started my how to make a blog on October 25th so this week my blog turns one year. As I have recently achieved the 200,000 visitors landmark, I thought this was a good time to put down some of the things I have learned from the first year that I would recommend bloggers to think of when launching a new project and building blog traffic.
Commenting on bigger blogs can bring you initial traffic
StumbleUpon is a nice place to get the first spikes in traffic
Use Twitter to get an audience and spread your links
Write a guest post for biggest blogs in your field
Keywords are a must in the domain name
- How to make a blog
- Make a blog
- How to make my blog
Use big brands to attract attention to yourself
- 8 things every blogger can learn by studying Perez Hilton
- How Gary Vaynerchuk built a multi-million dollar empire around a video blog
- 13 blogging lessons learned from Stephen King’s On Writing
Write magnetic headlines
Hitting Digg or Delicious is worth it – spikes and links
My first visitor other than myself was someone clicking over from a comment I had left at ProBlogger. In those first days all my visitors came from comments I left on ShoeMoney, DailyBlogtips, Mashable, Chris Brogan and other relevant blogs. For example on November 9th 2008 I left a comment onGetRichSlowly and that sent me 15 unique visitors first day, 20 the second day and 7 the third day which was huge back then!
Read more: How one blog comment can bring you 230+ unique visitors
I started looking for targeted people on StumbleUpon fairly soon after launching the blog. First time someone stumbled my post was on November 8th 2008 and that sent me 19 unique visitors first day and 37 the second day and that was huge! Even to this day, Stumble is one of the top 4 sources of my blog traffic.
Read more: 10 Simple Steps To Increase Blog Traffic Via StumbleUpon
On November 30th 2008 I joined Twitter, immediately started looking for people in my audience and got 55 unique visitors from there on the first day. It never stopped really, so Twitter along with Google is the biggest source of my traffic.
Read more: How I got my blog post retweeted by @problogger, @GuyKawasaki and 250 more
On December 14th my guest post was published at ProBlogger and that sent me 97 unique visitors on the first day and again 97 on the second day. Writing guest posts not only sends you traffic, it gives you authority, spreads your name to a targeted audience and also gives you a great value link for your search engine optimization.
Read more: How to get your guest post featured at biggest blogs
Looking at the traffic Google sends me, the 3 most popular keywords used to find my blog are very closely related to my blog domain name itself.
If I went with MarkoSaric.com I would have had a much harder time getting ranked for these three keyword phrases.
Read more: How to choose a domain name for your blog
In some of my most popular posts I have used other brand names to attract attention to myself. It is a great strategy as these brands have many fans so it is much easier to attract them to click over to you, much easier to get them to comment and also much easier to get them to share the story with their friends. See these examples:
In RSS, on Twitter, in Google search results, we are bombarded with choices to click on wherever we are online. The only way to attract attention among tons of other blogs is to write remarkable article headlines. In my experience “how to” and “top list” headlines work the best, are very clickable and shareable.
Read more: How to write blog headlines that make people click
The spikes in my traffic are from the days when my articles went “viral”. For example my Twitter plugins article hit the front page of Digg for few minutes and sent me 2799 unique visitors on that day, then my most downloaded WordPress plugins hit front page of Delicious and sent me 3602 unique visitors on that day. These events also bring you lots of links and that improves your SEO and increases your traffic in the long run.
