How NOT to generate traffic in Blogger

Since I began this blog a few months ago, it has been nothing but a magnificent carnival ride and a whopper of a creative outlet for my writing and comic musings.

I am a letter writer and an advocate for consumers everywhere. If I feel wronged by a company I do business with, I go into attack mode, and fire off a letter to its senior management, and sometimes copying the Better Business Bureau and the Post Master General in the process. I always get a response, and any problems are resolved to amicable satisfaction.

My very first posting was a long narrative about driver etiquette, which was the catalyst for this site. It was an editorial for the local paper, but they never ran it.

So I thought, that’s it – if the newspaper won’t publish my story, then I’m going to become a publisher, and run my own story!

Since that meager beginning, I’ve had nearly 7,000 visitors to my blog, and am slowly gathering an audience of followers. Most days I may get anywhere from 50 – 100 hits, and a couple weeks ago I got over 1,500 hits in one day. I attribute that banner day to my snarky comments about the book I Can Make You Thin. However, recently realized I had to rethink and re-center myself about what it is I want RaveRantRage to be exactly. Should it become a one-topic site, or remain a general interest site?

Through trial and error, I discovered what makes people land on my blog – a hot topic and well-written content. Through StatCounter, I can see where visitors are coming from, what link brought them to the site, what link takes them away, what posts they read, what photos or articles they download, how long they stay, etc.

There is no secret formula for driving traffic to your blog, but the generally accepted ways are:

* List other blogs as your favorites, and hope they reciprocate, or even link back from their site, or better yet, reference you in their posts.

* Comment on their blog, hoping they’ll comment on yours.

* Use the same blog post title as the same news headline that is running on CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo!, or any of the other big name news outlets. This may list you higher in Google results.)

* Send out mass emails to friends and colleagues informing them that you have a great new post for them to read.

* Add fancy content-driven advertising to flash it up a bit.

You can do all these things, but in my case, I become so focused on posting a hot topic, one that may have already been covered in the mainstream media, that I was simply regurgitating already run news, and my creativity stifled.

Surefire tips to create a better blog (and possibly drive more repeat traffic):

Remove the visitor counter from the landing page – it’s too distracting, because you will always be focused on that, and not the content. Besides, you don’t want just hits to your site. You want visitors to stay for a while and peruse your other posts.

Write about a hot topic, but put your own twist on it. Relate it to something comical that you’ve similarly experienced, or observed lately. Co-workers are excellent idea fodder. If you sit in a cube garden like I do, there are hundreds of untold stories you could write about that are just an earshot away.

Write about something that you are not an expert in. I’m doing that right now. I’m not an expert on blogging, but I do know from trial and error what works for my blog. By researching or blogging about something new, you are not only teaching, you are learning, too.

Insert related video from YouTube or other sources to coincide with your most recent post.

Keep the screen space clean and easily readable. Many people lose interest if the screen is not easy to navigate because of video and flash running all over the place. Put yourself in the mind’s eye of the visitor. Do you enjoy reading blogs that have all kinds of flash jumping up all over the place?

Don’t focus on making money from ads on your site. There are only miniscule amounts of big name blogs out there that actually make beaucoup bucks. I never started my blog to make money, but as it turns out, I’ve made a meager $47.53 so far.

Don’t just post a pix or video that is hot in the press now, just so you can get lots of visitors to your site. (I am guilty of this, and probably will still be from time to time.) If you’re in it for the money, sure, you may get a thousand hits for writing a quick, one sentence blurb about someone slowing a shoe at the president, and it may yield you 10 cents in revenue.

Just getting hits is not the goal. If someone lands on your blog and sees a quick blurb about “the shoe throwing”, they will click away from your blog just as fast to search for other sites that will have more content about the topic.

Again, the goal is to keep visitors at your site, so they can route around your other topics of interest: well-written content will do that. The more they stay and read for a while, the more likely they will click through on one of your content-driven ads – that’s where the real money will come from.

Rethink comments. Sure it’s nice to read what your visitors like or dislike, and it may even lead to a discussion, but blogging is not just about getting responses, it’s mostly about getting your message out for people to read. Do you think news outlets are sitting around waiting for their audience to respond to every story they write?