Dear Morgan,
I’ve spent the last few days researching how to increase traffic to my two blogs, my general one and my photography one. Blogging isn’t a get rich quick scheme, it’s a slow and laborious way to use up lots of time you don’t have in the hope that someone may click on an advertisement, or buy one of your images, or buy one of your books in the hope of making a small amount of money.
The surefire way of doing this is to increase traffic. You need to write interesting or informative or hilarious copy. In doing so you hope to connect with a reader who feels the same way, and with any luck will share your blog-post with their million facebook readers or twitterers. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen very often.
The first thing you need to do is get traffic. Fortunately my blogs are already getting that for a couple of reasons. The first is because I started them back in 2008, and I’ve kept them up to date. The second is because I’ve registered them to a couple of blogrolls. That is, when I post something in the blog, they go automatically into a blog-reader for several thousand people to read if they wish. The problem with my blog readers is that they are ‘deaf’ orientated, and I’ve really stopped writing about deafness and am now concentrating on photography.
The other important thing about blogs is to have the right tags for the search engines to find you. A good example of this is my blog about the Sculptor Ron Mueck and the accompanying photography. I have a photo of his sculpture called Naked Pregnant Woman with it labeled as such inside the blog. This is attracting a huge amount of pageviews from Google. I’m getting between five and eight thousand pageviews a month from this. Unfortunately, they’re not staying around to click on ads or buying any photography because they’re not getting what they’re really after!! The only good thing about this is that the advertisers think I’m good and therefore I am getting good advertisements on the blog for people to view.
In the last two days to help increase readership and then revenue, I have…
- Added the privacy policy for Adsense which apparently will increase revenue somehow.
- Added share buttons from ShareThis on each of my posts in both my blogs.
- Joined Chime.In, a place where you can add a link to your blog each time you update to gain more readers.
- Joined Blogcatalog with my general blog to gain more readers. It’s quite the social network as bloggers love reading other blogs too.
- Downloaded Hootsuite to manage social media. I have yet to learn how to use it, but the whole idea is to do regular postings to drive readers to your blogs.
I have yet to research..
- Other advertisement (Adclick) programmes
- An affiliateship with perhaps Amazon or other advertiser
- Become a Guest Blogger or ask a Guest blogger to submit an article to my blog.
- Join a Blogcarnival
Several things i have learnt in the past month when researching all these processes…
- You can make a six figure income from blogging
- I know of a woman writing about homelife making $40k USD a year
- You need to diversify .. eg. Have more than one blog, offer different income streams from say books, photography, writing, but have links to theses in your blogs.
- You do need to spend time researching, commenting on other blogs, reading, and developing and planning what you are going to write yourself.
- Everything I’ve learnt here doesn’t just apply to blogs, but to any website you might want to increase traffic to.
I’ve enjoyed doing the research. Even if this doesn’t work, the exercise has been entertaining, I’ve gained more knowledge, and I’ve met new online people within the blogosphere. So all is not lost.
If I see any success with what I have done, then I’ll do the same on this blog as well. If anything, it might buy us a cup of coffee from time to time!
Cheers
Robyn
Messages from Outer Space 