Great list, Elise. :)

Bill Cammack — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 06:10:39 -0500

I also agree with Melanie's point about forums & sigs. The socialization that goes on on forums is just as important as demonstrating that you have the required technical knowledge to be considered an authority in your field... if not more, IMO.

--
Bill Cammack
Video Editor
ReelSolid.TV

good ones

Mistress Of The Dorkness — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:48:04 -0500

I agree with those and would add another... signature lines in newsgroups.
My site being geared toward my profession, when I answer questions in newsgroups, my signature line contains my name and a link to my blog. I think I get as much traffic there as I do via links and google searches.
Oh, and good call on #4. I just did up a button to easily add my feed to a google homepage. Very cool stuff.

Thanks for the great topic!

Melanie Perry
***not all who wander are lost***
Mistress Of the Dorkness

Adding a send to a friend button

Vicki Bodwell — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:54:02 -0500

How do I add an off the shelf "Send to a Friend" button?

Also, your Del.icio.us, Digg,Reddit and Technoroti buttons are simple and clean...mine (which I downloaded) are too big...how can I "copy" these?!

Vicki Bodwell
Link TextFrom One Mom to Another
Link Textwarmbiscuit.com

How to Build Blog Traffic - How do people find your blog?

Elise Bauer — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:47:39 -0500

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

If our goal is to increase our blog traffic, the primary question we need to ask ourselves is, how do people get to our blogs in the first place? Understanding how people learn about our blogs, and make their way over to visit them, will help us better understand how to use technology to increase our visibility.

So, how do people find out about us?

Someone else's website - Someone - friend, colleague, or stranger - knows about your site and is linking to it from her website. If you are just starting out, and you have lots of friends, this is probably where much of your traffic is coming from.
A comment on someone else's website - You've left a comment on someone else's blog, and now that person and her readers are clicking through the comment link and finding your site.
Google or other search engines - The search engines spider the world wide web looking for sites and indexing them. Somehow they found you and have your site in their index. Someone has made a search on one of the search engines and has found your site in the search results. The longer your site has been around, and the more other sites link to it, the higher your site will be placed in the search results and the more people will be able to find your site that way.
You're bookmarked - Okay, maybe this isn't how someone found you in the first place, but it might be the way they find you the second time. If you change your URL structure, the directories or path names to your blog entry, you will invalidate all those bookmarked pages on the sites of readers who want to come back to visit again. The longer your blog is around, and the more popular, the bigger an issue this becomes.
Newsfeeds - Newsfeed readers such as Bloglines, MyYahoo, and Personalized Google promote popular and/or interesting feeds. You can make it easier for your readers to add your site to their favorite newsfeed reader, increasing your chance of being one of the more popular feeds.
Social bookmarking tools - Social bookmarking tools such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumbleupon keep track of what people link to, and then highlight the most highly linked posts.
Someone emailed your URL to someone else - You can help this along by providing an "send to friend" form on your blog.
Press - If you get picked up in a story in print media, that can bring lots of people to your site, especially if that print media also has an online presence. Want press? Find out what journalists are covering your space and send polite emails of introduction, offering to be a resource for any article they might want to write concerning blogs.

Those are the main categories that I can see. Am I missing something? How do people find your blog?

Next up, Google, Search Engines, and SEO.

Contributing Editor Elise Bauer blogs at Simply Recipes, Learning Movable Type, and several other blogs as part of elise.com. This series on building blog traffic is cross-posted at Learning Movable Type.

BlogHer - How to Build Blog Traffic - How do people find your blog? - Comments

Great list, Elise. :)

good ones

Adding a send to a friend button

How to Build Blog Traffic - How do people find your blog?