Alas, a blog

I played one game that drew a trememdous amount of traffic, culminating in a few days of over 10k visitors a day.

I used "blogshares" to "advertise" my blog (it was the Sept 11th Photoblog @ http://www.aboutitall.com/septphotoblog.php). I got lots and lots of juice from it, more then I would expect. That traffic spread across all my active blogs (at the time, had the Oregon blog, the Privacy blog, etc), and some of it persisted. So a short term project can be a very good traffic draw too!

Jack Bog has had some success in getting new readers by some use of timely, topical and funny images. He got mentioned by instapundnt, which launched him from the short season minors, to a AA caliber blog.

So there are other techniques.

I used the old "head over to Alas, A Blog and give the trolls the good-old fashioned spanking they deserve" technique. That's the only explanation I have for the relative and growing popularity for Raznor's Rants.

I'm particularly fond of surfing and leaving snippets here and there. The occasional curious email never hurts, either. I always answer the emails that I get from lurkers and the like, even without much free time on my hands.

I'm very new to blogging, so what I have to say on this might be of limited relevance. But it seems to me that the numbers in themselves mean nothing. If someone comes to my blog because Google has decided that I write about women having sex with snakes, well, that someone will be sorely disappointed. It's much more fun to have those people reading who you are writing to, and in that sense I feel incredibly blessed. I'm learning from the comments threads.

Also, most blogs are not little newsstations or chatrooms, and those are the blogs that are going to be really popular. To compare the average blog to those is really not meaningful IMO. In general, comparisons across blogs is like comparing the New York Times circulation to that of the Journal of American Mathematical Association to that of Shakespeare's Collected Works to that of Hot Sex in Hawaii (if such a thing exists). They all may be great or not, but they are not in the same market.

Also, if I e-mail another blogger, without ever specifically blog-whoring, I add my blog url under my name. I have no idea how effective that's been.

#11: Make posts with titles like, "How to get more hits for your blog," and make sure they hang around the top of the ORblogs list for a while...

I don't really know if I'm entirely qualified to give advice on this matter seeing as how I've only ever blogged at Alas and so started out with something of an established readership. (And, really, I'll post a lot more often when my life has settled down a bit.)

A few thoughts, though... First, comment at other blogs. It draws attention to who you are, what you have to say, and how you write. There are a lot of bloggers who have become daily must-reads for me because I loved their comments so much that I wanted to know what they had to say about other things.

Second, and some may disagree with me, but be tasteful in the way that you present your blog. I find it to be rather rude whenever someone writes a comment that consists of little more than "I responded to this post at my blog." I'd recommend doing one of two things in a case like that: write the author of the post an e-mail to let him or her know that you responded to his or her post, or write a substansive comment in the comment thread with a note at the end saying that you've written more on the subject at your blog. (An important note: don't end all of your comments with a front-and-center link to your blog, just on posts where you've written a relevant response.) Also, don't forget trackback pings.

Third, if you've written an e-mail out to people to encourage them to check out your blog (or, much better, as Amp said, a particularly great post at your blog) don't mention that this or that top dog blogger has linked to your before. I'm much more interested in the content of your post, the subject of your blog, than I am about whether or not you've ever been linked to by the Daily Kos.

Quick question, while we're on the subject, how do you check trackback pings?

At Alas or at your blog?

At Alas, and most Moveable Type blogs, you click the "Trackback" link next to the "Comments" link at the bottom of the post. This will open up a new window that not only displays the information for pinging the trackback but also those sites that have tracked back to the post in question.

On BlogSpot... I have no idea. I believe that they only just recently started doing trackbacks, so I have no experience with them.

Raznor, Haloscan has a very good tutorial on how it does trackbacks. Click on the News logo to find it or go to the forums section. If you use Haloscan, that is.

If you blog on a particular theme, find other bloggers on that theme and comment/link.

Keep a list of links to your very best stuff, and good research material, especially if you touch on contentious issues a lot like I do. That's more of a traffic thing than a link thing.

Also, not just participating but collating a cross-blog discussion draws links and traffic. From personal interest I picked up on a question ("What does it mean to be a Black blogger"). I answered it, searched out other people's answers from trackbacks and comments and blogged about them, making a brief summary, a reaction and a link to the response. Everyone I linked to linked back. Great numbers of interested parties linked for their friends' sake. And when non-Black folks joined the party they were included since they essentially answered the same question. A TON of great stuff, and I got credit just for collecting it all.

Echidne, thanks.

As a reader of Blogs, I can say that I'm more likely to check out peoples' blogs if I come across good comments by them at other blogs. Of course, references to specific posts from bloggers that I read also gets checked out.

One good way to increase traffic is to sign up with various services, most of which have cute little buttons that I've put on my sidebar. :)

I have a question on how referral data works.

Does it only list the occasions on which people come to your site by following a link, or does it list the previous web page they were viewing however they then came to yours, even if it was by pulling down a bookmark or typing in the URL?

What seems to work great for getting more people to read my blog is being listed in so many places in the sidebar of the famous Alas, a Blog! I'm very grateful and extremely pleased. Thanks!

Simon: my site host's logs list referrals as the last page a visitor was on, regardless of whether they actually clicked a link there or not.

e.g., I have recurring referrals from iaea.org (not huge numbers, but enough that it's noticeable, esp. early in the month) I'm pretty sure the International Atomic Energy Agency doesn't have a link to bigfool.com ANYWHERE on their site--I suspect I have a reader who works there, so that's his/her home page, but after opening the browser and loading the home page, s/he types in my URL.

Sorry, double post. To follow on Ampersand's first point, update frequently and well: if you have MT or another system that allows for multiple authors, consider adding a co-blogger. Find a friend or frequent commenter who really should have a blog but doesn't, and bring 'em on board. It will immediately increase the frequency of new posts at your site and give people more incentive to revisit. I recently asked an old college buddy to post on my site, and within three weeks he had gotten a specific post linked at Orcinus, tripling our traffic for a couple of days.

I know that I would likely get more hits if I spent more time putting witty, well-written and insightful comments on other people's blogs. The problem is that I have an unfortunately minute supply of wit, insight, and time and energy to write well. I save that up for my own blog.

In fact, two-thirds of the time I start typing in a comment on a blog, I re-read it, think 'gosh, that's a waste of any reader's time, and certainly won't get me any more readers' and delete the thing. I ain't particularly diffident, but I am aware that if I've dashed off a comment in two minutes, the odds are pretty good it's crap.

I spend a bit of time on most of my blog notes; I am trying to write actual mini-essays (such as the terrific one I'm responding to now), rather than post a quick link to the same story everybody has already read.
On the other hand, it's a good point that I should email a person when their blog sparks a post on my own. That doesn't take much time, and is only polite; in future I will do so. Thanks for that.

Redintegro Iraq,
-V.

Pictures of naked marmosets getting married via secret Republican rituals in Branson, Missouri always spins my sitemeter.

Friday economic-graph blogging works, but only when drawn on Greenspan's droopy buttocks with day-glo paint.

Snarky, unhelpful comments never boost traffic, however. Don't even think of it.