A reader asked me a question that I found quite intriguing, “How do I get people to find my blog posts?”
There are a number of ways that people can come across you and your blog posts. Here are just a few.
- Search Engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are constantly looking for new content to crawl and rank. Ensure your site is search friendly and submit an XML sitemap for faster indexing. Before you know it, the search engines will start bringing traffic.
- Tagging Engines – Sites like Technorati have blog searches that focus on serving up content based on what categories and/or tags you’ve used with your post. Ensure you’re using good categories and tags for additional exposure in tagging sites.
- Blog Sites – Technorati, Google Blog Search and community sites like Topix all index blog sites specifically and use those posts to feed their content. No websites allowed, only blogs.
- Feed Reader Suggestions – Rojo and Bloglines have the ability to share or suggest feeds based on what the user is already subscribed to.
- Social Networks – If you have a Facebook, MySpace, MyBlogLog or one of the many social bookmarking sites, included your feed in those sites to gain a bit more exposure.
- Social News Sites – If you spent a lot of time and have one great post, it may be a candidate for Reddit, Digg or Mixx. Or maybe one of the many Pligg sites that are popping up.
- Social Bookmarking – From Furl to del.icio.us there is no shortage of social bookmarking sites. Bookmark a few of your best posts to gain exposure in those areas. Just don’t over do it by bookmarking everything.
There are lots of people out there looking for good content. If you’re writing quality content, then getting visitors shouldn’t be to difficult, but it may take time. The more you write good content, the more visitors you’ll attract too.
There are ways to get visitors that are active and passive. Whichever way you choose to go, keep notes of what worked and what didn’t. That way you figure out where your time is best spent to get the most quality traffic in the future. Plus, as your blog grows, the amount of active blog promotion you do may decrease as your user base may do quite a bit of the promotion for you.
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