The Dos And Don’ts For Driving Traffic To A New Website

I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last couple of weeks mainly via email on how to increase website traffic, which is one of the reasons I started the Connected Internet Forum this week as I wanted to try and capture these conversations and include more people in the discussions.

In my view there are certain actions and steps that can be taken for driving traffic to a website, which are only useful or worthwhile at certain stages in its life cycle. For example, the benefits for a larger and more established site which already has a significant number of links from participating in a link exchange program, will be minimal.

Over, the last year or so, I’ve managed to turn this site into a reasonably trafficked site. Below I’ve listed what I consider to be The Dos and Don’ts For Driving Traffic To a New Website, where the payback from certain actions will be greater than for larger sites.

• Do Submit Articles To Aggregators: Even though you may be small and no-one is reading your site, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have anything interesting to say. Remember that even the big uberblogs were in the same boat as you at some point in time

If you do write something that you think is interesting, not just a standard post but one of your better efforts, then do submit it Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Furl, Spurl etc. Even if you don’t make it onto the homepages or the most popular lists, it will bring in valuable incremental traffic, and one of those readers may be enough to take your site to the next level if they are from a bigger site and they add your site to their ‘one to watch’ list

• Do Email Big Bloggers: Again, don’t be shy or afraid of their online ‘celebrity’ status. If you’ve made a post that you think they may find interesting then email them with a summary and a link – otherwise they might never see it.
  Even if they don’t link to the actual post, they may add you to their feed list which could pay dividends in the future. Or they may even just leave a comment, whcih in itself can be valuable as it will ‘vouch’ for your site to other readers

• Don’t Use A Naff Template: JohnTP summarises this up the best:

A good design won’t bring you traffic but it will get your visitors to stay longer. No one will stay on your blog too long if the layout or navigation annoys them…..The goal is to have a unique blog that stands out from all other blogs (making your visitors want to come back again and again)

Your design should allow your visitors to access the main pages of your blog and to contact you easily…..The more a reader knows about you, the more they trust your content

• Do Ask For Advice: Don’t be bashful about asking bigger bloggers for advice. I admit I was lucky when I started out as I had both Blogware (I moved fro Blogware to WordPress about 6 months ago) and Typepad ‘grooming’ me into a blogger, as they both wanted me to sign a deal with them. But, I also got some valuable advice from other people like Darren Rowse via email that paid big dividends

• Don’t Waste Your Time With Link Exchanges: Really, I hear you say? Well, when you are small and you have no or a low Page Rank, no one with any real clout i.e. a site with a high PR is going to link to you, and there is no point in my view in exchanging links with other low PR sites. If you think you can get a large site to link to you, then go for it, but you’ll probably be wasting your time

• Do Write Comments – Lots of Them: There is no point expecting people to read your blog, if you don’t show that you read theirs. Try and become a regular commentator on both large and similar sized blogs. Don’t just write pointless ‘thanks for a lovely post….’ or, ‘isn’t the weather nice where you are …’ crap comments.Try and write something insightful so that the author and also other readers notice your comments. It goes without saying always leave your URL so they can go and see who the new cool kid on the block is

• Do Make Buddies – There’s Safety In Numbers: I know I said don’t waste time making link exchanges, but this is different. Find other sites like yours that you think could become ’someone’ in the future and work together to grow. Things you can do to support each other is to help get converstations going by leaving lots of comments on their blogs. Or, contact your buddies when you’ve made a good post so that they can link to you. Share tips, leads, plugins, Wordpress themes etc – anything you discover on your blogging journey.
• I did this when Connected Internet was still finding its legs. I located my buddies via the BlogTopSites directories. I picked the blogs that were of a similar size to me or bigger and asked them if they wanted to partner. Two of those partnerships are still going today (gHacks and FosFor) and those sites have grown, (particularly FosFor!) at the same time as my site

• Don’t Waste Time With Blog Directories: Most blog directories are a total waste of time. Don’t waste your time adding your site to hundreds of directories – most of them are just in existence as traffic traps, and don’t actually send much traffic back to you. Just add your feed to feedburner who will then ping all the worthwhile aggregators with their pingshot service whenever you make a new post

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