Driving Website/Blog Traffic

MplsOsiris

Last month I started a website/blog about self improvement, namely about my own efforts to become the person I want to be. I really like what I'm doing with it and I think it has some serious potential beyond a normal blog. My problem is I'm having trouble driving traffic to it, in the past month and a half I've gotten over 1k hits, but only 50 or so have come from search engines, the rest have come from links posted on my livejournal and facebook. This tells me that people like reading what I write about, but that I'm not able to share my content with a wider audience.

Does anyone have any experience with, or any ideas regarding driving traffic to my site? I'd really love to take this to the next level and I think I have what it takes to do it, I just don't know how to do so. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If you want to look at the site and critique, send me a message and I'll reply with the link.

Thanks,
MplsOsiris

DrunkMc

Try sharing it with websites that post links to other websites such as Reddit or LifeHacker. Make sure your Robots.txt file is setup correctly so search spiders can categorize your site correctly. And you can also start including the link in Forum Signatures and such like that, so when spiders goto say this site, they link it to yours and it gets a bit more "fame".

Stuff like that.

Djeet

If you're looking to get more traffic via search engines then your entering into the obfuscated world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For blogs you want regular and often posts, with original content, that feature the keywords you want your google to rank your site for.

shadowane

It also took Google a little over a month or so to finally start showing stuff from my blog so you may just have to wait a little.

MplsOsiris

Hey thanks for all the advice!

I set up a SEO widget and have been busy tagging my posts/pages. I also added links on two of my forum signatures (not PA) so hopefully that helps. Is there anything else I should be doing?

TychoCelchuuu

You could stick it in your PA sig. shadowane did it and nobody minds! We're fine as long as you're not actively pimping the site for no reason.

MplsOsiris

Are there any PA rules on website signatures? I took a brief look but didn't see anything. I definitely will if it's okay.

admanb

As long as you're contributing to the forum and not just using it for advertising no one will mind if you have links in your signature. Lots of posters (including me) link their business or their resume in their sigs.

MplsOsiris

Awesome! Thanks team, I appreciate all the help!

Szechuanosaurus

Get your site listed on the major blog directories.
Find other blogs about self improvement / similar themes and start engaging with them:
- comment on their posts, don't spam their comments but actually add your thoughts to the topic, and include a link to your blog in the website field of the comment form
- find out which social media channels they use eg twitter and get following and talking to them there. Also take note of how they promote their blog on these channels
- ego bait other blogs by mentioning them in your own posts - eg do a weekly round up of good blogposts, be sure to tweet the post and @ any bloggers that were included. Retweet anything they tweet which you find interesting, tweet blogposts that you find interesting being sure to end the tweet with mentioning the twitter handle of the blogger.
- as you start to build good relationships with other bloggers discuss the possibility of doing a guest post on their blog

Use search suggestions and related searches in google to get ideas for the sorts of keywords to target in your blogposts - these are based on popular searches and common phrases so should have good volumes of search traffic. Try looking for longer queries such as questions that might make a good title for a blog post.

Also get google analytics and google webmaster tools set up on your blog if you don't already and start looking at what keywords are sending organic search traffic to your site. Use this insight to get a better understanding of how people are finding you and what their searches look like to better target search traffic.

MplsOsiris

Ugh, I'm not a huge fan of twitter, but I might be able commit to making one and spending some time on it daily doesn't sound too hard, especially if it gets me from spending too much time ogling facebook. Thanks for the suggestion Szechuan,