Online Business Article

How To Drive Traffic to Your Blog –

The Advice

I have kept in touch with one another since I posted about him last

and recently I asked him to consider writing a guest post here at

ProBlogger. I thought a 12 year old’s perspective on how to get

traffic to your blog might be worth hearing. Here’s his post.

When Darren Rowse comes up to you, and asks you

to write a post

for ProBlogger.net, it’s not something you can really say ‘no’

to. Not that you’d want to of course, but more the fact that it’s

the opportunity of a lifetime. Why should I write, of all people

though? Well Darren wanted to hear the methods that I as a

young person use to drive traffic to my blog, without spending

any money.

Learning the basics

First you need to grasp and understand that the Internet is

a big place. Several billion web-pages, and often with very

little time available to the end-user, they’ll use several

techniques to find what they’re looking for.

Search? Standard engines like Google, Yahoo and Live are

the most popular nowadays, and optimizing your site to be

found easily, can be easy and hard based on many factors.

My best advice for someone starting out would be to start by

building quality content for somebody to see, then progressing

to “The Three Cs”. This way, you’ll get noticed by genuinely

interested people, who’ll actively want to play a part in your

site’s development, by giving you quality feedback on ways

to improve, design and usability.

If you have a blog or a website that’s been going for several

weeks, perhaps a month or two, and you’ve done “The Three

Cs”, or at least some of them, would be to start focusing on

building on your existing content, with fresh, interesting, relevant

and unique content. Note I say ‘relevant’ and ‘unique’.

This is important. There are so many splogs out there now-a-days,

that people can quickly distinguish whether an article has been

written by somebody or not, at least the majority of the time.

Relevance too, like I said, is a key factor. If you have a very

personal blog, then one day write something completely off-topic

about a new type of golf club that comes out, people will start

to wonder if you and your blog actually have an aim or a purpose,

which is yet another vital thing to consider.

If you’re somebody with a very mature blog, that is several

months or more old, you can now focus on the technical side

of things, which is mainly down to the spiders. If you’ve been

blogging this long, then if you’re not on your own domain,

or hosting, I recommend it, as it allows for greater flexibility,

design and SEO. Search engine optimization? Yep! A Google

Sitemap can be stuck on your server for the Google-Bot

and metatags can be added, which let you pre-define information

about your page automatically, such as the author,

a description, keywords and feed information. This also makes

usability easier for feed-ready browsers like Firefox and

Internet Explorer 7. Tacky pre-set designs become a thing of

the past too, and upgrading to Wordpress can be a smart

move, as the developer community there will help you along

the way with every aspect of your blog, from the writing itself,

to the advanced functionality like widgets that are available,

and the themes that are freely downloadable to customize

your blog’s look. Of course you could always give design

a go yourself as I did at Techzi.net – though admittedly

I enlisted the help of two professional designers as well.So,

what are these ‘C’s that I’ve been talking to you so much

about anyway? Read on to find out…