Improving popularity of your blog

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So you’ve started a blog. You’re writing good content…But it does not seem like anyone is reading it besides you!!

How do you get traffic to your site? How do you improve its popularity? There are several ways to do so…

1. Good Layout: You might be writing good content, but you also need to ensure that you’ve got a good site layout which is uncluttered and easy to navigate. This will ensure that your readers find the relevant content quickly. Also, if you do intend on using a free theme, do customize it a bit so that it stands out from the crowd.

2. SEO Friendly: Ensure you have your site optimized for search engines. Getting your posts indexed periodically by search engines like Google and Yahoo! is absolutely essential. Ensure you add a sitemap to your site. If you’re using a self-hosted blog running on WordPress there is a plugin available which automates the entire task. All you need to do is to submit it once to Google and your posts will be indexed faster than usual after that.

3. Feeds: Make your posts available via an RSS/Atom Feed. Most blogs support this already, but ensure you’ve got the RSS subscription badges visible on the site for people to locate it. Many surveys seem to suggest that full text feeds are better in the long run. Use sites like FeedBurner to manage your feeds. They provide a host of additional features over what WordPress provides. One of the things that you can use is FeedBurner MyBrand which serves feeds for your site directly from your site without redirecting to FeedBurner.

4. Social Bookmarking: Have plugins like addThis or Sociable (there are many others!) installed on your site so that its convenient for readers to bookmark your articles. Do not clutter it with too many bookmarking sites though! Also, don’t forget to join sites like Technorati, BumpZee, BlogCatalog, and MyBlogLog. These sites can help you get a lot of traffic and they are good sites for socializing.

5. Socialize: Its essential that you visit other sites in your niche area and comment on articles they post. Ensure its constructive and relevant comments. This is a way for readers from other sites to get to know you. You also get noticed within that niche area and might get opportunities to guest blog.

6. Trade Links: I am not sure if this is so useful now, with Google clamping down heavily. A good example is what happened with John Chow where he got bumped down badly in the rankings at Google. In my personal opinion writing good content is better off in the long run in building traffic than participating in link train posts!

7. Trade Advertisements: If you don’t want to pay for advertising your blog, you could try out adgridwork. You will need to add a small advertisement widget to your site to show advertisements. For every ad impression shown on your site, your own advertisement (for your blog) will be shown on sites participating in their network. All this for free!

8. Trade Reviews: We have sites like ReviewBack where you can write a review for another site in exchange for that site writing a review for you. All this for free. If you can selectively choose good blogs to trade reviews with, it could help in building back links and traffic to your site. Be choosy though and don’t review sites which are not related to your blog’s focus area.

If you can think of any additional areas to focus on, please do drop in a comment.