June 5th, 2006
How To Be A Better Blogger - My Thoughts
The Blog Herald recently published a guest post by Alex Morganis on how to be a better blogger. Basically, Alex touches on three main aspects: Traffic, content and design - most of which are targeted at beginner bloggers (who I believe require tried, tested and working advice).
As a result, I must take this opportunity to chime in against one suggestion that I feel strongly against: Using blog traffic exchanges as a key traffic-improving tool. Alex suggests using blog traffic exchanges such as BlogExplosion and BlogMad, which time and time again have been proven to provide only “empty traffic” - visitors that have little incentive to actually read what you’re writing or to return to your blog.
Moreover, the time spent trying to rack up points at such traffic exchanges reduces substantially the time you have left to actually produce content or utilise more appropriate methods to increase traffic to your blog.
But I’m not going to elaborate any further because there’s already a post over at xavodim.com that not only looks at this problem, but actually provides more concrete advice on improving your traffic levels, e.g. keyword optimization, posting to social bookmarking sites, etc.
Need even more tips? Check out one of Darren Rowse’s older, but still relevant, posts on increasing traffic. Of course, you could just stop by at Seth Godin’s blog for a very recent post containing 56 tips on getting more traffic.
Edit: There’s a ridiculously excellently-timed post (published today) on traffic generation programs like BlogExplosion and why you shouldn’t use them over at ProBlogger.
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3 Comments
June 6th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
The day I published that post, was the day that ProBlogger came out with that article about how services such as BlogExplosion and BlogMad aren’t worth it. As you said, this was aimed at people who are just getting into blogging. Sometimes, these services can help get genuine visitors. I had a feeling that my thoughts would cause some stir amoung the blogosphere. Thank you for your thoughts on this matter, I’ll take that into account if I write another post like this. Thanks!
June 9th, 2006 at 5:41 am
Yep, I understand your sentiments, but while they could get some genuine visitors, the effort is very well not worth it, and could be channeled towards more productive tasks.
Thanks for stopping by even though you’re on blogging vacation.
August 3rd, 2006 at 9:11 am
[…] Edit: Yet again, Darren Rowse at ProBlogger amazes me with his prescience. He has just published a post on reinventing your blog, where he describes a redesign + new features as ways to do so. Only a couple of months back, he published what I called a “ridiculously excellently-timed post”. […]
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