10,000 Unique Visitors Every Day... Over 1 Million A Year
Elise Bauer gets traffic. Here are some notes on her session about what you can do to build your traffic and keep people coming back.
In building blog traffic, there are 3 major pillars: Content, Community, Technology
Content
- Be either useful, entertaining or timely - nailing them all would be a stellar blog, but if you were to pick and execute just one: USEFUL - information for the present, for the future, for the past.
- It's more important to have quality work than to post more frequently.
- Be intelligent and thoughtful when you write.
- Using images and photographs helps to break up the monotony of the page.
- Write well and concise. It's hard to read long, rambling posts online, so refine your work.
- Consider the headlines and post size. There are two ways to write a title 1. With a link in it 2. Smart and witty
- Include writing about polls, top 10 lists, contest, how-to's, controversial topics.
- Be Excellent - write something that you are proud of, work that is good enough to show the most important people in your life: your family.
- Blog about things you care about A LOT. You have to be passionate about your subject.
Community
- LINK!LINK!LINK!
- Leave Comments
- Plan and join online events
- Contribute to the community - connecting with like-minded people out there will grow your online world
Technology
- Site Design - image size and loading time - keep them small
- Font size
- Reduce clutter
- Avoid coloured backgrounds for main text
- Eye-tracking study - focus on upper left corner
- Search bars
- Categories
- Screen resolution
- Cross Platform Usability
- Must Use: Technorati, Delicious, Flickr
- In The Know: People find your blogs through other sites, search engines, tagging tools, bookmarking, feeds
To Sum Up
- Write useful material
- Focus
- Engage your community
- Tune your site for ease in usability so that you can be found
- Promote your feed
- Create a blog of which you are proud