So, you’ve just launched a blog. You’ve written a couple of posts, have some plans for future posts, and even have a reader or two. However, now you want to take it to the next level. You want to build a community of readers.
Problem is, you don’t have one person dedicated to your company blogging efforts. You’re doing this yourself and while you have some time to dedicate to working the crowd, you aren’t able to spend every hour of every day on it.
Here are a couple of things you can do to increase traffic, using however much time you have to give to it:
Submit to Digg, Reddit, etc.: Although it is next to impossible to make it to the front page of a site like Digg, that doesn’t mean entries still shouldn’t be submitted. By submitting a post you are almost always guaranteed at least one visitor. The odds are that at least one person will click it while perusing upcoming stories. However, when submitting to sites like Digg and Reddit the goal isn’t necessarily getting “Dugg” and making it to the front page, but getting our content indexed within these social news sites. The millions of people on these sites use their search functions extensively, and by submitting our entries we are giving ourselves the ability to show up within searches on these sites. So in sense we can think of submitting to these sites as submitting to other search engines apart from Google and Yahoo, and although the volume is significantly less, the traffic will probably be more targeted. And as we’re thinking of these sites as other search engines, it’s important to submit our titles and descriptions with good, relevant keywords to our posts so that we have a better chance of generating click-throughs on related queries.
Be active on blog communities (like MyBlogLog) and on other blogs: Blog communities are a tremendous resource for finding targeted readers, increasing your subscribers, and even getting backlinks. Other blogs are also a space that you should be active in. By participating and commenting on other blogs, not only will the author visit your site and potentially contribute, readers of the other blog might as well.
