4,320,000 ways to “Increase Blog Traffic”
Posted on March 29, 2007
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As my faithful readers (and by that I mean myself - Joe O’Brien) will know, I have not been in the blogging game for very long. I began my career as an Online Marketer just over a year ago and focussed mostly on learning as much as I possibly could about search engine optimisation. I tend to research pretty hard whenever I’m faced with a new challenge and as a result I managed to sniff out thousands of articles on the topic of SEO, most of them absolute crap. While I now consider that to be largely a waste of time it has at least taught me a bunch of things about how search engines work and how to quickly find relevant information. This post is about my quest to find as much quality information as I could, in a relatively short amount of time, on how to increase blog traffic.
Step one (1): I went to my faithful friend, overlord and master Google and queried increase blog traffic. The result? As the title suggests, the Holy G served me up a veritable banquet of delicious bullcrap to sift through - 4,320,000 results to be approximately exact! As if I was gonna play that game, I needed to tighten my criteria…
Step two (2): I figured that the people I want to learn from are already savvy on the SEO side of things given that optimisation of blogs seems a glaringly obvious way to increase traffic to a blog. Therefore, I tried a new query - allintitle:Increase blog traffic.
This narrowed the selection down to 683 results… much more palatable than 4,320,000! It’s still a hell of a lot to go through but I figured if I went through the top 30, 40 or 50 I’d be bound to find some decent hints on how I might go about increasing blog traffic. The quality of information, I presume, might be a little bit higher given the authors obviously went to a bit of effort to get their article found by including the keyword phrase in their title tag.
Step three (3): Now for the fun part. So far I’ve middle clicked each and every result from the top 30 and have preceded to copy and paste to a doc file all the content (including comments) from every page I visit. I’ve then glanced over every article and pulled out the headings and major points that looked worthwhile and pasted them into a separate document as bullet points. I figure if I skim through and collect the cream from each crop of content I’ll have a good collection of points to work with. At a later date I will go back and read through every word (including comments) and flesh out my skeleton list.
It doesn’t sound like much fun but I reckon by the end of it all I’ll be significantly wiser about the strategies and tactics required to increase blog traffic. Moreover, it seems a far more efficient strategy than wasting hundreds of hours thoughtfully poring over every man, woman and dog’s opinion on how best to increase traffic to my blog.
One good thing about blogging, I’ve found, is that it kind of introduces a bit of forced accountability to oneself and therefore I feel obligated to continue this line of discussion in a future post. I’m dead keen to buff up my knowledge on this topic as I’ve been led to believe by some guy that blogging is not only great for personal and professional expression but you can make money from it!
Joe O’Brien
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2 Responses to “4,320,000 ways to “Increase Blog Traffic””
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Hey Joe - Great to see you’re getting into blogging. That’s a great method you outline for boning up on a particular topic in a short space of time - I think you could even “generalise” the article in a new post to read, “how to cut your research time by 80% and triple your effectiveness” or some such. Keep up the good work! Will
Hi Will, cheers for the comment and feedback and the great headline suggestion!
Since writing this post I’ve noticed I research a lot of things in a ‘hit and run’ style. Perhaps I’ll write an article on ‘quick & dirty’ online research and content production techniques/systems with liberal references to old matey Pareto and his magical 80:20 goodness. If I manage to write something along the lines of “don’t try to learn everything about everything” then hopefully I’ll be able to take my own advice!
Joe