Ever wonder how I can garner some 200 visitors a day in 3 months time of blogging. Granted, it’s nothing grandiose compared to those highly trafficked sites, such as all the members of the MoneyBlogNetwork sites. But I think it is still a little above average, for a 3.5-month old blog.
Well, I did some of my homeworks before I started blogging. Here are my tips, not listed in the order of importance. There are probably more good ideas, but at least it’s something that you can begin on:
- Post everyday or frequently. Yeah, it’s very hard in the very beginning when no one is reading, but with every new post, you get your page (& site) flashes through internet, with some hope of catching a couple of eyeballs.
- Participate in the related carnivals at www.blogcarnival.com. You can slowly build some regular and one-time readers this way.
- Make sure your site has good & interesting readings, and structured well to grab and convert those one-time visitors into regular readers. Reference posts that can be read & referred several times as reference are good. Experiential posts with humor or interesting stories are probably good too. Tools/Calculators (actually, one of the first things that I have on my site) should be very good too. Good categories and a good navigating page will help a lot too.
- Occasionally go out of your ways to participate in some less directly related carnivals or leave your comments on un-related sites. This can bring some strayed but new readers to your site, once you’ve kind of exhausted the regular eyeballs on the directly related carnivals.
- Leave good & informative comments at related sites. After a while, you can leave a link back to your site for related articles. It will also build relationship with your peers/competitors.
Also, here are some of the social bookmarking sites that could potentially give you a ton of traffics.
- reddit.com: a simple submission site without categories. LOTS and LOTS of readers, and spam-haters. I’ve pretty much given up on reddit.com, after people either call me a spammer when I am trying to provide very useful information, or that my articles simply don’t get very welcomed. Still, even lowly ranked submissions will get LOTS of hits.
- del.icio.us: another very hot social bookmarking site. However, most of the submissions are related to high-tech stuffs, instead of money/finance stuffs. Since it works by tagging, there should not be any problems submitting your articles. Spam-killers however will not hesitate to call you spammers.
- popurls.com: I used to submit one or two articles to here, but unfortunately you can’t do that anymore. This site actually pulls the top articles from various top news or social bookmark sites.
- digstock.com: Here is a good site for investing blog to submitting their articles. I was able to get my articles ranked pretty high on this site. The number of readers cannot be compared to the big social bookmarking sites. But at least you can some targeted readers who will be specifically interested in this area.
- stumbleupon.com: This seems to be a growing social bookmarking site. But it requires you to install their software on your PC. I submitted a couple articles, and did get some readers. But that’s about it.
- digg.com: Same story as reddit.com, but a little bit better. Super-hot social bookmarking site. However, most of the categories are not directly related to finance, but rather to computer, high-tech stuffs.
You can check out this list for even more social bookmark sites. There are lots of competitions out there in this arena.
And if you want to follow one of the most highly successful PF bloggers, check out here. I’m sure J.D. at Get Rich Slowly is kind and will be still generous enough for any of you to take a pick at his traffics details. (My apology to JD for this disclosure. Being a success model for all of us, I don’t think you would mind, would you?) He is more than 10X if not 50X ahead of most people’s traffics (excluding the MoneyBlogNetwork members). I don’t think he needs to worry about any competitions up there. But unless you can get onto Lifehackers.com, Metafilters, 43 folders, and any sites at his link section, it’s likely that you won’t be able to reproduce his success. If you know how, please let me know. By the way, he is an oldie on the internet. Don’t be depressed about your own stats just because his site is less than 4 months old.
Two other terrific and diligent over-achiever among PF bloggers are Blueprint for Financial Prosperity and Free Money Finance. Check out Jim’s & fmf stats here. I believe that their traffics are quite organic, built upon solid regular readers and LOTS of Google Search hits. Now, you know how important it is to go back to your posts and fine-tune your SEO (search engine optimization), and add those keywords for search. And of course, quality articles are always essential for building a base of regular readers. Other MoneyBlogNetworks are all excellent PF sites & you can all learn from their stats. This includes AllFinancialMatters, Consumerism Commentary, FiveCentsNickel, MightyBargainHunter, listed in alphabetical order. There are many other good PF sites, but not every site makes their stats available for you to learn about their referals (including mine, but I’ve just told everything that I know so that you don’t need to go thru any of my stat data to find out how).
By the way, make sure you have listed your blogs at various blog aggregators. There are lots and lots of them. pfblogs.org, www.pfblogs.com, blogtopsites.com, blogxxxx (click for the list), and technorati.com. Every bit of traffics help. Just do make sure after you submit your RSS or URL, it’s actually working. It took me a long while before I realized that some of my submissions didn’t work at all for reasons such as I didn’t include their logo on my site.
At last, if not at first, study the ins & outs of blogging at probloggers.net. It’s almost like a manual to blogging. There are probably other good sites, but probloggers cover most of the essentials, if not all.
Haven’t seen any new tips from here? Sorry, blogging is more about work than tips. Tips are only meant to keep you on the right track and work smartly. But it won’t substitute any bits of the works that are required.
