A common question for freelancers with blogs is how to increase traffic. It’s a great question – and I’m the first to admit I don’t have a lot of answers.
I’m slowly building traffic to this site by:
¤ Posting a message on the online bulletin board of the freelance writer group I belong to whenever I put up a new post.
¤ Included an RSS feed button at the top of my blog, to encourage people to sign up to get new posts automatically mailed to them. See it up there in the top righthand corner?
¤ Using tags with common search terms on all my posts so they’ll get picked up by search engines like Google. I wrote more about this in a post called What Freelance Writers Should Know about SEO.
¤ Including the URL for this blog in my email signature.
¤ Including the name, description and URL in my LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn has a relatively new feature called Status that lets you write a short answer to the question “What are you working on?” so your LinkedIn connections can see what you’re doing. When someone looks at your LinkedIn profile, your Status sentence shows up at the very top, right under your name and job description. I use this feature to let my connections know about new blog posts. When I update my own “What are you working on?” description, the information appears on the Home page of all of my LinkedIn connections, so they can see what I’m up to – and hopefully, go read my blog.
Darren Rowse at ProBlogger offers some really good common sense tips in this post, 10 ways to improve blog traffic in 30 minutes or less. Among them: post your best stuff on the days of the week when you know you get a lot of traffic, and take time to respond to comments, so you’re building a rapport with your readers. Read Rowse’s other tips in the post.
Kathy Sena, a new online writer/editor friend, writes a blog called ParentTalkToday. In her email signature, instead of just listing a link to the blog, Sena also includes a line about her most recent blog post, which she rewrites every time she posts, and writes in a different color. The idea is for people to be so intrigued by what she’s written they follow the link to her blog. Here’s what it looks like:
Kathy Sena . Writer/Editor
Specializing in parenting, health, lifestyle and women’s issues
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Phone: 310-XXX-XXXX
Fax: 310-XXX-XXXX
Email: XXXXXXXXXX@XXXXX.net
Web: http://www.kathysena.com
Blog: http://www.parenttalktoday.com (Today we’re talking about keeping too many balls in the air…)
If you’ve got other tips for driving traffic to your blog, please share!
Great topic. I’m what you suggest and traffic is building — but slowly.
Posting comments on other blogs with a similar topic can increase traffic.
In addition to various RSS feeds, I have an email subscription option at the top of my blog.
And finally, whenever I blog, I post the permalink on Facebook. I always get a few hits a day directly from this one.
Other than that, posting daily in itself seems to be one of the biggest boosts. Sporadic posting drives traffic away.
Charmian
Charmian: Thanks for the comments and suggestions. I know you’ve been at this longer than me, so it means a lot. I’ll definitely investigate adding an email subscription option. I’m also contemplating starting a monthly e-newsletter to send to sources, etc., with lots of pointers back to the blog. Good point about consistency, that’s definitely key.
Michelle R.
Michelle,
When I write articles for my e-newsletter that are more than 2-3 paragraphs long, I point readers to my blog for the continuation.
Susan
Susan, that’s a great idea – and yet another reason why I need to start a newsletter.
M.R.
Michelle:
I find the best way to drive traffic to my blog is posting about something that’s hot in the news that day or week. Recently, when it came out that the oil companies were still raking in record profits, yet they were claiming that our rising gas costs at the pump were not their fault, I posted something about that. I saw a huge spike in traffic that day.
Also, another blog I’d read said that a great way to drive traffic is to write “evergreen” posts from time to time, and also to write posts that are actionable–that is, instead of navel-gazing, woe-is-me posts, give your readers something they can take away. So when I write about rising gas costs, I’ll often write about ways to stretch your gas mileage as I did here:
Leah
Oops, URL didn’t come out:
http://suddenlyfrugal.blogspot.com/2008/04/car-talk.html
Great suggestions Leah. I also read the daily news looking for items to turn into blog posts. But I don’t always blog about that item on that day, especially if I’ve already got another post queued up and ready to go. If I want more traffic, maybe I need to do a better job of blogging about the day’s events and save the evergreens for slow news days.
M.R.
Michelle,
I didn’t know about the new status feature on LinkedIn. Thanks for the info!
-Dawn
Great tips! I especially like the idea of adding a little teaser to your e-mail signature.
I love these tips, Michelle. You bring together what is for me a confusing mass of tech applications into focus for freelancers. What a timesaver!