General Musings

Using internet communities to drive blog traffic

So you’ve started your own blog. You’re putting up really good content, but no one is reading it. For some people, traffic is inconsequential, but not for you. You came here to get some tips on driving traffic to your site.

Traffic can be a measure of success for a blogger. It is a rough measure of interest in the blog’s content as well as an indicator of the blog’s topical authority.

At a certain point, traffic can be turned into advertising revenue. This revenue can go to offset hosting and design costs, or it can be thrown into a savings account for that vacation you’ve been planning.

Where does traffic come from? Traffic is broken into two categories: return traffic (those who have been to your blog before) and new traffic (those who haven’t). New traffic finds your site through hyperlinks from other sites and, of course, search engines. Both of these sources are very useful, and they go hand-in-hand to help send traffic your way.

To get other sites to hyperlink to your site, you need to do a little bit of internet community networking.

You’ve started up a brand new blog, but surely, your blog isn’t the first website for the subject you’ve chosen. The odds are good that somewhere out there is another blog or community message board full of visitors that would welcome a new blogger into their midst.

Simply spamming a community with links to your blog is not a great way to network. A better way to go about it is to join in the discussions and put a link to your blog in your signature. This will allow you to establish a presence in the community, give people a little taste of your work, and provide them with the opportunity to click-through right to your blog.

Internet communities are typically loaded with bloggers that blog about the same things as you. Whether you agree or disagree with their opinions, they can be valuable networking connections. By offering link exchanges on each other’s blogroll, you can share traffic with each other. (A blogroll is a list of links to other blogs that usually, but not always, share the same subject matter. Most blog software makes blogrolling very easy.)

As your site ages and more links to your site pop up around the internet, you will see traffic continue to build. You will also see an improvement in what is known as ‘page rank.’  Page rank is basically a measure of how important your site is, and basically, it is measured by how many sites link to yours.  Higher page ranks can lead to better rankings in search engine results.  This, of course, leads to more search engine traffic for your site.

If you are a respectable person with interesting things to say, getting your site off the traffic floor in this manner will be a piece of cake. Once people have found your blog, the trick is to keep them coming back for more.

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