Welcome to Smuggle Me

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately on the PayPerPost message board about how to get your blog more traffic. I’m definitely not an expert, but I’ve had some nice little successes. Who knows. Maybe one day I’ll be able to blog full time. If I did then I’d have to be more like Scoble who meets with people all the time. I just love people way too much. But, I digress!!

Well, until I find more time to share my own nuggets of wisdom I thought I’d share Pronet’s words of wisdom on making your blog more popular using content.

Break news

News spreads through the blogosphere like a wildfire. If the news is hot everyone else will start writing on it and link back to where they found it. In most cases it is not easy to break news due to thousands of people trying to do the same thing. But if you can find the time to break news people will link to your blog as well as read it on a regular basis so they can be up-to-date on the latest happenings.

Post on weekends

There is a good chance that your readers also read other blogs. Because of the sheer number of blogs that post on a daily basis they probably don’t have time to read all of them. If you post when your readers have time, such as the weekends, there is a good chance that they will read your blog. Look around at all of the blogs in your industry, there is a good chance that most will not post on weekends. I know that some may not agree with this idea, but it is something to consider if you have the time on weekends.

Write timeless posts

Try not to only write blog posts with a lifespan of 1 week, mix it up a little by writing on things that are timeless. Those posts might not be a smash hit right out of the gate, but they might become popular a couple months down the road. So try to also write things that can last for longer then 1 day or 1 week.

Teach don’t sell

A lot of people are starting to blog because they want to make money. There is nothing wrong about making money or even blogging to make money, but try not to make a sales pitch in your blog posts. If you try to educate and teach people through your blog, it is possible that people will think of you as an authority in your industry which can lead to all kinds of great opportunities.
Join in on conversations

Emailing out bloggers and asking them for links can be an effective approach to increase your traffic. But another good way to increase your popularity is by joining in on conversations. A good example of this is when Rohit Bhargava wrote 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization; after thousands of people saw it and started adding to it the list grew to the 17 rules of Social Media Optimization.

I’m fine with this list. However, breaking news is even harder than is described in this post. Don’t count on it. I also don’t personally trust the weekend rule. This depends a lot on the blog. On my EMR and HIPAA blog I see drops during the weekend because most people read that blog during working hours as the research the subject. A better lesson would be to know your audience, watch your statistics to know when your blog is most seen.

Timeless posts are important. Otherwise, you’ll have a spike in traffic before you go back to a deep depression that no one enjoys when blogging. I would suggest that 90% of blog traffic comes from 3% of your posts. The more you blog, the larger that 3% becomes.