Oh heck yes I want traffic to my blog! I have a feedjit loader http://feedjit.com/ so I can see who comes to my pages and sometimes how they got there. For instance I love knowing that some soul from Belleview Arkansas visits often and they found me by searching for Mystic Isles on google and that my story about a graveyard was passed around for some reason and received a lot of traffic from Norway. Perhaps someday I will go to Bellview and wonder if I will see my reader. lol I don’t like writing to myself, I need somebody to write to.

 

I WISH more people would comment as I also love comments and conversations and that hardly EVER happens I would like to know how to make my blog more comment friendly as I crave feedback and push and give.

Great info. It's such a trial and error. SEO is huge. I have done experimentation and it really works. Small things like proper tagging and I even put my RSS feed link at t he top and bottom of each post for easy sign up.

 

Asking for guest posts and doing posts for others, having some fun contests and give a ways is good too. If you have good content and can attract people they will stay. Also blog hops and carnivals are good traffic builders.

 

Speaking of which I am having a blog tour Jan 10-14th if anyone want to join. Go to my site for details.

Hi Anne, you're welcome and I agree, it can get overwhelming, and the best guide seems to be trial and error.

Hi Judith, you're welcome! Glad it's helpful :)

Thanks so much for the info, Wendy. With so much out there, knowing what works and what doesn't is valuable...I like to sleep, too!

Lots of great information. Thanks, Wendy.

This is definitely a good topic and one that challenges many of us. I launched my blog www.creativityfuse.com less than 3 months ago, and the first month I was consumed with building traffic. I've since slowed down (so I can get some sleep), but below are some of the things I've done to build traffic. I should also mention that my blog features art work, it's not a traditional blog, but I think most of the techniques apply to any kind of blog.

Directories and search engines - I spent a lot of time listing my blog in directories that I found through searches and by looking at other blogs. Some directories charge a fee, and many require that you put a link on your site back to the directory. My experience is that after getting listed in around 10+ directories, there were only one or two that periodically send me traffic. I wasn't aware when I started that search engines have places to submit blogs, for example, here's where you submit for Google: http://blogsearch.google.com/ping.

Blogging communities - similar to directories, I also signed up for various blogging communities. For some blog communities, like www.blogged.com, you really need to actively participate in order to draw traffic, others like www.technorati.com simply seem to favor larger blogs and others get lost. Also, some communities allow people to follow the blogger or follow the actual blog, and I often get people following me and not my blog.

Facebook and Twitter - I created a FB page and list it on my personal FB page and I put a widget on my blog so people can 'like' the page directly from my site. So far I have 75 likes, not a ton, but slowly building. I also listed my blog on Networked Blogs on FB. So far I only have 8 followers, but I can now syndicate my blog feed, so every new post gets sent by Networked Blogs to my FB page for my blog, and my personal FB page. I also created a Twitter account and started following others and have about the same amount of growth as FB. Each time I create a new post I tweet it out.

Other social networking sites - I've tried using Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc. I have added social bookmarks to my own site, and each time I post something, I send the post to all of these social network sites. It's important to tag the post so it goes into a relevant category (e.g. art, painting, for mine, whatever is relevant for yours). And, like all communities, results will improve if you participate closely, follow or friend others, and build a community there who will want to read your blog posts.

Forums and Communities - I've started to find forums and communities that are related to the art topic of my blog, and sometimes I post comments and try to be come a value-added member of the community. But this also takes a lot of time.

Guest Blogging - I started guest blogging on another art site that is similar to mine, but much larger and much more established. They give me an 'about' section with a link back to my blog which is beginning to draw some traffic.

SEARCH - by far the most steady growth in traffic is coming from search. I use Wordpress and have downloaded an SEO (search engine optimization) widget that helps me tag and categorize each post. I also take time to label images carefully (especially important on an art site), so people are finding my blog by keywords and post and image tags. I think this will probably result in 70-80% of my traffic over time.

I hope this is helpful and would love to hear what others are doing as well.

Best,
Wendy

Blog Jog Day sounds interesting. Thanks for including the link, Anne! :)

I'm very new to blogging, but I've just signed up for Blog Jog Day. It's being held Sunday, November 21st, and I think there is still time to sign up. Take a look at my blog for details. You'll find the post dated Monday, November 8. Anne K. Albert Blog

I'm wondering what "heavy" traffic is for a start-up blog. Sure, Huffington Post bloggers get heavy traffic, but what are good traffic numbers for an independent blog at the six-month or year mark? Lofty Ambitions traffic picks up with guest blogs and with our recent series "Countdown to the Cape," for which we posted every day. Mentioning it on Facebook and Twitter helps. Growth seems slow and steady, but I don't have a context or a sense of goals for traffic. How many blogs does the average person follow regularly? How many do you check every day, or once a week? As a reader, I can't keep up with everything out there that interests me, so that makes me more patient with the slow growth of traffic on my own blog, which is just four months old. Posting on a regular schedule seems important. We post every Wed, we have guest posts every 1st and 3rd Monday, and we're going to add interviews every 2nd and 4th Monday. Sometimes, we do additional, timely posts. But for bloggers like me with jobs and other projects, it's tricky to figure out how much is enough and how much more matters when it comes to blogging and promoting the blog. I'm having a lot of fun with Lofty Ambitions as a project--it pushes me in good ways.