No matter whether you have 1 reader or 10,000 it’s always good to find more, and although only time will tell if my methods work, there’s a lot you can do to promote your blog.

The following are all free, easy to do and a good way to help other bloggers & to help yourself. Please note I’m not suggesting link exchange for the sake of it - but if you genuinely like a blog, here’s how you can help publicise it, and hopefully someone will do the same for you.

Technorati: These guys are currently tracking over 62 million blogs-yours may be one of them. Sign up & claim your blog-this will enable you to view some interesting stats about your blog, such as who is linking to you & what they’re saying. You can also find other people’s blogs you like and ‘Favorite’ them. Do that, they can then check you out & maybe ‘favorite’ your blog.

StumbleUpon: A little toolbar that can be added to Internet Explorer or Firefox. Sign up for a free account, check some boxes on your interests and click stumble. This will then take you to random sites & give you the chance to rate them with a simple Thumbs Up/Down. StumbleUpon then learns your preferences & refines it’s suggestions. A great way to visit sites you’d never find in 100 years of searching, and a good source of blog material. Stumble your favourite blogs & get them more traffic, and someone may stumble yours!

Bestest Blog of All-Time: A quite stunning effort by one blogger, Bobby Griffin, to enable everyone to get some traffic to their site. More than a simple link exchange, his addition of the ‘Random Blog Button’ moves this up to being like StumbleUpon but for blogs. I have only done the free link exchange for now, and have already received dozens of hits via the random button. I intend to donate (totally optional) in the new year which should increase the chances of more hits. Essential.

del.icio.us: You’ve probably seen ‘add to del.icio.us tags’ on many sites & wondered what they are. Well, in short, it’s a way of storing your bookmarks of all your favourite sites online, so you can access them from any computer. But, the kicker is that these bookmarks can be made public & searchable. So, other people with a similar interest in one of your bookmarks can find your list, and then follow another link away, or even ‘favourite you’ so they can view your future bookmarks. An excellent way to promote the sites you like.

eXlinks.net: I don’t even know what this is yet. According to the buzz & Digg it’s aiming to be a new concept in traffic exchange/social networking/bookmarking/link exchange. It’s not even in beta yet, but if you’re quick you can click on the link below and sign up which will get your blog entered into the beta when released. A head start on everyone else?

I hope these are of some use, no doubt there’s plenty more. If you know of some useful ones, why not put them in a comment, or better yet write a short article-see the ‘How To Contribute’ link at the top left.
A version of this article first appeared on my Thermal blog.

4 users commented in " Increase Your Blog Traffic "

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in December 14th, 2006 at 4:11 pm

Why you rampant little capitalist, you. The site looks good. I’ll be putting a link up, on both Letters and Odder Blog. I think my readers could benefit from your expertise.
I’m going to be posting my Blogger vs RSS feed woes later today at the Experiment.

Chris Lodge said,
in December 15th, 2006 at 10:12 am

You are one of my inspirations Bob,….seriously.

I will be after some contributions from you!

:-)

in January 9th, 2007 at 9:49 pm

I’ve used technorati and have yet to receive a significant amount of visitors from it. But stumbleupon on the other hand drive 50 percent of my blogs traffic. I also use Digg and Reddit as well as Netscape. Have you tried any of those?

in January 9th, 2007 at 10:24 pm

Technorati has given me a surprising amount of traffic - couldn’t say why.

I’ve started with Digg & Redditt, without trying too hard, but I already think Blog-Buzz is better :-)

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