It's been one week already that I've had my "buzz traffic" experiment and I learned a few things from it that I will share with you today.
The experiment was initially of "Spamming" the internet with free but relevant advertising for my blog using all the free resources I had at hand, hoping that it would "kick start" my blog's traffic and readership. I believe that the time and effort put into it made it a mini-success. If you've already started a blog, you probably know that every single visitor counts. If you don't think so then ask yourself; would you pay 0.50$ - 1$ + for every blog visitor that is not even guaranteed to come back?
Here is a compilation of free ideas and resources that work to bring you traffic, I used most of them.
1.Commenting on unpopular Blogs
I have gotten a good bunch of visitors from blog commenting on not particularly popular blogs, and you can too. Just by greeting a blogger in a comment on his blog, in most cases he will be coming back to your blog to see who you are or reply back, or if not then one or more of his own blog visitors that will have read your comment will. To accelerate that process you can even use the copy/paste function for a comment, and slightly change it for each blog you comment on! - getting more potential visitors in less time. If your blog has a very general appeal or an appeal to blogers then this could be effective. To visit a lot of blogs in low ammount of time, use the blogger surf bar to surf blogs.
2. Commenting on popular Blogs
Commenting on popular blogs related to your niche is a good way to get interested visitors. Simply subscribe to one such blog, and as soon as you receive an update, rush to the blog and be amongst the first to comment! When I use that technique I usually get at least 5 visitors when I'm in top ten first commentators of a popular blog.
3. Starting a forum topic
This method is I think is one of the most succesfull ways if you do it right. Forums usually allow you to have a "signature" where you can post a link to your site or allow you to mention your site. If you create an attractive title for the forum and engage into a conversation with people replying then the topic you created might catch on and stay on the top of the forum topics for a while, receiving lots of visibility. You can look out for such forums and create similar titles or come up with your own.
Also, have you noticed sometimes that when you search for a term or phrase on google, one of the first results is a forum topic? If a given forum has a strong pagerank (the pagerank is the importance of a website or web page as seen by google going from 0..most blogs to 10..less than 10 pr websites at this time)... so if a given forum has a strong pagerank then that means that new topics created can be in the top 10 google results! Depending on the keywords in the title you give to the new topic aswell as the competion for those keywords, you may have good chances of your topic of ranking on top of google for that set keyword(s) and without much hassle! Here's a tool you can use to check out pageranks...I will leave it on the sidebar of this blog for future reference. Btw, two good forums I suggest is DigitalPointForums , BlogCatalog and you should also join the forums related to your niche.
| Check Page Rank of any web site pages instantly: |
4. Joining traffic exchanges.
Traffic exchanges are yet another way to get some visitors. If you don't know what a traffic exchange is, it's a system put in place in which you surf other people's sites (giving you "credits") and then you can use those credits to have other people surf your websites. From my own experience, people surfing traffic exchanges are more like human clicking machines than actual readers! most people surfing traffic exchanges do not usually stick on a website page even if the content might be interesting, they just wait for the clock till the next site to visit. Most traffic exchanges also let you convert your surfing credits for banners, usually 25-36 banners per credit. Even if you might only get 5 clicks per thousand banner impressions I recommend using that way. Also most traffic exchanges also give you a signup bonus of some kind after you surf a given ammount of sites. What I did was join 5-6 different traffic exchanges and surfing them all in same time! - saving me time because while the clock runs out for one, the time you take surfing the other 5, the clock will have ran out already. I reccomend you do join different traffic exchanges untill you hit their bonuses and convert the credits for banners.
5. Spamming Social sites with your "press releases" or other articles
You can submit your articles to social news sites like digg, reddit, etc... hasn't worked that well for me, probably because my site is in a pretty specific niche=blogging, but if you have a general website/blog, or blog about funny stuff, cats or other topic of interest to a wide range of people then I'd be interested how this works out, it could work quite well I htink. Here's a list of the top social sites
6. Posting messages and your link on walls on facebook
Facebook spammed my mom, she received an email that she had a "new message" while she didint even have an account with them, I read the email. For that, I owe facebook big time spammage. I suggest creating a new account on facebook for your blog(s), copy/pasting a quick paragraph with your link on the forums, adding people that have a lot of friends and then posting on their walls and then all their friends should be able to see your message I think when they log on. Facebook worked pretty well for me.
7. Twitter
All I know is that you follow people and people follow you, then you spam your followers with junk from your blog in 140 words... Twitter is garbage for me and they also spammed my inbox with junk about following.
8. With Google Friendconnect
You can also get traffic with google Friendconnect. I saw a pretty good example, there was a guy that joined and he put his little pic as a symbol showing "18+" , he had a male entertainement blog. Anyway, the point is by having a catchy little pic that the reader would immediately know what your site is about, he is more likely to click on ur friendconnect pic. Another good example would be the dollar sign for example. Just get a pic that somewhat relates to your blog and then join hundreds of friendconnect gadgets for maximum exposure. The downside of that is that ull get waay to many updates of posts in ur blogger account and u woudnt be able to keep track of blogs you like properly, so perhaps think of creating a new account specifically for that.
9. Starting a gadget
You can start a gadget of your own and include a link back to your site, then tell bloggers about it and you would gain backlinks to your site if bloggers implement it. Will come up with an article later on doing it, but in the meantime for techie ppl, here's a way to get started with google gadgets.
10. Getting a part time job just for your blog
Have you calculated how much time do you put in your blog and what are the results? A blog is a business if you wanna make money on it. Working for your blog might sound dumb, but if you factor in opportunity cost and return on investment then it could be a great idea.
11. Your tip:
What is your tip for getting blog traffic? I'd like to hear it, share your tips/thoughts in the comments section. Till next post, happy spamming, and don't loose hope for ja blog!
