Photo credit: Dario
There comes a time in every young bloggers life when pure, wholesome thoughts eventually turn to blog traffic. When this happens, the traffic libido becomes engorged, sometimes ballooning to the size of a transport helicopter, which causes the newbie blogger to send emails to well-known experts—people that know how to get blog traffic—and ask them for tips on how to get more visitors to their site.
When they get no response, they start sending them to me.
Three or four times a month I get emails from new bloggers asking me the best way to start getting blog traffic. I usually give them the standard methods I used to get Dead Rooster off the ground: sign up for social blogging networks like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog; get an entrecard; submit your site to several blog indexes such as blogflux, topblogging, etc., or, if you are a humor oriented blog, humor-blogs is an absolute must; and, of course, digg, reddit, stumbleupon, etc. But, there’s one special method that I have never revealed to anyone until now.
If this is your first visit to my blog, the very fact that you are reading this right now is probably due in some part to this insidious recipe. In the limited, extremely non-scientific tests I have conducted, it delivers anywhere from five to thirty-five times the normal blog traffic.
So, what’s this cruel active ingredient?
It was revealed to me one magical night in Las Vegas by the hottest blonde I have ever laid eyes on; she was sleek and sexy and when she walked into the casino all the slot-machines began paying off. Stunning though she was, I was able to remain steady and suppress the urge to blurt out something clever. But then she sat down next to me at the bar, ordered something called a “Throbbing Rooster” and the screen on my iPhone shattered.
She turned to me and smiled.
After a bit of small talk she boldly asked me if I was up for something kinky. I said, “Sure, anything, just as long as it doesn’t involve animals or electricity…”
I was surprised to see she was genuinely disappointed by my response. She explained it was unfortunate I felt that way, and that she merely wanted to show me how her hamster wheel generated enough energy to power her toaster. “We could’ve made perfect toast,” she said as she got up to leave, then she further crushed my spirits by adding, “toast that could later be used for making love.”
BOING! Haha! Alright, I admit it: none of that ever happened. But, don’t think I would’ve let you off the hook so quickly if I could’ve come up with a believable—but not too repulsive—way toast could be used during sex. But, the point of this article isn’t to tempt you with hamster wheels and toast; it’s to reveal some rather diabolical ways to get some extra traffic to your blog. Here are five methods. Warning: the first is kind of evil:
1. Use a photo of a hot babe for your avatar on social sites—possibly a hot blonde. This is the easiest, yet “cruelest” method because, even if you are an old, fat, bald guy named Frank who often surfs the net while wearing nothing but a urine-soaked adult diaper, you will still get tons of pulsating young gentlemen clicking thru to see your blog. Although I don’t utilize this idea myself, I know it works because—and I admit this only in the name of science—I have personally been tricked by this method over one million times.
2. Write a ten-word compelling title for your blog post. Why ten words? Because Google considers the first ten words of your post-title when indexing your article. If you use less than ten you could be short-changing yourself and if you use more than ten you are not getting index credit for all your keywords. Of course, sometimes you will have to go with eight or nine words for your title to make sense, but you should always try to get as close to ten as you can while trying not to go over. (Note: this does not mean you should pad it with a bunch of non-keyword-style adjectives just to try and stretch it out! If you can’t fit some kind of substantial keyword in there then don’t worry about it.)
More importantly—and I sometimes wonder what is wrong with some bloggers—make sure you construct a title that sounds interesting enough for someone to want to click and visit your site! If I would have used, “How to get extra blog traffic” as the title of this post, I probably would have still got some okay traffic, but I GUARANTEE it would not have been half as much as I’m getting with the current title. So, why not take a few extra minutes and come up with something tempting?
3. Occasionally write long posts of between 600 and 900 words. This helps by the simple fact that, if there are more words, there will be a better chance something in your article will match something that someone typed into a search engine. It’s a simple matter of statistics: more words, more chances. (note: this post tops-out at over 1,100 words which is way too long).
4. Encourage comments on your blog posts. Most bloggers already do this, but some don’t, and they are shooting themselves in the foot. I get search engine traffic all the time from keywords found only in comments left by others.
5. My final word of advice is to help your fellow bloggers. I have met a bunch of great people online that author some great blogs and I try to submit and promote their posts as much as I can. In turn, they do the same for me. For the most part, we don’t even have to ask each other, we just do it. And, believe me, it feels like a special gift every time your hit-counter explodes 1,000 points in a matter of two minutes because someone was nice enough to submit your post to Stumbleupon, Digg, or Reddit. I’m sure you can think of a fellow blogger that needs a traffic boost—why not surprise them with the gift of traffic? (If you know of no one, you could always surprise me—I won’t mind. Hehe!).
So, there you have it. I admit I was, at first, a bit tricky with this blog post, but I haven’t written anything really good lately and my traffic has been suffering, so I thought I’d give my blog a little boost.
Thanks for stopping by!
