Jamdo Marketing Blog

Getting traffic to a new blog is not as difficult as people make it out to be.

I was reading Yaro Starak’s blog recently and strongly disagreed with something he said:

On the day your blog is born you will have no readers.

That is just plain wrong. (Note: The rest of Yaro’s tips were actually pretty good)

In fact only a short while before Yaro wrote that post, I had managed to drag over 120 unique visitors to a brand new blog on its first day of operation. And that would be a conservative goal for new blogs with just a little more organisation and luck than I had.

The key here is planning.

There are a few things you need to set up before you launch your blog.

Content

You need to have a bunch of solid content written and ready to go on day one. People seem to say you need at least five posts. I would not be happy with anything less than 20 well written, solid blog posts. Write them in the days and weeks leading up to your launch and save them on your hard drive. You will want to post all of them as quickly as possible on the day your blog launches.

That way, when you start getting traffic, your new visitors will have a reason to stick around and keep reading. (Visitors to my blog on day one viewed an average of 8 pages each).

With you content, you also want to make sure that your posts are tagged with Technorati tags. In the early days of your blog, Technorati will be a solid provider of targeted visitors to your blog. Make sure that you tag your posts with relevent yet diverse tags. If your posts are all tagged with the same tag, then you will only get Technorati traffic from that one tag page. Tag your posts with categorical, geographic, and paralell topic tags. By diverifying your tags, you are ensuring that you get a diversity of traffic from Technorati all searching for something unique on their site. This will maximise your traffic from Technorati.

(Note: On my blog, there was a problem with my Technorati tags and they ended up not showing up on Technorati. I was STILL able to get over 120 unique visitors in the first day).

Social Bookmarking

Make sure you let the world know about a couple of your best first-day posts. You will want to notify as many of the relevant social bookmarking sites as possible, but be a little sparing. Do not submit all of your stories or you will be banned as a spammer. Two or three of your best stories is enough.

If you need a list of social bookmarking sites to notify, then check out this list over at WeblogHits.

This alone should get you a significant number of visitors to your site. The good thing here too, is that these visitors will be targeted as they will have clicked on story titles that they are interested in.

Notify Other Blogs

In the weeks leading up to your launch, you should be collecting the URLs and email addresses of other bloggers in your niche.

You should also write to each of the INDIVIDUALLY. Do not spam them as a group.

Write each of them an email explaining who you are and what you do. Mention something on their blog. In fact follow these tips on emailing other bloggers that I wrote up a while ago.

Don’t send these emails yet. Just save them on your hard drive. Send them on the day of your launch, AFTER you have posted your first 20 posts.

How many emails like this should you send out? Well, the answer is “as many as possible” but if you need to put a figure on it then at least 30 or 40. There is certainly no upper limit (as long as they are ALL individually written emails) and into the hundreds will ensure you a very good flow of incoming links and traffic.

Treat these bloggers well because over the coming weeks and months they will be able to keep sending you traffic from their blogs. This traffic is probably the best, because it is referral traffic and it is made up of people who will already be interested in the topic that you are writing about.

That’s it!

If you do these couple of things then you will easily get over 100 visitors to your new blog on day one.

Truth is that I did them all, but in a very lazy fashion. My Technorati tags didn’t work at all due to a technical glitch, I only submitted one story to about 5 or 6 social bookmarking sites and I only emailed a couple of other bloggers in my niche.

And I STILL got over th 120 mark.

By doing these few things well, you will easily beat that.

Technorati Tags: traffic, blogging, blog, blogger, web promotion, hits

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