Feel Free to Ask Me Your Questions

[remarkablogger]

Professional blogging and marketing a business with a blog is what I do. There are plenty of blogger forums, but they're really big, "noisy" places. I wanted to find a place to help people with blogging and Wise Bread looks like a great, welcoming place. It makes sense for me to be here because blogging is all about doing it yourself and doing it frugally.

So I figured the best thing to do was to show up, introduce myself, and start being as helpful as I can (I do plan on learning about personal finance and picking up frugality tips as well--I'm sure I'll get a lot of benefit from here).

I'm starting this topic as an "open thread" on blogging and social media questions you might have. Feel free to ask me anything. Don't be shy or think your question is dumb. I look forward to meeting you all and helping you with your questions!

[amandajane]

Ok, I'll bite :0)

Can you suggest some good ways to get free traffic to a blog?

Thanks!

[remarkablogger]

There are many good ways to get free blog traffic. Some of them work quickly, and some of them take time. Some of them take a little more know-how than others. Let me see if I can break them down for you into a quick list:

Fast traffic:

• StumbleUpon
• Twitter
• Guest-posting
• Blog Carnivals

Longer-term traffic:

• Commenting on other blogs
• Guest-posting (giving and receiving)
• Article-writing
• Content-sharing sites like Squidoo and HubPages
• Forums

Know-how required:

• SEO (Search engine optimization)

I've noticed the threads here on StumbleUpon and Twitter, and the questions people have about them (i.e., they don't see the value in using these as traffic-drivers). I've written about all of these topics extensively on my own blog, but let me see if I can encapsulate the highlights for you guys especially. Since these two channels really can drive significant traffic quickly.

StumbleUpon
SU is essentially a social content recommendation machine. You sign up, download the SU toolbar, and you tell SU what kind of stuff you like. Then, when you click the Stumble button on the toolbar, it dishes up a site that potentially matches your declared interests. If it makes a recommendation you really like, you give it a "thumbs up" and you can even write a mini-review and tag the page. if you don't like the page, you give it a "thumbs down."

Avoid stumbling your own blog posts. SU knows when you do this, and if you do it too much you can be banned, so just don't do it. The trick is to get other people to submit and vote up your blog posts. By forming a group and helping each other, you can achieve some good traffic this way. The larger the group, the more traffic everyone gets from everyone else.

You can add friends in SU and you can private message those friends by using the "send to" button on the SU toolbar. If another stumber has submitted your post to SU, there's nothing wrong with you sending it to your friends. You can write brief messages to your friends when you send them a page (your blog post). Always be polite and offer to do the same for the other person.

You can form a private Stumble group (forums are a killer place to do this, and it looks like there is one here) and add friends fairly quickly, which means you can get traffic fairly quickly, too.

Twitter
Twitter is a combination chat and micro-blogging service whose whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. The secret is to use a program instead of the Twitter website (after you get going). I recommend TweetDeck. Once you go through the sign-up process, just do a people search (top navigation) to find others you know are on there. All the big-name bloggers and social media people are on Twitter. So are tons of freelancers, WAHMs, artists, and everything else.

If you want to shortcut this process, you can follow most of the people I'm following (I'm at http://twitter.com/remarkablogger). Many of them will follow you back. At the beginning, you want to follow a lot of people, but not too many more than are following you. Why? Because tweeters with high numbers of followed to followers are often spammers. They follow everybody in hopes of being followed back, but they only tweet their self-promotional garbage. So, keep the ratio close at first.

The trick with Twitter is to engage others in conversations by replying to their tweets (just like at a party). A few times a day, provide your followers with links to stuff you think is cool as a way to provide value. When you post something new on your blog, tweet the link and you'll get traffic. You need to do all three of these things: provide links to cool stuff, converse with people and have fun, and drop links to your own posts. Variety is key.

[amandajane]

Thank you very much :0) Great info!

Are there any other social networks you recommend? There seems to be an awful lot of them springing up and I'd like to join some but can't afford the time to join too many.

[khorrell]

amandajane asks a great question - with limited time, where would YOU start?

Thanks for your answers.

[remarkablogger]

It totally depends on your audience. If your audience is liberal young men who hate Microsoft and like cool design and college humor, then Digg is your place. If you want to reach hardcore tech nerds then Reddit is your place. Mixx is good for general stuff, but it takes a while and a lot of effort to become a player.

Go to Google and search for "list of social media sites" and you'll see tons of them. The popular ones with all the traffic are usually the ones that will send you traffic, but it really depends on how good of a fit the network is for you and your bog.

[Babalu]

You can submit your RSS feed to scraper sites, and your posts will show up in other sites' RSS feed widgets. This helps build backlinks and traffic.

If you're using Wordpress, download and install a site indexing widget to make it easier for spiders to crawl and index your site.

If you post using your site in a sig, try to get your main keyword(s) inside the anchor text.

[amandajane]

Thanks for the rundown remarkablogger :0)

Babalu: Isn't 'scraping' frowned upon by the search engines?

[Babalu]

Originally Posted by amandajane

Babalu: Isn't 'scraping' frowned upon by the search engines?

You are giving over your feed to other scrapers who will post your content elsewhere, but you aren't doing the scraping yourself. Then your site results show up at other people's sites as feed content.

Perhaps "scrapers" isn't the best term, when they're actually content distributors.

[remarkablogger]

Feed aggregation is what you're talking about, and it's usually a desirable thing. Feed aggregators will remove your feed if you ask. They're legit sites run by real people.

Scrapers are content thieves.

From a practical standpoint, technically there's no difference between the two.