Sunday, April 20, 2008

How to boost blog traffic

Last night I began experimenting with three ideas for increasing traffic to this blog. (Not that there's anything wrong with the old traffic; you're all sweethearts. Mwah!) I joined Stumble Upon, but haven't yet figured out how to use it to lure people over here to NRJW.

Much simpler was signing up for BlogRush and installing their widget--the little black box in my sidebar that says, "From the blogosphere." (Please scroll down a little and take a look. I'll wait here.) I'm not necessarily endorsing the blogs featured there (reload this page to get a fresh batch), but some of them should be of interest to writerly types. Let me know what you think. And if you want to put the widget on your blog, just click the little "BlogRush" button at the bottom of the box. It's extremely quick and easy to set up, and then you do nothing. Seriously. Even if I get only a trickle of new traffic out of that, I haven't wasted any time.

How does BlogRush drive traffic to your blog? Every time you display a post headline from another blog, one of your post headlines is displayed on somebody else's blog. And sooner or later, somebody's going to click over to your blog. What's more, you can refer people (as I am doing right now) and get viewing credits for their traffic in addition to your own. Things should snowball from there.

If you click over from my widget and sign up, I'll get credit for referring you. (Thanks in advance.)

The third thing I'm experimenting with is sharing my, ahem, expertise at Yahoo! Answers. They contacted me a few weeks ago to say they'd linked to some writing advice on my website. Since I'm already answering a lot of writing and afternoon-tea questions via private e-mail, I figured it wouldn't be too much trouble to pop over to Yahoo! Answers once in a while and share my experience in public, with a view to attracting people to my website and this blog.

I'm not married to any of these ideas. If my participatiuon in StumbleUpon or Yahoo! Answers turns out to be boring or sucks up too much of my time, I'll drop them and try something else.

If any of you have tried StumbleUpon, BlogRush, or Yahoo! Answers, how about leaving a comment?

3 comments:

Heather said...

I stumbled you :)

Another widget I like is Blog Catalog...it shows who is visiting your blog and you can click through to their profiles, their blogs, blogs they like etc, etc.

Good luck upping your traffic!

Brenda Coulter said...

I stumbled you

Well, bless your heart. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

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