How to popularize a blog?

Blogging! We blog because we want to write what we want, and let others see!



Yes, we write whatever we want, but how do we attract more people or traffic to our blog? Here are a few simple steps for your blog to be a tad more popular.





How to Increase Traffic

1. Have a good blog title and post title.

A good blog title can consist of the following:

- Easy to remember.

- Relevant to the topic you're going to write.

- A theme or category for the whole blog including the posts and layout.



Post titles should consist of the following:

- Start most titles with How to... or Why... if it's an instruction or a snippet to help others.





2. Write compelling content.

Do not create a totally personal blog or it will not attract any traffic at all as many people in the net have no interest in viewing your personal life except your friends and family.



Write something that has benefits to other readers, when they search for ways to overcome their problems, your posts might be indexed in the search. Write something good, something original and make sure you have correct grammar and spelling for better viewing. Usage of bombastic/rhetoric words can be a way of attracting the reader's attention, while usage of casual words can be more easily comprehended by most readers. Your choice.





3. Submit sites to search engines.

By default, Blogger automatically submits your site to Google if you allow it to. You can go to Yahoo! or Ask.com as well as many other popular sites with search engines to submit your website. Your site will be indexed in a few days, weeks or maybe months. Websites such as Google or Yahoo! will prompt you to add their Crawler codes in your HTML coding. Crawlers are little robots which access and collect information from your site to be indexed. You could do this by selecting the META Verification method when it asks you, and just copy and paste the code into the HTML field.





4. Backlinking.

You could ask your friends to link you in their blogs. This increases your blog/page rank and is more likely to be indexed when searched in most search engines. The more backlinks you have to your blog, the better. Speaking about that, I have not linked my friends because I haven't decided what other widgets to add. I'll add up the links soon.





5. Swapping your blog titles with post titles.

By default, the titles of your post pages in your blog appears to be like this.



YourBlogName: PostTitle



This is not as good because the main article's title is at the back, which is not likely to be indexed easily when lined up with other sites which have the keywords in the title right away. Look at the titles in my blog, they're swapped. To do so, just edit your HTML coding.



Find the title code and replace it with the following code.





<b:if cond="'data:blog.pageType == 'item'"> <title><data:blog.pagename/> | <data:blog.title/></title> <b:else/> <title><data:blog.pagetitle/></title> </b:if>





Publish your blog and the changes have been made!





6. Do not include too many advertisements in blog.

Avoid including pop-up advertisements or those that block part of your screen unless you click Close. Many users do not like those type of advertisements and it is best that you put the advertisement to one side in your blog rather than all over the place. A neat layout with proper sections for advertisements will increase readability and makes your blog look better.



Note: Having advertisements or not does not influence most of the traffic in your blog, but just be sure not to over-do it.





7. Answer questions with your blog link.

Many question sites such as Yahoo! Answers have people asking around for help. If your blog has a related content, answer the question with your blog link in it. This will allow the asker to visit your blog for clearer information as well as other users who would like to know when they read the question in that site. This also helps in the indexing as some of the questions are found in the Yahoo! Answers directory.





8. Ping your blog to build ranking.

A blog ping is just a small code being sent to a server with your blog name and URL in it. The more you have, the better your blog ranking would be. Add ping to sites such as Technorati, Google Blogsearch, Blogstreet and so on. It is simple and direct, and will only take minutes.





9. Updates and notices.

Be sure to update your blog frequently, at least once a week. Readers tend to go to other sites when they're too tired to await updates from your blog. Frequent updates will keep readers coming back for more information they would like to discover.





10. RSS Feeds

RSS or Atom does help. Encourage readers to subscribe to your feed. Feeds allow readers to receive immediate updates from your blog and they could view it easily anytime! Put the RSS icon in a more obvious place so readers could click with ease. Feeds are good because they work with mobile phones/PDAs too.







Closure

Sitting alone doing nothing will not get your blog to be popular! In the current world, building traffic and higher ranking for your blog is difficult and requires a lot of work. Be sure to search more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.