A little while ago I wrote about how you can get your site/blog indexed in Google in a short period of time.  However, getting your site indexed is not going to drive traffic to your blog (or your website for that matter).  Driving traffic obviously takes time and patience.  So what can you do to drive traffic to your blog?

Comment on other posts related to your industry

If you have a blog that deals with sports cars then find other people that talk about sports cars and comment on their posts.  It doesn’r hurt to branch out slightly to related industries as well, for example car parts, car accessories either.

Try to get syndicated

When I write a post it immediately gets sent to Marketing.alltop.com, Socialmedia.alltop,com, and social media today.  That’s 3 different places that my post appears in addition to appearing on my blog.  This helps increase your reach.

Put the URL in your email signature and profiles

I have my blog URL in my email signature.  I also have a link going to my blog from my facebook profile, linkedin page, twitter account, etc.  Make sure that you make it easy for people to discover your blog.

Use Digg and Stumbleupon

Use these tools judiciously but do use them.  Every now and then when I think I have written a solid quality post about an interesting topic I will “stumble” it and post it/and share it on digg.

Share your posts

Whenever I write a post I make sure to distributed it to my twitter followers and facebook friends, that way people that are connected to me will have an easy way of discovering my blog.

Write guest posts

No guest post is too small or too big.  If you are given the opportunity to write on someone else’s blog then do it.  Don’t be scared to ask to write guest posts either.  In addition to writing my own blog I also write on Brian Solis’s Bubblicious blog and for the Blog World Expo Blog.  Writing guest posts is one of the best ways to get your name out there.  Something is better than nothing so get out there and write where you can.

Write quality and engaging content

This is undoubtedly one of the most important things you can do to drive traffic to your blog.  Write something you are passionate about and use your voice when you do it.  In a nutshell my passion is people and ideas and that is what I try to write about (marketing, social media, etc, all fall under that general category).

Network online and offline

Try to maintain an active online and offline presence.  I try to attend as many events as I can.  These events range from tweetups, to technology get togethers, to conferences, to parties.  Try to get out there and talk to people.  Share your ideas and share your passions whenever you can.

Write Often

As many of you know, I try to write at least once a day, and sometimes more.  People like to see new and fresh content.  If you start off writing a blog post once a week then chances are that people are not going to “stick” to your site.  Try to write as often as you can to keep your readers interested and engaged.

Respond to comments

I respond to every single comment and e-mail I get, even if it’s just a thank you.  Don’t be worried if your blog doesn’t get that many comments either.  Mashable for example has over 1 millions unique readers a month, yet the comments are sparce at best.  Conversation don’t  just happen on blogs, so just because you don’t see comments doesn’t mean people aren’t talking about what you wrote.

RSS feeds

Make it easy for your readers to RSS feed your content.  I have a link at the end of all of my posts that let’s you receive my posts in the RSS feed platform of your choice.  I also have that giant orange RSS feed symbol at the top right of my page.  Oftentimes people just read the content straight from their RSS reader without even visiting my site, it’s a convenience.  Either way, they are reading what I write, and that’s what counts.

I really hope you find the above tips useful, please feel free to email me with any questions or comments, my email can be found on the about page.  Do you have any other tips you would recommend?  Did I miss any?

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Since Twitter is growing in popularity and I am an active twitter user, I thought I would put together a quick list of twitter tips to help make sure that your twitter experience is pleasant and beneficial to both you and your followers.

1. Don’t make your background look like some sort of advertisement, it turns people off
2. Upload a photo of yourself, people love to know who they are chatting with
3. Follow people YOU think are interesting, don’t just follow folks because everyone else is
4. Try to post regularly to make sure that people know you have an active presence (I post around 10-20+ times a day)
5. Try to not use twitter as your own personal “this is what I’m doing” list.  Do you think your followers want to read about your breakfast cereal? Check out the twitter whore to see what I mean
6. Try to add value to the conversation by sharing links or things of interest.  For example, if folks are twittering about SEO try sending them a link to a post that describes how to measure online SEO competition.
7. Mix in SOME personal information so that people know you are a human being and not just an online merchant pushing links, don’t go overboard (see #5), find a balance, there is no exact number here.
8. Thank people when they follow you on twitter with a direct message, I try to thank every single new twitter follower I get.
9. Start conversations with the ‘@’ command, don’t just wait for people to talk to you.  If something is going on in your industry don’t be scared to ask for opinions and feedback.
10. Make sure to respond to people that ‘@’ or direct message you, quite frankly this is just a matter of showing respect, if people are taking the time to message you, respond
11. Don’t worry about how many twitter followers you have, if you become an active participant you will see your followers increase.
12. Remove people you follow if they don’t bring any value to you or if you just don’t find them interesting
13. Don’t spam anyone with anything
14. Promote your twitter name, I have a link to my twitter profile in my email signature, on my business cards, and at the end of all of my posts.  Don’t be afraid to mention twitter offline either, I have met many people offline that I was already connected with online, it’s great!
15. Use twitter search to see who is talking about you and what they are saying.  You can only see your replies in twitter if someone starts off a tweet with ‘@(your twitter name)’ but sometimes people use ‘@’ in the middle of their tweet (i.e. “thanks to @jacobm” as opposed to “@jacobm thanks”), so when you use twitter search, use this command “to:(your twitter name)” to help find tweets that contain your name, just not at the beginning.
16. If you see that people are talking about you (good or bad) on twitter search, then join in the conversation!
17. Take advantage of the many twitter mashups out there to help you engage in conversations and get information
18. Try to keep the amount of followers to something manageable, (currently I’m following 115 people) when you start to follow too many people the stream goes by too fast and you miss a lot of what is going on.  Then again if you happen to think that 10,000 people on twitter are interesting and you want to follow them, then go for it.  Check out what type of twitter follower you are for some tips.
19. Don’t stalk or harass people on twitter, if someone ignores you, just let it go.  The same goes for you, if people are stalking or harassing you, you can block them on twitter.
20. Most importantly have fun and try to build relationships, we’re all people here (except for the damn bots)

These tips have helped me during the course of my twitter usage.  Keep in mind that these aren’t rules and you don’t have to follow them, they are just a few tips and ideas that I have found helpful.

I Hope you found the above tips useful, did I miss any?

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Yesterday I downloaded the new Disqus plugin for wordpress, everything was fine, comments were showing up and I was happy.  My blog is syndicated on a few places, alltop.com being one of them.  I checked alltop.com to see where my blog was ranking and then realized that it was nowhere to be found.  I e-mailed Guy Kawasaki and he explained that my RSS feed was no longer valid.  Now I should point out that I’m not a very technical person so when these bugs come up, it’s actually quite hard to deal with them.  I  went to http://feedvalidator.org several times and tried to figure out what the possible problem could be.  To be honest I had no idea what I was looking for. This is the error I was receiving:

Underneath one of the errors I saw the word “disqus,” so I took a chance and went to remove the Disqus wordpress plugin, shortly afterwards the problem was fixed.  I’m not saying this is the only possible solution but if you are using feedburner and disqus, you might experience a similar issue and the disqus plugin is the likely culprit.

Hope disqus already knows about this issue and is working to fix it.  If you know of an alternative fix that let’s you use the disqus plugin I would like to hear about it!

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Advertising is obviously a great revenue source for successful blog such as Marketing Pilgrim by Andy Beal.  However, if you are going to advertise on your blog you should probably consider the types of advertisements that are going to be shown.  Andy Beal has a good reputation as being a good online marketer, he as active speaker at conferences, has his own clients, and developer his own reputation management software (in addition to writing a book).  Now, you would think that someone in Andy’s position would be a bit more prudent in his blog advertisements.  I say this because on the Marketing Pilgrim page there is an add promoting text link brokers, which is a service that let’s you buy links in hopes of increase your search engine rankings artificially.

According to Google paid linking is a violation of their terms:

“Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file”

Paid linking is an artificial way to increase your page rankings.  Google does allow paid links for advertising but those links must be designed in a way such that no page rank is passes from them, this means that your search engine rankings WILL NOT be artificially inflated.  The ad on Andy Beal’s site blatantly suggests and offers paid links to help increase search engine rankings.  As a marketing professional Andy should not be showing adds that make false claims to the users or ads that violate Google’s terms of service.  Showing ads such as these decrease Andy’s credibility and now I’m beginning to wonder if Andy’s rankings have been inflated artificially with the use of paid links.

Most people that use the paid link services have no idea how Google calculates quality, most people have no idea how link value is passed, and most people have no idea how true SEO works.  As someone who has been involved with SEO for several years I can say that most SEOs out there don’t even have a clue about SEO works, but this is a topic for another day.

Andy, as a fellow marketer I think it would be wise for you to remove that advertisement, it’s just not something that a marketing professional such as yourself should be touting on your site.  Paid linking has harsh penalties when discovered.

What do you think?  Should Andy remove the paid link add from his site?

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The tech industry has been abuzz as of late, thanks to Yahoo’s announcement of BOSS a.k.a. Build Your Own Search Service.  The catch is that the custom search engines have to be built on top of the current Yahoo system.  The way it works is that you can configure and manipulate the way the Yahoo search engine returns information.  Still, it is a very interesting and bold move by Yahoo.  We all know about the never ending battle between the search engines, perhaps this will give Yahoo a bit more of a lift in terms of traffic and hopefully reputation and revenue.

The BOSS system is free to use, however the successful partners of BOSS, meaning the search engines that will actually work and be used, will have to show ads that will generate revenue for Yahoo.  Yahoo stands to make a pretty penny off of this move if all goes well and yes, they will share some of that revenue back with the search engine creators.

Nobody really knows what is going to happen, there are of course limitation in using BOSS, Yahoo is  obviously not going to completely open their search engine doors, but still BOSS should allow for a much better understandin of how search engines work.  I am actually more curious to see what types of engines will be created, it’s about time we get something new The technical SEOs out there (I think only 1 exists in the world, and I know who he is!) may want to play around with BOSS and use it as a testing environment.

Very interesting move from Yahoo, I wonder if Google will eventually do something similar.  If you want more information about BOSS, check out the in depth CNET review.

Do you think Yahoo is making a good move with BOSS?  Why or why not?

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