Well I sure wish I had all the knowledge of the exact how-to’s on how to gain more followers. I’m published on every blog feed site there is known to man and publish articles that really are helpful and I’m struggling to grow the blog. Kudos to you for sticking it out.
Camden,
I took a look at your blog that’s linked from your name. Is that the one you mean? I don’t know if I’ve ever published my blog on a blog feed site. Maybe I’m missing out on some traffic. I don’t know.
Here’s some suggestions to drive more traffic:
-Choose a niche and become an expert in it. When I look at your blog, I have a hard time understanding what your focus is. Choose a niche and make every post somehow relate to that niche.
-Change the Title (seo) for your blog. Right now it says “Blog | DREAMFly Marketing” which doesn’t give you much value.
-Having the blog as a category off of the main site seems like a bad plan from my experience. I’d have done 2 blog installs. One for the main site and the other for your blog.
-Find other bloggers with a lot of traffic that rank high and comment on their site. Occasionally link to posts you’ve done that relate to their post. Just be sure that it adds to the discussion topic of the post so it’s not seen as spam.
-These same bloggers, talk to them about doing a guest post for their site and in the guest post include a byline for you with a link to your blog.
-Find forums that talk about your niche. Participate in the forum and when it’s beneficial to someone on the forum, answer their question or comments with the occasional link to your site
-Find similar people on Twitter and follow and interact with them. Be sure your blog posts automatically post to your Twitter account too.
That’s just a start. There are a lot of little things that you can do to make it successful. Just be sure to watch your stats so you know which things are yielding results and which ones are not.
I have found that search results make a huge difference in site traffic and growth. Thing is that this is not something you can really control. For the past year or two my site turned up above the fold regularly for many searches. Although I have not been specifically trying to grow my visitor count, these sorts of search results did increase traffic gradually over time.
In the past month or so, I noticed that my search engine referrals were way down so I did some digging. Because I do a pretty regular “search of the week” post, I was able to go back to some old searches and see if they still worked as they had in the past. They did not. Then I did some searches that were so specific I knew my site should be in the results. It was not. Then I did some searches for specific quotes from my posts, (something that always worked in the past), and again, found no results that returned the quoted post. During this time the trend in traffic to my site from Google was down.
Your video prompted me to try some of these searches again today and I have found that the results seem to be back where they were a few months ago. So for some reason, Google was sort of ignoring my site for a month or so, with a corresponding drop in visitors. Interesting to think about how dependent we are on search results.
I also have not used blog feeds in several years. I did try them a few years ago, but found they really did not contribute anything. Over 80% of my traffic comes from search engines, so I see that this as an important issue. I wish I had more direct and referring traffic but for a couple of years both of those have been steady at less than 10% each. Maybe 2011 is the year I need to focus on increasing those last two categories.
Experiment
WordPress.tv 
December 21, 2010 at 1:29 pm |
Very good video John! I use some of the things you do. I will put to good ues all the new info I got from your video. Thanks John!
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December 21, 2010 at 4:01 pm |
You can find the deck for the presentation and the presenter’s blog: http://www.crashutah.com/2010/10/23/from-hobby-to-full-time-blogger-lessons-learned-from-5-years-of-blogging/
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December 21, 2010 at 10:28 pm |
A transcript would be nice, especially for a 49min video.
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December 21, 2010 at 11:34 pm |
Well I sure wish I had all the knowledge of the exact how-to’s on how to gain more followers. I’m published on every blog feed site there is known to man and publish articles that really are helpful and I’m struggling to grow the blog. Kudos to you for sticking it out.
LikeLike
December 22, 2010 at 7:35 am |
Camden,
I took a look at your blog that’s linked from your name. Is that the one you mean? I don’t know if I’ve ever published my blog on a blog feed site. Maybe I’m missing out on some traffic. I don’t know.
Here’s some suggestions to drive more traffic:
-Choose a niche and become an expert in it. When I look at your blog, I have a hard time understanding what your focus is. Choose a niche and make every post somehow relate to that niche.
-Change the Title (seo) for your blog. Right now it says “Blog | DREAMFly Marketing” which doesn’t give you much value.
-Having the blog as a category off of the main site seems like a bad plan from my experience. I’d have done 2 blog installs. One for the main site and the other for your blog.
-Find other bloggers with a lot of traffic that rank high and comment on their site. Occasionally link to posts you’ve done that relate to their post. Just be sure that it adds to the discussion topic of the post so it’s not seen as spam.
-These same bloggers, talk to them about doing a guest post for their site and in the guest post include a byline for you with a link to your blog.
-Find forums that talk about your niche. Participate in the forum and when it’s beneficial to someone on the forum, answer their question or comments with the occasional link to your site
-Find similar people on Twitter and follow and interact with them. Be sure your blog posts automatically post to your Twitter account too.
That’s just a start. There are a lot of little things that you can do to make it successful. Just be sure to watch your stats so you know which things are yielding results and which ones are not.
LikeLike
December 26, 2010 at 8:15 pm |
I have found that search results make a huge difference in site traffic and growth. Thing is that this is not something you can really control. For the past year or two my site turned up above the fold regularly for many searches. Although I have not been specifically trying to grow my visitor count, these sorts of search results did increase traffic gradually over time.
In the past month or so, I noticed that my search engine referrals were way down so I did some digging. Because I do a pretty regular “search of the week” post, I was able to go back to some old searches and see if they still worked as they had in the past. They did not. Then I did some searches that were so specific I knew my site should be in the results. It was not. Then I did some searches for specific quotes from my posts, (something that always worked in the past), and again, found no results that returned the quoted post. During this time the trend in traffic to my site from Google was down.
Your video prompted me to try some of these searches again today and I have found that the results seem to be back where they were a few months ago. So for some reason, Google was sort of ignoring my site for a month or so, with a corresponding drop in visitors. Interesting to think about how dependent we are on search results.
I also have not used blog feeds in several years. I did try them a few years ago, but found they really did not contribute anything. Over 80% of my traffic comes from search engines, so I see that this as an important issue. I wish I had more direct and referring traffic but for a couple of years both of those have been steady at less than 10% each. Maybe 2011 is the year I need to focus on increasing those last two categories.
LikeLike