CyberNirvana

Last Friday (2nd May) was a special day...My blog had the highest number of visitors for a day since I began on Blogger in February 2007. The number of hits for that day was 206 (compared to the previous highest number 157 back in June 2007).

I think two key methods have been instrumental in driving traffic to my blog: promotion via social bookmarks and commenting on other blogs.

I shall describe each method in detail and how to manage them effectively to maximise exposure to your blog.

Social Bookmarking

No question about it, this is a must tool to master if you want to spread the word about your blog. A number of sites should be on top of your list like Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon. There are countless of others but I have not had the chance to assess their popularity. There are 2 tools which I use to maximise the benefit of social bookmarking:

The Social Media extension for Firefox: while browsing a web page, using either Manual or Automatic settings, it will show you which social news sites the story has been submitted to and if they have been submitted it will show you how many votes they have received. If the web page has not been submitted, here is your chance to promote it via your blog!

Social Poster and/or Socialmarker: two excellent products which submit stories to multiple social bookmarks. These tools will save you a lot of time and avoid visiting each social sites to promote your content.

Comment on other Blogs

This method will only be effective once you have gathered some 'momentum' on your blog, i.e. you have plenty of good and interesting stories to share with the rest of the world. The necessary steps are:

1. First, you should find blogs which discuss similar topics to your blog (try Google or a Blog directory). You should also try to ensure that the blogs are very popular (check its RSS feed reader stats).

2. Monitor those blogs via an effective RSS reader. Netvibes has been great for me as I can monitor a dozen of blog feeds on a single page.

3. Once you see a blog story which covers a topic covered by your blog post, just go straight there and participate via its comment section, sharing your findings/thoughts/links/opinion.

There are hundreds of other ways to drive traffic (content, style, etc) but these 2 tips have been very valuable for me.

|