14 Tips for Increasing Traffic to Your Blog

You hear about this awesome new invention called blogging. You decide to give it a try. You get a free blog at Blogger or WordPress.com. You pick a template. You start cranking out posts. About a week, month or year later it finally dawns on you.

No one is reading your blog.

Don’t feel bad. About 90% of the blogs on the internet are standing shoulder to shoulder with you on this Dock of Shame. The good news is that with time, focused effort and a few of these suggestions, you can overcome your no-traffic nightmare and turn your blog into the rockin’ place to be.
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For Newbs: How to Blog-Tools

While you could go your whole blogging career without using any of these tools, you will soon find that these tools will make life a little easier (and maybe a little more interesting) for you.

Traffic Counters

Traffic counters keep track who visits your blog. These counters range in complexity and usefulness. The simple ones only count the number of people who visit your blog while the more comprehensive ones will tell you how they found your site, how long they hung around and even what pages they looked at. This information allows you to see what content on your blog is drawing in the traffic and tailor your blog accordingly.

Most bloggers use Sitemeter, Statcounter or Google Analytics. All three are free, easy to use and offer detailed information about your website’s traffic.
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Craigslist Job Scam-Internet Solutions Corporation

Previously I had written about my car breaking down. Well that incident really set me back. Because I wasn’t able to continue to commute back and forth, I had to quit my job. Since then, I’ve working hard at finding an office job in my area which has not been easy. The town I live in is not that big. In fact, most of the people that live here commute to D.C. So the limited job availability coupled with the fact that whatever job I get must be accessible by the bus system has made the job hunt a bit of challenge.

So when I saw the following advertisement on Craigslist for my area, I thought I had lucked into something good.

Click image to get a larger view

However when I emailed the person for more information, I received the following form letter in reply:
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For Newbs: How to Blog-Types and Topics

Blogging Motivations

As mentioned several times before, it is important to understand your motivations for blogging because those motivations will influence your decisions on how to best position your blog for success. Blogging for money requires a different strategy than using a blog as a medium for socializing.
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For Newbs: How to Blog-Getting Started

The only things you absolutely need to start blogging are time, inspiration and a blog. In this article, I will discuss the pros and cons of two options for getting your blog online.

Blog Providers vs. Self-Hosting

The fastest, easiest and cheapest way to get a blog is to sign up with a blog provider such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com or Vox. With these types of providers, everything is done for you. The software is installed, the blog is set up and many have a variety of themes to choose from so you can personalize your blog a bit. The only thing you need to do is start writing.

While this may seem like an ideal option, there are several drawbacks to third party blog hosting:
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For Newbs: How to Blog-Overview

The official definition of a blog is that it is an interactive Internet journal in which entries are published in reverse chronological order. The term “blog” is the short version of the word “weblog” which was first coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997 and was soon after shortened to the well known version by Peter Merholz of peterme.com.

Brian E. Redman created the first blog when he started up his Usenet group mod.ber. In this group, Brian and his friends wrote about the interesting things they found while surfing the Internet. It wasn’t long before the novelty of this new media format caught on and people, like Justin Hall, began using it to share their daily lives with others in the web world. Like a small country town suddenly exploding into a metropolitan city, blogging has since evolved from being a hobby of the uber geeks into a public megaphone for anyone with access to a computer and an Internet connection.
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How to Get Your Website Listed in the Search Engines

Search engines are the librarians of the internet world. Every day they send out their interns, called Robots, into cyberspace to forage for information. Each piece of information that is returned to the library is filed in a digital catalog. To access any piece of information in this catalog, all one needs to do is go to their library of choice (Google, Yahoo, MSN or ASK), type in a few search words and wait while the librarian (the search engine) serves up sites matching the query.

As a webmaster, you may be wondering how to get your brand new, still in the bubble wrap, website listed in these giant cyber catalogs. Well, there are two ways robots find new websites. Either by following links from other sites or from the queue of direct submissions.
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9 Tips To Make Your Blog User-Friendly

Don’t judge a book by its cover? Yeah right! Publishers spend thousands of dollars on cover design. They know that the difference between selling the book and having it languish in obscurity on the bookshelf lies in attracting the consumer’s eye and intriguing them enough to stop what they are doing to pick the book up.

Your blog’s design is the book cover for your writing. You may be a brilliant blogger, the best in the web kingdom, but you are scaring off potentially loyal subjects if your template is visually overpowering, difficult to navigate or just takes too darn long to load.

Here are a few things you can do to help make your blog user friendly.
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