Traffic and Link Building Techniques
There are some specific techniques that every blogger should perform to build traffic and links to their blog. Here are some of them.
Join Technorati and Claim Your Blog
You probably have done this already, but if not, be sure to join Technorati. If you are not familiar with that site, it is a huge directory of blogs, organized by tags. People can search for a topic, and it will bring up blog posts on that topic.
Your blog must be indexed by Technorati, so that you can get into their blog search engine. The best way to do that is by “claiming” your blog.
Once you have joined Technorati, you go here to claim your blog. They will give you instructions on how to do it.
If you have a WordPress blog, you should also add Technorati to your ping list. You will find this in your Admin area under “Options – Writing”, near the bottom of the page in the box marked “Update Services”. Add the following to the list: http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Every time you create a new post, Technorati will index your post. Technorati will use the categories of your post as tags for indexing that post. You can also add Technorati tags to your post by following the instructions here.
Once you have joined Technorati and claimed your blog, you will see many benefits.
1) People searching Technorati for the topic of your blog will find your posts.
2) You are building links to your blog in Technorati.
3) Every time a blog that is indexed by Technorati links to you, Technorati will track it, and this will help increase your Technorati ranking and authority. This is used by many other sites to rank blogs.
4) People can “favorite” your blog in Technorati. If you can get a lot of people to favorite your blog, you could show up on the “top favorited” blogs list. It’s not very likely that you will get on that list, because it is very competitve. So why should you care about being favorited?
Because some people use Technorati as a way to keep track of their favorite blogs, so you should give them the option to favorite you there.
Technorati WTF
While we’re on the subject of Technorati, they provide another method for building traffic with the Technorati WTF (it stands for “Where’s The Fire?”). This is a place where you can post short blurbs about a topic.
You can use this to post a short blurb pointing to one of your blog posts. People can vote these up or down, so give it a catchy title and description.
The problem is that the WTF’s don’t stay on the first page very long, unless they get quite a few votes. But at least it does give you another link to your blog, and I have gotten some traffic this way. If you are lucky and yours gets voted up quickly, it could bring you a lot of traffic.
Blog Carnivals
You can find a huge list of blog carnivals at BlogCarnival.com. A blog carnival is basically a regularly scheduled blog post which contains links to other blog posts about a topic.
Submitting To Carnivals
You should submit some of your best blog posts to some blog carnivals that are related to your topic. You can sort the list of carnivals at blogcarnival.com by “Next Edition” to see upcoming carnivals.
Once you submit, the carnival organizer looks at the post, and if they approve it, they will link to your post in the next edition of their carnival.
You will get a few visitors from some of these carnivals, but often there are so many links in a carnival post that not many people click through to read the articles.
Don’t be discouraged, though. In this case, the links you receive are more important than the visitors. This is a good way to get quality links that will help you to rank in the search engines.
If you are lucky, someone could read your article and decide to link to it from their blog too. One of my articles became very popular this way, and was linked to from a lot of different sites.
Hosting A Carnival
If you have time, it is also good to start a carnival of your own, or, you could volunteer to host an established carnival on your blog. Some of the carnivals rotate blog hosts and are always looking for blog hosts.
By hosting a carnival on your blog, you get people to find your blog. The people who post articles to blog carnivals obviously have blogs of their own. So if these people get to know your blog and like it, they may link to you later, or at least, you may have gained another loyal reader of your
blog.
Join Group Writing Projects
Keep a lookout for popular blogs hosting group writing projects. Not only did I get some great links from very highly ranked blogs, but my articles were picked up by quite a few other blogs, so I got additional links as well.
There really is no excuse for not joining whatever group writing projects you find out about. I don’t know why more people don’t join these. You are publishing quality posts anyway, right? So all you have to do is sumit them to the group writing projects.
If the project wants a certain type of post – maybe a list, or a post on a certain subject – if it is a popular blog, I certainly would write a special post just for the project. It is well worth it for all the links you get. You will get traffic from these projects too.
Topic-Specific Top Lists
Try to find a list of some kind for your niche.
Especially For WordPress Blogs
I would like to mention a few things that can help your traffic and keep visitors coming back, that are specific to WordPress blogs. This seems to be the most popular blog platform. If your blog is not a WordPress blog, maybe you could adapt some of these to fit your platform.
First, here are some good plugins:
The Top Commentators plugin allows you to show a list of your top commenters. This encourages people to comment on your blog. This helps traffic because it rewards your loyal readers for frequent commenting, so it encourages them to come back often
I love the What Others Are Saying plugin. With this plugin, you can display the latest posts of the blogs on your blogroll. After installing the plugin, you just add the RSS feeds of your blogroll members. When you add someone to your Blogroll in WordPress, you will find a spot for their RSS Address under the “Advanced” portion of the Add Link or Edit Link page.
This is another instance where linking out really helps you. You are generously linking out to the latest posts of your blogroll. These people will see that you are sending them traffic, and they will be likely to return the favor in some way – by linking to you, adding you to their blogroll, or in whatever way they see fit.
The Subscribe to Comments plugin allows people who comment on your blog to check a box before they submit the comment, which will notify them by email if anyone comments on that post after they do. This brings more traffic, because people who check this box want to be
involved in the discussion. When they get an email that someone else has commented, they may come back to make another comment in reply. Pretty soon they will be in the habit of coming back to your blog often and commenting a lot.
By default, WordPress blogs mark all comments with the “nofollow” tag. This tells Google that the link is not a link that is vouched for by you. Originally this was thought to be a way to reduce comment spam because commenters would not get a link that was any good for search engine ranking by commenting.
If you moderate your comments, you should only be approving ones that are not spam. So there is no reason why your commenters should not get a little link love in exchange for commenting.
The Dofollow plugin removes the “nofollow” from the URL links in your comments. If you make it known that you have this plugin installed, people may make more of an effort to comment, because their comment will mean a link for them.
I don’t see this as a “bribe” for commenting. I see it as common courtesy in giving back something to my commenters. I appreciate the trouble they are going to, in leaving thoughtful comments, and I want to give them a little something in return.
Besides these plugins, here is another helpful hint for WordPress users:
Ping List
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
Every time you make a new post, all the services in your ping list will be notified, and your new post will spread by RSS. Several of these are services that in turn notify more services of your blog posts. This is why it is important to have a good ping list.
