What is a blog if it hasn’t got a decent amount of traffic? It’s like a book on a shelf that no-one ever reads that is gathering dust. The writer is proud of their work, but there is no-one to share it with.

And that is why we all want to increase blog traffic, let alone if we are using any money making schemes then these work best with lots of traffic! So, how can we increase traffic?

Pretty Links
Often quoted, but in actual fact my highest traffic blogs go against this. But, in some search engines, by having the keywords in the page URL might just be an advantage.

Commenting
Leave sensible, useful comments on other blogs that add to the blogs and you might see more traffic. Tie this in with monitoring your traffic so that you know where people are coming from and you will know which blogs to continue commenting on.

Guest Posting
This can apply both ways. Request guest posts on other blogs so that their readers come to you and invite guest posts from other blogs in the hope that the authors will mention their post on their blog and some people will come across to your.

Tweet!
Twitter can give a lot of traffic, if used well. You can use plugins to automatically tweet every blog post and a link, so make sure that the blog post is inviting and can be found my many people. But make sure that you are also writing a few tweets each day that are interesting and keep followers entertained, reducing the ration of tweets with links to those without.

Write Often
Writing often means different things to different people, but by writing 3 or 4 times per week you are providing quality content that will tempt people back time and again.

Social Bookmark
Encourage your readers to make use of social bookmarking, allowing them to like, favourite, tweet and so on your posts. Do this by adding a suitable social bookmarking plugin to your blog, and mentioning it at the end of every post!

As a challenge to myself, I have set myself a challenge of taking this blog from a trickle of visitors to 1000 page hits per week, by the end of September. So, about 3 weeks on and at the end of the month, how am I doing?

March saw just 113 page hits, April had 255 hits and May had 273 hits. For June, the traffic level has increased to 466 page hits. No way near the 1000 target per week!

The best week was the week I started this self imposed challenge, seeing 130 page hits that week. So traffic is up, just not as much as I want to see. I think a few more unique articles are needed and I have a huge series of articles about to come off the press – along with the long promised Ebook…

Sadly, my efforts at commenting does not seem to be generating much traffic, although I have been choosing Do Follow blogs, so hopefully there will be a search engine links benefit there in the long term. Most traffic seems to be from Ezine Articles, which is always a good source of traffic. A couple of recent articles seem to have generated more visitors than others, so maybe these will really take off as they have only just been published.

However, a lot more work is needed so I’ll be experimenting with Twitter, maybe Facebook, and a few other tricks. I’ll post back in a few weeks a summary, sooner if I start to see a lot of succes with any of the methods!

I have no idea what is going on at the moment, but daily traffic levels are about double those of a week ago and quadrupled against a month back!

So I have to say welcome to all the new readers of the blog! There seems to be a lot of interest in the new Ebook, which I promise to get out very soon, plus also a lot of people going to the follow us page. So hopefully, if you haven’t bookmarked the site you will be adding it to your RSS feed or joining the other readers that have already signed up to the newsletter. I’ll have to write one of them soon as well!

Changes over the next month – well a bit of guest posting should be going on to some new sources; maybe an easier way of subscribing to the newsletter and joining in the chat on other blogs.

Do leave a comment on any posts that interest you – as long as the comment adds to the post then it will be approved quickly and this is now a “Do-Follow” blog – so your comments will actively link back to your own website. Enjoy the blog and I wish you happy blogging!

Here is an excellent tool from Google that I have just stumbled across in another website – a search just of the blogs that they have detected to be do follow blogs!

This begs the question, why do Google want to identify these blogs to us? Is it not opening up the system for people adding links just for SEO, which is what they try to prevent?

Anyway, how do you do it? Well, you go to the Google Do-Follow search page, enter some term and then press search. It should, if all works, then give you a list of results of that keyword just from do follow blogs. Go to a couple and see if they are relevant and recently updated.

If so, add a comment to a post or two – make sure that it is useful and adds to the site rather than spam so that the blog owner will accept your comment. Make a note of the blog that you have commented on and leave it, for say a week.

A week later go back and look at the post – has your comment been accepted and on show? If so, look through recent posts and see if there are any there that you can make comments on. Personally, I will avoid those blogs with hundreds of comments per post unless you can be the first to comment. If there are more than a handful of comments, there is no page rank gain and no chance of any visitors seeing your comment and visiting your website (the other reason you need to make a good comment).

Ideally, those blogs that accept your comments and either have a good page rank or send you a lot of traffic (or both) should be followed by an RSS reader. Mine only follows one blog at a time, but I’m hoping that I will be able to find one that will aggregate several feeds so that I can just keep watching for the latest posts from a variety of blogs.

Right, back to searching for blogs to leave comments on!

The first step to getting more people on the site has to be placing comments on other blogs. Now, this can be done for 2 reasons. First, for link building, second for traffic.

If you are lucky then the comment drives both – search engine friendly links AND new unique visitors. Does it work? Well I know for certain that I see visitors arriving from blogs that are nofollow blogs, but these don’t give any link juice. So the first step to increasing the traffic on this site is to place comments on “dofollow” blogs.

Why on “dofollow” blogs (and this is one, so leave a comment!)? Well, that way if I comment on enough blogs and then start seeing people arriving from a handful, I can concentrate on following those blogs going forward and know that my work is having both effects. If I just comment on nofollow blogs, then there is no link advantage, just the hope of traffic. But at least a tiny amount of an advantage should be received from all of the dofollow links that are created.

So, how to find the blogs? Well, here are some recommended links to dofollow blogs that I will be trying out:

1. Why Do Work
2. Nicusor
3. Dlist
4. Do Follow Blogs
5. Follow List
6. Blogs that Follow
7. Squidoo
8. minterest
9. Do Follow 001

So far, I have only tried out some of the sites on the list and I am going to work my way down the list. Why Do Work’s list I tried out a few weeks ago and I have to say that I have seen no traffic and a few of the sites were not actually taking comments. So not the best list. But maybe a few suitable sites there. I am also still waiting for my own blog to get listed. I am not convinced that site is updated.

As for Nicursor, well the list definitely looks frequently maintained and has provided a few links from which I have got some of the sites listed above and I have just posted comments on a few of the blogs. Time will tell whether the blogs listed there are any good.

The Dlist is huge – about 200 blogs. But many are Blogger redirects, expired websites and blogs that have not posted for a long time (the worst offender was 3 years!). But there were some useful sites on the list and if you are a traditional ‘mommy blogger’, then there are loads of sites for you to explore!

And if you own any of the sites listed above do let me know – I have left all of the above links as dofollow.

Well, this blog hits 3 months old in a few days and although I have seen traffic spikes, I have not yet really seen a lot of regular traffic to it. The Page Rank is still 0, but then the update was only about 3 weeks after the site was published.

So, the start of a new challenge for me! I set myself the challenge and then decided that this blog would be the best tool to take up the challenge with. And here it is.

By the time that this blog hits 6 months old – early September – I am aiming to be seeing around 1,000 visits per week to the blog. Hopefully, this will tie in with a good Page Rank, but the next rank update must be around the corner and not again before the challenge. And anyway, what is Page Rank if you have decent traffic.

I will be investigating and using a variety of tricks to try to generate new visitors to the site. Those that work will be continued and reported back as successful ways forward. Those that fail may get a mention, with a cry for help if anyone knows how to make it work!

Of course, in this time I am hoping that I will be able to really monetise the website and that again will be getting a mention. Those methods I like and those that don’t work will be being talked about.

So, some base line statistics! Well today it is PR0 and Alexa 2,563,883 and that is from around 50 to 100 page views per week.

Well, what techniques am I going to be using to start to generate more traffic to the blog? Call back tomorrow and I will have the preliminary list of ideas!