Traffic Generation Challenge 3: The Start Of Marketing Outreach
This is the third part of my “Traffic Generation Challenge” where I document my efforts of driving massive to this brand new blog from scratch, with little technical knowledge.
In my previous post, I explained that I’ve provided some good content for my target market-entrepreneurs and business owners, to ensure that my blog adds value to the people who arrive at it. I’ve also added a way for them to subscribe to my blog to increase the chances of them coming back to my blog again and again.
I’ve also added a few plugins to make the blog more user-friendly for both the readers and myself. While there are still a lot more plugins that I can use (there are literally thousands of good plugins available for free, the key is to know which ones are useful for you), for now the ones I’m using are enough.
Now my blog is ready to be presented to new readers and so I started to actively drive traffic from external sources to my blog. Here’s what I did:
Set up my RSS Feed using FeedBurner. This is a great way to make it easier for people to subscribe to your rss feeds. I’ve also added seceral of the more popular rss readers ‘chicklet’ on my blog such as:
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‘Add to Google’
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‘My Yahoo’
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‘Newsgator’
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‘Newsvibes’
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‘Bloglines’
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‘My Aol’
I wanted to add ‘My MSN’ as well. However, I still don’t know where to find the chicklet from. If you know where I can get it, please let me know. Probably the most important 3 ‘chicklets’ are ‘Add to Google’, ‘My Yahoo’ and ‘My MSN’.
How do I know which ones to add when there are so many others choices? I simply model (copy) the successful blogs that I’m learning from. If they are not working they probably won’t be using them. Of course I might be wrong, but chances are I’m right. That’s why learning from others who know what they are doing is one of the best thing we can do as an entrepreneur. It cuts down learning curve significantly and helps you to get the results you want much faster.
I submitted my blog and rss feed to Blog Directories and RSS Directories. This is a process to get blog and rss directories ‘discover’ and list your blog. The more directories list your blog the more chances of readers getting to know about it. However, not all directories and equal. There are those that have more authority, and a must for you to be listed there. However, in general it is best to get listed in as many directories as possible.
I joined MyBlogLog. As you can see on my side bar, I’ve also installed the MyBlogLog widget. By having the widget installed on your blog MyBlogLog will start to record and measure all sorts of statistics within your blog such as how many people come to your blog, and which are the most popular clicks etc. Your blog is also made available to their huge member database, making it have higher change to be discovered by others who are interested in your blog content. Since I’ve installed the widget I started getting people come to my blog from their database.
I joined BlogCatalog. This is another very popular third-party service among bloggers. It is quite similar to MyBlogLog, however, it also have a ‘Discussion’ area where you can post questions, or even promote your blog to the rest of their members. After I joined, I posted a few questions and promoted my blog in the discussion area. From there I also have some new traffic.
Just by doing the above I started to get more traffic to my blog already. It is nothing fantastic, but things started moving. My ranking in Alexa has gone down, but more importantly the unique visitors recorded in my stats (using awstats) shows an increase in traffic. On top of that I also see that my readers from US is incresing, not only Singapore based ones. While the increase is still not much, it is quite interesting as I’m getting the traffic totally free.
NEXT:
Now that I’ve the ‘technical’ things set up (although there are still a lot more to be done), I’ll be focusing on delivering even more great content. I’ll also start to do some article marketing and visit some forums. 10 days to go! I’m excited to see the results at the end of the month.
Tags: BlogCatalog, drive traffic, Feedburner, MyBlogLog, traffic for new blog, traffic generation challenge, Web Traffic
October 22nd, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Generating massive traffic is easy. You can get good relevant traffic from social networks and with good relevant link building. You may want to consider adding Blogosphere to your list. This is a decent free tool that can double your site traffic. Looking forward for your findings!
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Joe, thanks for the tip. I’ve started doing social network linking. I will install BlogRush next. I’ll also start my article marketing blast. Traffic and ranking have been improving quite a bit. A few more days to go for the final tally!