Building Blog Traffic - It’s Who You Know…
Keeping a Blog is hard work, and to make money from that blog is even harder work. Don’t let anyone kid you, there is no program and I mean no program or Guru who will teach you how to make money overnight. Blogging is easy, put your thoughts down in a post and your good to go, but try to monetize that blog and you have another thing coming. Blogging is not like a “Field of Dreams” you don’t build it and they will come. You have to build traffic slowly and methodically, and understand that not everyone who stumbles upon your blog will like your writing style or even what you are writing about. Can you please everyone every time? No! But you can please the ones who are interested in what you are writing about. I see a lot of bloggers that ramble about just about anything their mind is set on for that particular moment in time. When it comes to Blogging I feel the best thing to do is to pick a Niche, something that interests you or has a following that you feel you might be able to cater to.
With that said, how do you build traffic to your blog? Do you use Google Adwords, Banner Ads, Social sites or traffic generators. To me it’s pretty simple, it’s who you know. The more you get yourself out there, whether it’s by commenting on other blogs or forums or joining social networks the more readers you will get to your blog. In my last post I spoke about Jack Humphrey’s new Social Network, and in just the past couple of days since I became a member I made lots of new friends and gained a lot of new RSS Subscribers. I have also been participating more on StumbleUpon and Digg, these sites are not just for promoting your posts and blogs. They are there to network with other people and build a presence for yourself through friendships and partnerships.
Another thing I have been using very heavily is Entrecard, it takes some time but I feel it is well worth it as I have gained a lot of new friends and continued visits to my blog.
So how are you building traffic to your blog? Are you out their networking? Please take a moment and leave a comment and share your thoughts and ideas so that the rest of us might benefit, after all if we all share somebody might just learn something. 
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February 14th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Hey Raymond..
Thanks for the great post again. I made a post today about how I like reading content that can be adapted and used by anyone. This is the type of content I’m talking about. It can be used by anyone and the information is easily understood.
I’ve been using most of the techniques you mentioned but I have yet to heard of the new Social Network that you listed. I will be sure to check it out and register for it.
If you want check out the post I’m referring to on my blog I won’t post a link to the direct post but it will be near the top of todays post and is titled “Pillar Content”. Hopefully you can read it and let me know what you think.
Thanks, Scott.
Scott’s last blog post..Pillar Content - Important?
February 18th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Yup indeed true that itis very important to participate to social networks. And of course visit fellow blogger’s sites and learn something from them as well. Live a comment and let them know how you appreciate the knowledge you got from their post.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:31 am
I agree with you. It’s kind of scary as a new blogger. There are all the gurus out there trying to work their niche inside the blogging community (I think this is one of the easier niches to start out in). Meanwhile, a new blogger tries to get into a political niche, etc. and hits the roadblocks in their quest to find a non-blogger audience. I hate finding those abandoned blogs where the owner was extremely excited about earning money and building traffic in the first few posts and they haven’t posted in months.
Entrecard and Blogcatalog have been wonderful for me. Mybloglog has horrible lag, so I don’t mess with it. New bloggers can use MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook to post videos and bulletins to get fresh traffic.
We have to wait several weeks to a few months to get indexed by search engines and picked up in big directories. You can use forums to make up for being a newbie. Many popular niche forums are crawled several times per day and it works well for backlinks as long as the blogger posts responsibly without spamming the community (signatures, relevancy).
February 26th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
[…] sincerely with other bloggers is crucial and Raymond shares his view about building blog traffic and […]
March 5th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I’ve just started my blog a few weeks ago, so building traffic and networking is what I’ve been doing a lot of lately.
I just submitted to a blog carnival. We’ll see how that turns out. Otherwise, it’s pretty much what you mentioned. Entrecard has been working well for me also.
Curt’s last blog post..Anti-Virus – I Hope You Have It
March 20th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
I’m also new to blogging and this new EntreCard program can really help in tagetting blog traffic to its members by sharing ads from one blog to another.
This could definitely help me building blog traffic.
Eric’s last blog post..The Importance of Comment Section in Blog