The Evolving Internet Marketer

Build Traffic to Your Blog with Blog Directory Submissions

Building relevant traffic for our blog is often the biggest challenge we face. One great way to generate links and traffic is to register your blog with popular blog directories.

WebsiteMagazine.com recently published a list of 30 popular blog directories. I’ve taken this list and turned it into a blog submission tracking spreadsheet that you can download and use to track your efforts in submitting your blog to the relevant blog directories on the list.

30 Popular Blog Directories

Use this list to generate additional traffic for your blog by

• Visiting each of these directories and
• Registering and claiming your blog.

Then use this document to track your efforts and any login information and other notes related to your submission. Keep in mind that not all directories are appropriate for all blogs. Some serve special niches which may not be appropriate for the focus of your blog. Also, check within your own industry to see if there are industry specific directories where you’ll want to pursue a listing for your blog.  

Many blog platforms provide the capability to “ping” or notify popular blog catalogues when you create new posts but a more hands-on effort on your part will ensure that you create a more targeted, focused listing that will pay off in more targeted, focused traffic to your blog.

The Death Knell for Blogging?

They sucked me right in on this one, didn’t they?

Build Site Traffic by Blogging

One of the best ways to build traffic to your web site continues to be with a consistently published, compelling blog. I was forced to lay off blogging for over a month due to circumstances I couldn’t control. The upshot, my site’s traffic tanked. After a couple of weeks back in the blogging saddle my traffic, over the previous, non-blogging period, increased by almost 1600%. Yeah, I know what your thinking, “he went from 1 to 4 readers, big deal.” Ha ha.

Blogging Builds Website Traffic – The Proof is in the Google Analytics Pudding

Okay, enough about me, the following chart illustrates the effect blogging is having in building website traffic for a client who I recently worked with to setup a Wordpress blog. She’s still working to find the right editorial mix and she’s not blogging enough but the proof is irrefutable that when she blogs, her traffic soars. You’ll notice that her traffic numbers aren’t huge but then again her site sat virtually stagnant for a number of years with little or no search engine optimization.

Is a 510% Increase in Website Traffic Significant? Doh!

The chart above compares the current month with the previous month just to more graphically illustrate the spike that posting to her blog had on daily traffic versus a ‘regular’, non-posting day. In general she saw a 380% increase in site visits on the days she blogged and a 359% increase in page views. When you subtract her blog posting days from the equation, the numbers are even more dramatic with her site traffic showing an increase in visits of 560% and 510% in page views!

Adding Social Media to the Mix

Our next step is to increase her overall social media marketing effectiveness by integrating her social networking presence on sites like LinkedIn and Twitter with the content she produces on these sites. By bringing her Twitter feed into her blog, for example, and feeding her blog content through her LinkedIn profile her traffic will increase that much more.

The Ripple Effect of Social Media

The beauty of an integrated social media marketing approach is that you can create these outgoing content ripples that expand well beyond your content’s original entry point.

The truth is that this site doesn’t have a lot of traffic … yet. But, it has about 3 times the amount it did before the site’s owner began blogging. As we integrate the website’s content with that generated throughout her social network and increase the frequency of publication, her traffic will increase at an exponential rate. The ripple effect will kick in and the same amount of effort will result in an ever-widening scope of distribution; and influence.

Lessons Learned

The web, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In the case of a website that vacuum translates to stale content and static websites. The easiest way to correct this is to establish and regularly contribute to a blog. And, while your at it, start posting to Twitter and claim your space on LinkedIn, MySpace, Naymz and other relevant social networking sites.

Need help? Call or email me. That’s what I do. 303.882.8252. tom.gray @ gemsolv.com.

What’s Your Experience?

Leave a comment about your success, or lack thereof, in the blogosphere or social media space. Don’t just stand there. Join the conversation!

Keep Your Content On Topic

A post by Janine Popick, CEO at Vertical Response, on 10 things you should have on your marketing to-do list for 2008 reminded me of the importance of focus when blogging, sending your email newsletter (ezine) or any other customer-focused communications.

Her first item says,

1. Use a Calendar – iGoogle has a great one where you can use alerts to remind you to write your copy and send your communications. Bonus? You can also share it with others so that they know exactly when you’re planning to launch.

I’ll amend Calendar to Editorial Calendar. Unless you write current events types of blogs or ezines then you should develop a publication plan that details what you’ll write on, when and how often. The narrower you can focus your communications the easier it will be to target the interests and needs of your most important customers. You’ll also have an easier time attracting the attention of search engines for the areas in which you have the greatest expertise (assuming that those are what you’re writing on). What a vicious circle, eh? Better search engine placement = more customers. Not a bad pay-off for introducing a little discipline into your communications.

Use analytics to track the response to your topics and fine tune your message based upon the attention paid by your visitors and subscribers. Services like Vertical Response for email communications and Google Analytics for web site visitor analysis can be invaluable in helping you determine what matters – and what doesn’t – to the audience your trying to reach.

Sizing Up the Blogosphere or “How Big is It?

I originally reported the following data on the growth of the blogosphere as part of a post I was writing about a year and 1/2 ago. As sometimes happens, it got stuck in draft world and I never completed it. A couple of items recently came to my attention that motivated me to revisit this…

The first was the report I cited yesterday from businessandblogging.com that spoke of the million small business blogs out there and the tremendous, cost effective, marketing opportunities blogs provided for small business (referencing a New York Times article on the topic.

The second was my curiosity about how big the blogosphere has become. I zipped over to Technorati to take a peek at the number of blogs they’re tracking:

Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

…

The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.

Compare this to the data below from April 2006 when Technorati reported tracking over 35 million blogs with 75,000 new blogs created each day. So just in the last 20 months we’ve seen an 321% in the number of blogs tracked and 233% in daily postings.

(They say baseball is awash in steroids. I think that the blogosphere is juicing big time! How soon before Congress calls hearings to investigate the real story?

The blogosphere, social media, podcasting, vidcasting,/YouTube … all interconnected channels for business of all size to get the message out. In this wired and wireless, information-flying-all-over-the-place, low cost and no cost of production world it’s inexcusable not to be using any or all of the above to promote your message!

My Original Post

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

Blogging continues to move into the mainstream as a.) more folks blog and b.) more folks read blogs. According to a phone survey of over 7,000 people conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project…

• About 57 million Americans are reading blogs, up from around 39 million in 2004.
• 12 million Americans write blogs up from 8 million in 2004. As an aside, Technorati reports that they are tracking over 35 million blogs and that over 19 million blogs continue to be posted to 3 months after creation. Further they state that 75,000 new blogs are created every day and the blogosphere continues to double every 6 months (from State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth)
• 84% of bloggers are under 49 and 54% are under 30. They tend to be avid consumers and heavy internet users.
• Bloggers are passionate about what they write. Only 7% state that their principal goal is to make money from their blogs. Most blog to document & share their personal experiences while a substantial percentage use their blogs as a teaching tool…

Access Pew’s Reports on Blogging…

A Million Small Business Bloggers Can’t Be Wrong

Not according to Liz Fuller at BusinessandBlogging.com in a recent post citing a New York Times article on the topic (Blogging’s a Low-Cost High Return Marketing Tool). I like the spin Liz put on it…

Blog! (or else!)

I often advise my clients – or anyone considering starting a blog – that they need to blog consistently and regularly if they hope to attract and retain an audience. After all, how quickly would you stop checking your driveway or front porch every morning if your newspaper only showed up sporadically. That’s why I had to chuckle when I saw this in my morning newspaper (yeah, I read the comics first; they’re the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine – aka, news – do down):

So how often should you blog? The top bloggers may post dozens of times a day. For a business blog, the rule of thumb I recommend is to post at least 3 times weekly.