You can’t just stay at your own blog all the time. You have to go out and be social. Someone who just blogs and waits for the traffic to come is like the single guy or gal who spends all their time at home and then wonders why they don’t get any dates. You have to get out there!
Getting out and being social will bring many visitors to your blog. Instead of just relying on the search engines to bring you traffic, you are going out and getting your own traffic – and this traffic is the best kind, because it consists of people who already “know” you from the social site and are curious about you.
With a new blog, it often takes time to get search engine traffic anyway, so social traffic may be all you will get for a while.
Here are some of the things you can do to be social:
Comment On Other Blogs
Everyone tells you to do this – because it works. There are two strategies for commenting on other blogs, and you should follow both of them. But please only comment when you have something worthwhile to say. Otherwise you are spamming, and it will not help you any. Spam or
worthless comments will just hurt you. People will think less of you and it will damage your brand.
Strategy #1: Comment on popular blogs. This is good for getting a lot of people to see your comments. It is best if you are one of the first commenters, because people don’t read all the comments on a post.
Strategy #2: Comment on less popular blogs. If a blog does not have a lot of comments already, then your comment will certainly get the attention of the blogger. Maybe they will then visit your blog and comment on yours. Also, that blog may not have a lot of readers, but chances are, the readers it does have will read it thoroughly and will notice your comment. Some of them may stop by to visit your blog as well. This works especially well if you become a regular commenter on the blog.
Link Out To Other Blogs
It will do your blog good to link out to other blogs. First of all, it is a myth that this will hurt your Page Rank somehow. Actually, linking to relevant blogs will help you in the search engine rankings. Linking to other blogs also gets their attention, especially if you send them some traffic.
Be sure to have WordPress set up to send automatic trackbacks to any blogs that you link to (if you have a WordPress blog). You do this by checking the box that says “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article” under the “Discussion” tab under “Options”. If your blog is on
a platform other than WordPress, investigate how to send a trackback.
If the blog you are linking to has trackbacks enabled, this will place a link to your blog in their trackback or comments section. You may get some traffic from this, from curious people who click to see what you are saying.
The blogger will notice too, and bloggers are always curious what people are saying about them. They appreciate the link too. So they will be likely to link to one of your posts when the opportunity comes up. They might even add you to their blogroll.
Besides all these benefits, linking out to other blogs helps your readers to discover other valuable sites. They will appreciate this and will come back for more.
Linking to other sites shows confidence. You are not afraid to lose your readers. You are confident that they will come back. Your content is valuable and you link to other valuable blogs, so you become an important resource for your readers.
Join Social Networking Sites
There are a lot of social networking sites that you could join. You might not have time to join all of them. If you try, you could spread yourself too thin.
Try to join two or three of them, and use them extensively. It is better to become well-known on a few of them than to spread your efforts among too many of them, and end up not being well-known anywhere.
The most important site to join is Stumbleupon. Be sure to join it and become an active stumbler. Then pick one or two others to join (more, if you have time). You might want to pick one that just caters to your particular niche.
