Tag Archives: Blogging

Get Visitors To Your Blog!

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So how do we do it, again and again?

Just how do we get so many visitors to our blog?

How do you do it?

How does he do it?

There are lots of ways, and not all of them work for all people, but many people get many people to visit their blogs. And here is how: they make a blog that a lot of people would enjoy, then those people who would enjoy the blog discover it, and read it, and enjoy it,  and they share it with their friends and they return to read it again in future.

The first step, therefore, is to make a blog that people will enjoy.

The next step is to make it easy for people to share links to your blog.

Another thing to make sure of is that your blog is search engine friendly.

Something else you should think about is to make it easy for people to comment and interact on your blog.

Importantly, you should make it easy for people to subscribe by RSS or email (use Feedburner, and place the buttons and forms somewhere obvious).

There are lots of other ways, but if you exhaust the above and still can’t get traffic, then it is probably your output (content) that needs a little attention next!

Leave a comment below if you have a good tip you think I have missed out.

How To Get More Visitors On My Blog?

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Lots of people want to know how to get more visitors onto a website or blog.

And the answer is usually so very simple: talk about something that people want to know about, and do so in an interesting and entertaining way.

Actually. Now that I think about it. It is not so simple. Well, if it were simple, those people who are looking to get more visitors to their blogs would probably not be looking for this – they’d just be writing about things they know, and these things would be something that people wanted to learn about.

Those visitors would be entertained and/or informed.

Those visitors would tell their friends about this great blog – they would drop links to it in their own blogs. Those visitors would hit “share” and “like” and “tweet” all over the place.

Google would upgrade and enhance it’s opinion of the blog in question.

So, to clarify, to get more visitors to your blog, don’t look outside, focus on yourself. Write more. Write better. Add videos and images (with permission, of course). Make more entertaining. Improve.

If you do the above, and make sure that there is a “market” or, rather, “audience” out there, somewhere, for what you are saying, each time you say it, then you will not fail to increase your audience.

You’ll get more visitors. You’ll make more money. Or, you’ll just feel a little bit better about the fact that what you are saying isn’t just spilling down the digital drain.

Whatever your blogging goal might be, if one of those goals is increasing traffic, then you should focus almost all of your effort on improving your blog – and nothing else – if you make it good, people will find it.

Blogging to Nobody

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A big problem with starting and maintaining a blog on the internet is building an audience.

In todays world, it so often seems that everyone out there is trying to tell their story and that, perhaps, we are not listening to other people quite so much.

Twitter is a good example of this – many people use Twitter to say things – even @ other people – but they don’t appear to use Twitter so much for listening to other people. Unless those people happen to be celebrities, of course.

So those ordinary people, like me, who blog, or microblog, or tweet, can often come to the point where it becomes clear they are blogging to nobody. Literally nobody in the whole wide world is interested in what the blogger is saying – or at the very least, those people who might be are not reading your blog!

So, then, what to do. There are two options: 1) give up; or 2) find your audience; or 3) carry on regardless, and let your audience (such as it is) find you.

There is something to be said for perseverance. Rome was not built in a day, and just the action of writing for an audience (albeit an imagined one) will improve your writing, whether or not your blog is to become your breakout successs story, or just a personal plaything.

It could be both. Or neither.

Blogging, like life, is what you make of it.

For me? I’m still not sure whether blogging is worth the time and effort, but I have committed a little of both to it as an outlet over the next few years as I’d like to have something light to use my writing skills on away from the formality of books and articles for more traditional publication.

Why do you blog? Does it matter what your audience is?

 

My Blog Has No Ads

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Today, I’m just saying “my blog has no ads” because that is the case.

How many people start blogging as a means to make money online? And, how many of those people then realise that blogging is not, actually, that good a way to make money online.

Ultimately, if you have ads, you end up tailoring what you write, at least to some degree, in order to achieve more visitors to your blog (and therefore more revenue); or you’ll write about more lucrative subjects (in order to achieve more revenue); or you’ll do both.

Websites with no ads, which aren’t selling any products, are few and far between.

But we all must have an incentive to blog. So what is mine? And what is yours? Leave a comment below if your website has no ads too, or even if it has some ads!

Explain why you blog, and why you do (or don’t) earn money from it.

Does advertising make you write different things?

How To Get The Linkedin Share Button

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Linkedin is a popular network for professionals, so if you’re writing stuff on the internet aimed at business users – or any professional user who might be networked via Linkedin – you’ll probably want to make it easy for those people to share your great content on Linkedin.

In this blog post, I’m going to explain to you just how to do that!

How to Get The Linkedin Share Button into Your Blog

Firstly, there are a heap of good plugins which will handle the placement and positioning of sharing buttons on your website.

I use a great WordPress plugin called “Sharebar” (just search for that name on the Add Plugins part of WordPress to grab it for yourself). However, that plugin, does not come with Linkedin support out of the box. Nope, you’ll need to edit one of the other templates and drop the Linkedin code into the “Large Button” and “Small Button” areas.

But what is that code? Fear not, I’m here to help you!

Linkedin Large Button (With Count) Code

The linkedin large button (with count) looks like this:


The code you’ll need to put into your website, wherever you want this button to appear is as follows:

<script src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”IN/Share” data-counter=”top”></script>

Linkedin Horizontal Button (With Count) Code

The Linkedin Horizontal button (with count) looks like this:


The code you need for this one is as follows:

<script src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”IN/Share” data-counter=”right”></script>

Linkedin Horizontal Button (Without Count) Code

Finally, if you want the Linkedin button, horizontally, only without the count number (maybe it will be soooo big that it will hide some other part of your page ;) ) then that one looks like this:


To get this into your website, simply enter the following code into your template, wherever you wish the button to appear:

<script src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”IN/Share”></script>

So, that’s all there is to adding the Linkedin Share Button to your websites and blogs! Any problems, and you can leave a comment below.

Complementary Spam Comments

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I receive an awful lot of complementary spam comments.

By “complementary”, I of course, do not mean “free of charge” – nobody expects to pay to receive spam blog comments. Rather, I mean comments which are attempting to pay me a complement, such as:

“What a fantastic insight, I am subscribing to your blog with my RSS reader (sic)”

Even though I know they are spam – because the name links to some sort of download site or other, and my spam filter has placed them into the spam comments folder within WordPress, these complementary comments still make my day.

Not really, I just notice them when I’m deleting spam comments, something I do routinely whenever I login to this blog at the click of one button.

I just wrote this post in a shameless and slightly cynical attempt to get more traffic to my blog by writing about something that many other bloggers will have noticed, in the hope that they may Google search something somewhat related to the topic of this post, and end up here.

It’s one of the things I do. You might have noticed.

Like writing about redsnow.

Hello Blogosphere

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When you open up a new blog, as this surely is, you get a first post which is, somewhat presumptuously, entitled “Hello World”, and the hapless blogger, me, in this instance, tremulously begins typing away at their first, inspired, message to the planet.

However, the internet is a busy shopping street, full of people wandering around looking for the next thing upon which to spend their money. A blog is like a megaphone. You could be heard shouting away on your megaphone, but it’ll be damned hard getting any of those happy shoppers to listen to you.

So I’m directing my hello at the blogosphere, because I’m led to believe by newspapers with large pages that such a thing does exist. This means there are people out there also standing on this busy shopping street, with megaphones in varying states of readiness, who will listen to another human’s efforts on their loudhailer before picking up once more and shouting something into the abyss.

Meanwhile, Lady Gaga drifts past. One of her minions throws out a 140 character pearl of wisdom. All the shoppers turn, momentarily, from looking at the funny video in the TV store window, and gaze, glazen eyed, at Lady Gaga. Each realises that they have just been offered the unmissable opportunity to purchase a T-shirt and become a Little Monster. They pull out their e-wallets…

And so. It begins….

Hello World.