No one blogs without wanting to be read by other people, but attracting visitors to your site can be a long and difficult process on your own. Getting links from other bloggers and social media sites are two ways to increase traffic, both of which rely on action by other people for them to be successful at bringing new visitors in.
Keep that in mind the next time you are visiting a new blog and think about one of these ways you can help them without them even asking.
Link to their post
Link to one of their blog posts on your own site. One of the ways you can easily send some link love to other bloggers each week is to post a weekly link roundup on your website.
Write a counter point to their blog post
Everyone has an opinion and not every opinion is the same. If you have read an interesting blog post but have a contrary view of the topic then write that up as a blog post and link back to their post. You’ll send new traffic their way as your own readers click through to read the blog post that you are rebutting.
Expand on their blog post
You don’t need to disagree with someone to link to their blog post. Sometimes you’ll read a great post on a topic that you agree with but you think can be expanded on further. Write your own blog post that dives into more detail and link to the other blogger.
Twitter one of their posts
Twitter is growing every day and chances are that if you’ve been using it for even a little while you’ve built up a decent number of followers. By Tweeting links to blog posts you found interesting your followers will visit and help boost traffic to their blog. If the post is interesting enough your followers might reTweet it to their own followers, sending even more traffic to the post and maybe even going viral.
Comment on their post
Bloggers love to see comments on their posts, even just brief ones to say “thanks” or “good post”. You can really make a blogger’s day by leaving the first comment on a post.
Submit or vote for their post on social media sites
This applies to any social media site, but I’ll specifically mention StumbleUpon here. Your first thought might be “why not Digg?”. Well you could certainly submit or vote on Digg, but my experience is that drawing traffic from Digg goes one of two ways – either it fails completely or it goes very well and the resulting traffic spike kills your server, with most visitors either giving up due to slow site performance and then once your link has dropped off the front page the traffic evaporates. New bloggers rarely have the sort of hosting that can cope with that kind of traffic spike.
StumbleUpon tends to be a more gentle flow of visitors, and lasts a lot longer than Digg. Instead of thousands in one day you receive thousands over several days or weeks, which is much more manageable and less likely to strain your web hosting to the point that visitors can’t load the site.
About Paul Cunningham
Hi Paul,
Blogging is much more fun as a community rather than a competition and I think this post does a great job of encouraging the community mentality.
I particularly like the weekly link roundup idea. Due to time constraints, I’ve had to scale down to three larger articles a week and this is a great way to save some time, contribute to the blogging community, and maintain posting continuity. It’s bound to incur some reciprocation as well!
I’m with Vin. Community’s where it’s at! Nice one Paul.
Good idea, Paul.