This week I am going to talk about the specifics of increasing your blog’s traffic.  To some, this is one of life’s greatest mysteries, but it doesn’t have to be.  Here are some great ways to get the blog ball rolling.

First, plan to blog as often as you can.  Try to commit to blog 10 or 15 minutes every day.  If you don’t have that much time to spare, then shoot for every other day, but definitely no less than once a week.  Bogging is about building relationships with your readers and that takes time and commitment.  People will become accustomed to your regularity and will stop by your blog often.  If you don’t post, or post infrequently, your readers will forget about you quickly.  Let’s face it, we all have fairly short attention spans these days.

Write great content because if you don’t have that, the rest of these tips will be useless.  If it’s entertaining, helpful, visually stimulating, or newsworthy, readers will come.  If it is all of these and more then you already have a great start.  Now hold on a minute blog maestro, we’re not done yet.

Comment, comment, comment.  If you want readers, they have to find you, you must make yourself known.  Don’t be a lurker!  Once again, build relationships.  Don’t be shy; make the first move.  In addition, make your best effort to reply to people that comment on your blog.  Your readers like comments just as much as you do.

Promote your blog.  Talk about it with everyone, your friends, other homeschool moms, your homeschool group, the pastors wife, your mailman.  You can also promote it indirectly by adding a link to your blog in your email signature.

Join blogrolls. Blogrolls link blogs together that are related by a particular topic, such as, homeschooling, mom blogs, politics, etc.  Blogrolls will give you more traffic and inbound links, which others will see.  Inbound links also give your blog a higher ranking with search engines, which determine the order in which your blog is shown when certain terms are searched.   Here are a few popular blogrolls to get you started:

• The Mom Blogs
• Blogger Chicks
• Blogging Chicks
• Blogs by Women
• Crazy Hip Blog Mamas

Write great titles for your posts.  Last week I was sent a newsletter that was titled something like “Our 2008 calendars are HERE…plus smell my feet! :)”  Now, while this no doubt grossed me out, I was sincerely curious to know why anyone would title their newsletter in such a way.  The point…it got my attention and I opened it.

Submit your blog to blog directories.  There are tons of blog directories.  Try to pick out a few that fit your blog’s genre. Here is a list of popular directories.

• 5 Minutes for Mom
• Catholic Homeschool Blog Directory
• Blog Catalog
• Best of the Web Blogs
• Blogamama
• Delightful Blogs

Host a blog carnival.  Since everything you would want to know about a blog carnival can be found here, I will spare you my comments and point you to the experts.

Have a contest.  People LOVE contests and they love to win.  And the getting something really cool for free part is pretty good too.  Give away a book, or something handmade, or even a gift card to Starbucks.  The ideas are endless and will bring you lots of traffic when the word spreads from blogger to blogger.  Ask your contestants to link to your contests and spread the word to others.

Have fun with memes like Wordless Wednesday or Thursday Thirteen.  These are super fun and drive a lot of traffic to your site.  It may be temporary traffic, but if you have great content then they will likely return.  The Daily Meme has an entire list of memes that you can participate in.

Use Technorati to tag your posts.  Technorati is a blog search engine that ranks blogs on their popularity and their inbound links.  Scribbit has some great information here about using Technorati to your advantage.  Also, you might want to check out Technorati’s page on Blogging Basics.

Use trackbacks.  If you don’t know what a trackback is, or why you should use them, Susan from fiveminutesformom.com has written a great tutorial on the subject.  There is also another great tutorial at Jackhumphrey.com.

Ping.  No, not ping pong.  There are many definitions of a ping; however, a ping that relates to blogging is basically a signal sent from your blog to a blog tracker such as Technorati.  Blogs are scanned regularly for updates by blog trackers.  In order for the blog trackers to know that you have updated your blog, they need to be informed.   Most blogging platforms have a setting that allows you to set your blog to ping automatically, but it may only ping one tracker like Technorati, so I ping several others as well.  Here is a short list of trackers that can be pinged directly by you.  Why should you ping?  Pinging =’s more traffic!

• Pingomatic
• Icerocket
• Technorati
• Feedburner
• Google
• Pingoat

Lastly, be patient.  Building traffic takes time and patience, but with persistence your traffic will grow in no time!

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