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Building Blog Traffic – Best Practices

Our own blog is a case in point, maintaining and building readership is an important and tough job. In 2006 and early 2007 nearly 40% of all of our website visitors were reading our Web-World Watch blog (our only blog at the time). Then our business grew dramatically and we had some personnel related issues and our own blog got pushed to the bottom of our priority list. We lost major readership and blog traffic by the end of 2007 due to infrequent posting.

Since January 2008, we have been focused on building back what we lost and I have to tell you, it is a tough road to hoe. Here are some of the lessons that we have learned in the process that you may find helpful in regard to building your own blog traffic.

1. Don’t get hung up on Feedburner subscriber stats. Stats here only reflect your blog readership using RSS news feeds which is still only a 7% reflection on the real marketplace. Yes, keep an eye on RSS subscribers, but know that the majority of your traffic will come from readers using browsers so make sure you have website analytics installed to track this larger portion of your readership.

2. Stick with it, to build traffic you really need to post 5 days a week. Yes, I know this is a real grind, but you’ve got to have content for people to read to want to follow and subscribe to your blog.

3. Don’t get disappointed by the lack of comments. People are reading, I know this from experience, but rarely will they leave a comment unless you really hit a nerve, strike a chord, or have a controversial topic.

4. Make sure your content is good. This is crucial, you cannot build readers if you have drivel or derivative posts.

5. Leave comments on other blogs that you are following pointing to your blog. You may not get search engine benefits due to “no follow” tags, but you may point readers to your site. The other benefit is that you will connect with others in your field and keep tabs on what is happening in your industry and you may actually learn something new.

6. Embrace new things on your blog. Add widgets, test applications, use all these tools to not only keep your blog up-to-date, but give you fodder for new posts and new ways to engage readers.

7. Watch your stats and cater to your audience. If you don’t watch your stats, you won’t know what your readers consider important. I have learned that my readers like best practice blog posts and that out of my three blogs, this one Blog-World Watch is my most popular, and so this is the blog I invest the most time in, and use to publish my most interesting posts. Do you know what your blog readers want? Watch your stats to see what posts generated the most traffic and build on your success. What you find may totally surprise you, but use that information as a building block for building blog traffic.

If you have your own best practice approach for building blog traffic, leave a comment (really do it this time as I really want to know). Leave a link, and I’ll make sure to visit your blog, possibly subscribe to follow it, and write about it one of my future posts. Good blogging everyone!

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Choosing and Effective Domain Name

Choosing an effective domain name is an important part of creating your Web visibility plan, but not the main driver of website success.

If your company name or abbreviation is not available, then you may want to consider using keywords in your domain name. Don’t worry about .com or .us, search engines will get visitors to your site regardless of which one you use. But stay away from .net, .info, and .org if you are a commercial business. Here are our tips for selecting an effective domain name.

1. If your company name is not available as a .com consider a .us or try an abbreviated version of your company name. .Org and .net usually are for non-profits and communications firms respectively stay away from these unless they are a good fit for your business type.

2. Choose a name that will grow with your business. When we started our firm name was McCord Web Design. Our main domain selected at that time was www.McCordWeb.com. Now our business name has changed to McCord Web Services and our domain name still fits with our core business. We do own www.McCordWebDesign.com and www.McCordWebServices.com though and you should definitely consider locking up your domain name variations for future use.

3. If you choose multiple keywords for your domain name, separate them with hyphens particularly if you are not doing print advertising. A search engine will read this domain www.MD-real-estate.com differently than www.MDRealEstate.com. The first will actually help you with search engines as your domain when referenced in absolute links throughout your website will build keyword density on your top keyword “MD real estate”. A search engine will read the second domain as just a string and not differentiate the words in the phrase not allowing any keyword density benefits when used.

4. If you are going to use your domain frequently in print advertising stick with something short and with a .com ending. Try not to do hyphens or confuse others by having a .net, .info ending etc when your main domain .com is taken. You run the risk of driving traffic to the wrong website; the one that holds your name but with a .com ending as reader will type in a .com usually without thinking.

5. Short is better! I’ve seen really long domain names, and these are fraught with problems as they can be misspelled any number of ways. Choose something that reflects your business. We have one client named H & R Mortgage choose www.helpful-mortgage.us as her domain when all other variations of her name were not available. This domain is a very workable example of what to do when what you want is not available.

6. Don’t freak out if your domain in .com is not available. There are so few .coms left that .us for American companies is totally okay. Remember, search engines will list your website by organic placement and all a reader does is click the link to get to you, so your domain name really becomes crucial for print advertising and as a keyword strategy in some cases.

These are just a few tips about choosing an effective domain name, but remember it is the content on your website that gets you placement and traffic not what domain name you actually choose.