How To Get More Visitors

[Talia Carbis]

This isn't any sort of how to, it's more of a cry for help.

I currently do a few things to increase my visitor count.
1. COmment on other people's blogs
2. POst relativly regularly
3. Link to other blogs
4. Put questions at the end of my posts to increase conversation.

But I am still in at under 10 visits a day.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[Robin]

Have you listed your blog in directories yet? If not, you could start with Blog Catalog, Technorati, and Blog Log. Also you can list the blog in Stumble Upon. Here's a link about how it works: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/09/26/building-your-blog-wi...

[Suzanne]

I am in exactly the same boat, so will watch the responses with interest. I must set to commenting more regularly - that does seem to help a lot.

[Susan Sheehan]

Suz, I am going to ask you the same question. Why do you want traffic? Are you trying to market your beads?
As a fellow bead maker I'll share with you my purpose. It is two-fold. Yes I would love to get more customers to my site but my biggest reason for blogging is to keep the ones I have coming back for more. One of the neat things about bead buyers is many want a piece of you. They care about your life and want to hear what you are up to. It is as if they buy a friend in some respects. I mean that in a good way because I have gained some friends who started off as a bead buyer.
I have many email conversations with my buyers. I forget who knows what and often write the same things over and over. I decided a blog would be a nice way to share a piece of me and my life with my customers as well as get my beads out to others who stumble upon me.
My point is traffic numbers aren't as important to me as who the traffic is. 10 visitors a day is fine if they are all the right ones.

[Suzanne]

yes I have a marketing aspect to it now. So there is an obvious interest in getting more people to see it. But I am also talking about my edublog - where I want to build a dialogue, a network, sharing resources and ideas with other teachers etc. But even in my personal blog, before I was focusing on the beads so much..its nice to have a bit of audience interaction. I love to write, so blogging is enjoyable...but I like to know someone is reading it. I would have been happy in the early stages if the friends and fmaily who were reading it would comment occaisonally, just to remind me someone was reading.

[Eklavya]

Hi Talia,

I visited your blog and did a short inspection of that. Here is my advice to you

The first thing we can do to increase traffic to our blog/website is to do an honest appraisal of our blog/site. An appraisal from the perspective of our visitors. What a reader should aspect from your blog. Is there anything useful which he can find on your blog ? How can you improve the online world through your blog ? ..etc

On evaluating your blog on the above criteria, I found that your blog has very little to offer to an ordinary visitor like me. All in all, it's a personal blog of a 20 years old Australian girl who is soon getting married to his boyfriend and in this bog she writes her thought on various topics revolving around her life. There is nothing which is useful for me on her blog.

Got the point ? Except your family members and friends, the other visitors of your blog (like me) will look for only one thing : What's in for me ?

If there is nothing useful for me on your blog, I shall move away. Simple.

So what's the solution ? The answer is : find a niche and diversify your writing. Don't just be limited to your personal life in your blogging. Write on topics which are of interest to many people. Your blog does not display the categories. Display categories in your blogs so that people can sort out what they want to read. I saw that you have written some 'how to' articles also. It took me sometime to find those articles. Had there been categories, I would have found them easily.

While blogging, you to focus on one particular subject. Don't write about that particular topic only but make it the main theme of your writing. Slowly make your blog a good source of articles on one particular topic. For example - as you are a young Australian woman, you can write on various problems faced by Australian woman of your age. Start writing tips for them. Read, research and write. If you do this, slowly your blog will become a storehouse of valuable information for many readers of your age group resulting in many new visitors everyday.

Here are some other equally important pieces of advice :

(1) Make your blog Search Engine friendly. Telia, your blog has the following link structure :

http://87purpleelephants.com/?p=#

Instead of that opt for the 'permanent' link structure. If you have a little knowledge of wordpress (the hosting platform of your blog) you can easily understand what I mean. Having a permanent link structure is a must for all bloggers using wordpress. This one thing can boost your Google ranking manifold.

(2) Use the power of social Bookmarking sites to promote your blog. Write any interesting article on any hot topic of the day. Submit it to some important Social Bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Netscape (now known as www.propeller.com). I submit the articles of my India centric blog on many Indian bookmarking sites also. There must be some Australia centric site also. This is a really useful method.

(3) Another powerful (but quite new to bloggers) method for generating traffic is to write useful articles and submit them to articles directories. If your article is useful and interesting, it can be picked up by many webmasters/bloggers who are looking for fresh content for their site. As your article has a link back to your blog/site, this way you can generate many new backlinks / visitors. Three very good article directories are Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com and Articlecity.com.

(4) Become a member of any discussion forum related to your blog. Participate in the forum regularly and post useful information. Try to help others in the forums. Slowly people will start recognizing you and your blog.

(5) There are some other methods also like submission to blog directories,participating in a blog carnival or challenge (like we people did in the 'Blogging challenge at Problogger.net), offering some freebies on your site/

[Suzanne]

Some great suggestion - I'll be taking note of these too, thanks

[Michele Martin]

Hi Talia--I just responded to this in the "Mobilizing Your Archives Forum" too, but here are some links you might want to check out:

Building Blog Readership by Monitoring What Other Bloggers are Writing

Driving Traffic to Your New Blog

You might also browse through these reader tips.

[Susan Sheehan]

Why do you want more traffic? Your store doesn't have anything in it to sell so right now you seem to be chatting away about your personal life. That is perfectly fine but it makes me wonder what the heck you need traffic for.
Perhaps you need to define the purpose of your blog and if marketing an item isn't it then traffic shouldn't matter.

[Suzanne]

My favourite blog to read is generally nothing more than random chatter about his life, with the occasional cutting social commentary remark. Its witty and entertaining. If the skill of the writer is up to it, a purely personal blog can build a great following. And I still keep coming back to the fact that why journal online if you dont want or need an audience. Might as well write in a notebook at home....

[Susan Sheehan]

Oh I agree! But does your audience have to be huge? I guess what I'm trying to get at is you can submit your blog to all sorts of places but wouldn't it make sense to determine who would read you in the first place and target the campaign a bit more?

[Suzanne]

oh yeah, I dont need huge.... just someone. :) Except for the edublog - the more traffic I get there, the more potentil for shared ideas etc

[Talia Carbis]

These are all great suggestions. I use to have three blogs- www.teachingtalia.wordpress.com, which was about my Uni and Prac etc. and I got lots of people from my uni course reading that. And then I also had taliacarbis.wordpress.com as well which was all tech related and how-tos (sort of like articles etc), and then taliaslife.wordpress.com which was my personal blog.

I culminated them all into one blog- 87purpleelephants.com, and that's what you see today. I guess I've been busy lately, and not doing prac or uni, so the other two blogs have sort of gone under, and I'm just left with The Talia's Life- personal blog type one.

I'm having a lot of trouble with my store- it's just hating me at the moment, and I don't have time to fix it.

So that's the go with my site, and why I have no current niche.