio.us, which is far better long-term than a digg front page.
3. Yousif H
The secret to any traffic generating strategy starts with crafting a powerful and effective value proposition that shapes your brand’s image. Make sure to clearly echo your company’s value proposition on your website, stationary, postcards and even business cards to ensure consistent messaging.
4. Scott Townsend
Inform search engines and aggregators like Technorati (using the ping functionality) when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources. (check the List of Ping Services)
5. Kyle
Simplify. Pay attention to complex issues in your field of work. It may be a big long publication that is hard to wade through or a concept that is hard to grasp. Reference it and make a shorter “for dummies” version with your own lessons learned and relevant tips. When doing this, I have been surprised to find that the simplified post will appear before the more complex version in search results. Perhaps this is why it results in increased traffic; people looking for more help or clarification on the subject will land on your blog.
6. Grant Gerver
Try to be polemic. I write obsessively about all-things political from the left-wing perspective in the form of humorous, sarcastic one-liners.
7. Daniel
A simple tip that will probably boost your page views: install a translator plugin. I decided to use a paid plugin for this, but if I am not wrong there are some free ones as well. The translation is not very good, as you can imagine, but it helps to attract readers that are not fluent in English.
8. Rory
Submit articles to blog carnivals (http://blogcarnival.com) that are related to your niche. Your article almost always gets posted, and it must generate a handful of visitors, at least.
9. Ramen Junkie
Newsgroups. I always see a spike when I post a review to a newsgroup.
10. Eric Atkins
Create a new design for your website. Not only will it be more attractive to your regular readers, but you can submit it to some CSS gallery showcase sites that feature great designs. This will give you exposure on those sites while generating a lot of traffic and backlinks from those types of sites.
11. Megan Taylor
Participate in conversations on related blogs. Start conversations on your own blog. Don’t just post about a story and leave it at that, engage your audience, ask questions and call to action.
12. Guido
Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums.
13. Brian Auer
You must be active to generate traffic. I post comments on other blogs that are related to mine, and I post my site link in my signature at the forums. Spread the word about your blog and it will certainly attract readers.
14. Shankar Ganesh
Just browse around MyBlogLog.com and you will surely get visitors to your blog. Also try to join as many communities as possible that are related to your topic.
15. Andrew Timberlake
A great tip for generating traffic is off-line by including your url in all your off-line liturature from business cards, letterheads, pamphlets, adverts through in-store signage if applicable. I even have our website on my vehicle.
16. Cory OBrien
Read lots of other blogs. Leave trackbacks. Make sure your blog is optimized for search engines. Leverage social bookmarking sites like digg (both for new ideas and for traffic).
17. Jester
Leave comments on other blogs. If you’re already reading them, it takes
just a couple of seconds to leave a message agreeing or disagreeing
with the author, you get to leave a link to your site, and you will almost
ALWAYS get traffic from your comments.
18. Goerge Manty
Post 3-5 times a day. Use ping services like pingomatic or set up wordpress to ping some of the ping services. Engage your readers. Put up polls, ask them questions, give them quizes, free tools, etc. Make them want to come back and tell their friends about you.
19. Engtech
Community. It’s one word but it is the most important one when it comes to blogging. The only “blog metric” that makes sense is the vibrant community of readers it has. Building a community around your blog will bring you increased traffic, but how do you start? The boilerplate response to building traffic is always “SEO, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs” but it can be simplified to “be part of a community. The easiest way to seed your blog is with an already existing community. But the only way to do that is to be part of the community yourself.
20. Chris
Squidoo Lenses are a good way to generate traffic. By using a lense,
you can generate your own custom “community” of webpages, including some
of the more popular pages in your “neighborhood.” Including your own
webpage in such a list is a good way of generating traffic.
21. Splork
I’ve had good success writing articles and submitting them to EzineArticles. Articles that have been written from well-researched keyword phrases and accepted by EzineArticles tend to rank very high in Google for that search term. Placing anchor text in the footer of those articles so the reader can visit my relevant website has always increased my site traffic.
22. Jen Gordon
I came upon some unexpected traffic when my blog popped up on some css design portals like www.cssmania.com and www.webcreme.com. If you can put some time into the concept behind and design for your blog, I’d recommend submitting your site to a design portal not only for
additional traffic but to build an additional community around your site.
23. Kat
I’ve recently gotten involved with several “MySpace-like” community sites that focus on my target audience. I share my thoughts in their forums, post intros to my real blog on their system blog and I’ve even created a group for my specific niche. It’s been very, very successful for me.
24. Inspirationbit
Well, obviously everyone knows that social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. bring lots of traffic. But I’m now submitting some of my articles to blogg-buzz.com (a digg like site for bloggers), and I always get not a bad traffic from there.
25. Mark Alves
Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers where you can demonstrate your expertise, get associated with relevant keywords and put your URL out there.
26. Tillerman
Be the first to write a post about the ‘Top Ten Blogs’ in your niche. The post will rank highly in any general search for blogs in your niche and other bloggers in your niche write about the post and link to it.
27. Nick
Participating in forums is a great way to get loyal readers. Either link baiting people in your signature or posting great advice and tips will give you high quality traffic, which will result in return visitors.
28. Brandon Wood
A simple trick I’ve used to increase traffic to my blog is participate in group writing projects. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now.
29. Alan Thomas
Don’t forget your archives. I just posted a roundup of all interviews I did over the past seven months. One of them generated a new link and a big traffic spike from a group of users that look like they will be loyal readers now.
30. KWiz
Write something controversial. I don’t think it’s good to write something controversial just for the purpose of getting traffic necessarily (especially if it’s only for that purpose and you’re being disingenuous), but it works.
31. Dennis Coughlin
Find the best blogs on your niche and contact the authors. Introduce yourself and send a link of your blog. This might help them to discover your blog, read it and possibly link to it.
About Daniel
Daniel Scocco is a programmer and entrepreneur located in São Paulo, Brazil. His first company, Online Profits, builds and manages websites in different niches. His second company, Kubic, specializes in developing mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms.
i think i must think about new tips.
Thanks so much for posting these tips..
we are new to blogging…just about 6 weeks young…and looking to learn and grow…
Thanks
it’s the first time I saw the concept of blog project, interesting:)
One way to get returning traffic to your blog is putting a live chat solution in your blog. Geesee can provide that and we reviewed adn interviwed the company. You can read it at
Really good tips and a good initiative. Thank you very much.
Thanks for the tips, those are definitely some ideas to keep in mind!
really useful tips here. Although some are just the same tips repeated with different words.
Thanks for all the helpful tips. I bookmarked this post and will likely do a re-read to remind me of some simple yet effect methods for improving my blog.
This is some really great advice and for all of us bloggers it needs to be taken to heart.
Thank you for excellent tips. I would add some of my obserwations. Keep active on your blog, there are always questions and spam. Kill spam and answer all the questions, even if “I don’t know” is the only answer you can give, still if keeps thing running and visitors “semi-satisfied”. Once I was on vacation and did not touch my blog for a couple of weeks. The drop of traffic was like 50%.
Excellent web site I will be visiting often
Another practice that I follow is to keep your Blog URL as your IM presence information. ie. as Google Talk, Yahoo!, MSN Status.
It works well with friends especially if they are in MyBlogLog community .
I pushed this one to a new client. Thanks for this.
nora, voy a ver lo que encuentro en tu blog y despues te mando los consejos por mail.
saludos y gracis por visitar
Great post and ideas, infact I found quite a few useful ideas on your site and am now a new RSS subscriber 🙂
@kin:
This copy of the list is very clean / organized:
Good to hear these tips from everyone employing them as well. Would like to see a cleaned up list without the duplicates giving everyone a daily worksheet they can work from!
Maybe I will compile when I find time.
This is wonderful information. It looks like I have some work ahead of me, but I’ve also been able to quickly confirm that I’ve been doing some of the suggested things correctly already. Thanks again for another great post.
Maki, thanks for subscribing, I am looking forward for your entry on the next project!
This meme-like blog project thingy seems pretty cool. Will be joining it the next time round.
Just subscribed to your feed, Daniel.. keep up the excellent work! 🙂
My post is up now, too. Thanks again for making this possible, Daniel.
Anthony, 6 posts per day could be an overkill, depending on your topic. News-related blogs could get around with it, but I am not sure about your subject.
In comment 18 Goerge Manty suggests posting 3-5 times per day. I’ve recently added a second author to my blog and lately we have been posting up to 6 articles daily. What do you guys (and gals) think, can there be too much of a good thing? Is there a limit to how many articles a reader can find valuable per day?
Thanks for the nice words Wally. I will definitely check your blog out.
Hi I get alot of traffic from using a plugboard on my blog as well as traffic pods exchange. Blog explosions blog tycoon is a great service too. LOVE your blog. Its the kinda blog mine wants to grow up to be like.
Andrew, I agree with you, maybe next time we can make bloggers post the tips on their blogs (I was not sure about this one because not all blogs deal with blogging tips).
Also thanks for everyone spreading the link love.
Posted on my blog:
Daniel
Thanks for this project, I have added my blog entry.
Suggestion:
The idea here is to promote different blogs, get links but also to to encourage on another to visit and/or interact with other blogs.
The one thing this project didn’t do was encourage visiting other blogs because all the tips are in one place.
If we each wrote our tips on our own post and your provided links to those posts, we would be able to get more effective link text for promotion purposes, we would need to visit other blogs for the actual tips and there would be no duplicate content problem because you’re not actually posting the content, just links.
Not sure if I’ve thought through it properly but the ideas there.
List posted. One thing I did to try to avoid any dupe penalties is 1) reorder the list and 2) write a couple of intro paragraphs. It should help.
Interesting tips everyone… and thanks for organizing Daniel.
I’ve simplified the list a bit and linked to the actual tip. If I have summarized your tip incorrectly, let me know and I’ll fix it.
I posted the list. Goodnes knows what my regular readers will think of it. They come to my blog for stories about sailing.
Things to watch out for:
– Rory link might be missing
– Megan Taylor’s link is missing the http://
I’m publishing my list now
thanks for the awesome project
I’ve got my post up here:
I’m not entirely sure the re-order will change the duplicate content penalty in search engines, but at the very least it will increase the chances for everyone to be in the top spots of the list.
Plus everyone will read the list.
🙂
I’ve re-arranged the order on my post. Thanks to Engtech for the List code. Hope re-ordering would eliminate the duplicate content’s penalties.
inspirationbig, if we adopt engtech’s advice making people order the list according to their preference we can count the tip that was nomitated on the first place more time and declare it the winner
Engtech,
I just changed the post with the following paragraph:
“Secondly, for the participants that will now write a post with a link to the entries, I would like to ask you guys to place a link directly to the participant blogs. I was thinking about letting everyone include the tips, but I am not sure whether this will create penalties for duplicated content or not.”
I guess you point about the duplicated content is relevant. I will research more about it to see whether re-ordering the list would eliminate the penalties.
I think including a Winner would make the projects even more attractive. But who’ll be the judge – you, Daniel? 🙂 I’m ok with that – you’re the boss here 🙂
Here is the text as an HTML ordered list.
Useful if you want to rearrange it in order of your favorites:
Actually I think I already have the topic for the next edition, but stories about Digg is definitely a good option, i will write it down.
I would also like to know if we should change the rules for participating or keep it as they are, possibly include a winner, etc.
Crazy idea guys.
Changing the order of the posts will help deter “duplicate content” penalties.
So taking the 15 minutes to reorder the list into the order of your favorites is worth everyone’s time.
Converting it to an order list makes resorting it easier.
Hopefully this will make for cut-and-paste code.
How about getting answers on “What everyone learned from having their sites submitted to Digg?”. I’m sure everyone has something to say about Digg…
thanks you guys for participating.
also lets chat about how we can improve the project next month, I am open for suggestions.
I’ve posted everyone on my site as well. I’m very glad I was one of the participants of this great project. Thanks, Daniel!
I’ve posted all of the links on my site.
Thanks for the organising this cool project.
Cheers
Dennis
Also, the duplicate content penalty isn’t a big deal since the traffic from this article will be from the associates sites, not from search engines.
@Daniel: The only rule I would change is ask people to reorder the list in some way to keep the posts from looking like duplicated content.