Driving traffic to your blog
Happy new year everybody! Returning to work after the holidays I was excited to do a monthly review of traffic (geek!) to the Quba blog. I discovered that Nick’s Diadem post was the most popular, with 111 page views and Rob’s post on the Social Media X Factor had the most comments. Well done guys!
I also checked traffic sources to see the most effective ways for getting our content noticed. Currently most of our referred blog traffic comes from Twitter, followed by our Facebook page and then posts from Linked In. This got me thinking about a posting process, to make sure we diffuse our content onto the relevant platforms without spamming people.
I have already worked up a process flow chart including what to do with the sites above. I do not advocate we link to every blog post on sites such as Digg and Linked In, but for those with specially useful content it’s helpful to have a reminder.
That long preamble leads me to the point of this post, here is my step by step process for promoting your blog followed by a couple of services I am going to test for success:
1. Write blog post and ensure it adheres to your Social Media policy (you should have one!)
2. Use a tool like Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. This basically means various blog directories are notified that there has been an update to your blog. If you use Wordpress you may already be pinging the service automatically, if not, you can enter your blog details on the Ping-o-matic site.
3. Think about the content of your post and use a tool such as Google URL builder to generate various URLs tagged with source info, for example “Twitter” or “Facebook”. This allows you to track exactly where the traffic to your individual posts is coming from in Google Analytics.
4. Use a service such as bit.ly to shorten your individual URLs
5. If you are a company with more than one person active in Social Media, it can be useful to use a service such as CoTweet, which allows several people to manage your business’ Twitter account.
6. If you have your own Twitter account (or wish to retweet your post), you can link your Twitter and LinkedIn profile so that any post with the #in hashtag will show on your LinkedIn profile.
5. If your business has a Facebook page you can set it to bring your blog feed in automatically. Just keep an eye out for comments!
6. If you feel you have written a particularly useful post you can post it to relevant groups on Linked In and also try Digging your own story. However, in order to get the most out of these services you should definitely interact with people as well as just pushing your own content.
So far, that’s where I’m up to. The next steps are as follows:
1. Technorati is a popular engine for searching blogs. In order to “claim” this blog and have it indexed by Technorati I have set up a profile and have to include a unique code (NVZZEP6B24CB) in my next post so that they can see I am the author.
2. In the future I intend to submit articles (where appropriate) to other sharing sites such as Sphinn, Slashdot, Reddit, Diigo and StumbleUpon
3. Find other bloggers in your industry and make thoughtful comments on their posts, you can link back to your own blog and you will begin to gain attention if you are adding useful content to the debate.
Of course the most important thing is to write content that is worth sharing in the first place. There are plenty of blog posts with content ideas that you can use. So, what can you add to the debate?
Image source: Flickr
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Richard Lawrence
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Rebecca Jesson
