Building traffic on a new blog

There’s a lot of talk about the ability to reach thousands through a blog and earning money at the same time, but the reality is it can be incredibly difficult to get going.

I put my skills to the test recently and started a fresh niche blog and it’s been going fairly solid so far.

Without any real credibility of any type I built a great community around a fresh blog in a matter of weeks.  There was about 40,000 hits last month, averaged maybe about 10 minutes a day on it, and I didn’t pay 1-cent for any form of advertising.

Here are some tips from my recent experience

1.  Blog about something you’d enjoy spending time on anyways. Preferably something you’re an expert on or something you’re passionate about.  The right ideas at the right time can be a powerful force.  I started http://monopolyhq.com simply because there was a lot of hype around the fact that it was integrating the monopoly board game with google maps and I personally love the game.

2.  Get a memorable domain name. This usually means as short as possible, but there are plenty of remarkable long domain names.  Try and get a keyword people would be searching on in there.

3.  Build your site. I can’t recommend wordpress enough.  Google loves content-focused blogs in general, but it loves wordpress even more.

4.  Thesis. If you’re using wordpress, why not complete the awesomeness with the Thesis Framework.  It’s a dynamic professional theme that is built on rock solid search-engine-optimized code.  There’s a great user community around it and you can design it just about any way you want while keeping your content as clean and search-engine friendly as possible.

5.  Create valuable content. As long as it’s discoverable – content remains king.  Make it as clear and readable as possible.  While they might not admit it, people love lists, rankings, charts, bullet points, etc.  I typically keep posts below 300 words.  If you’ve got a lot to say, break it down into a series of posts people can track with.

6.  Design. Your site ought to leave an impression.  Without reading any of the content, within the first five seconds without going below the fold of your site, a person ought to know what your site is all about.  ie. for the monopoly site I branded it with similar monopoly colors and included a pair of dice slightly off the grid of the page just so readers know you’re not just scraping together content, but that you care about what you’re writing about.

6.  Be a collaborator not a competitor. Especially if you’re new, build contacts, partnerships, links with other sites and blogs of similar interest.  Leave useful comments on their posts (not spam!) and refer people to them as well if they’re offering something of value.

7.  Find what’s giving your competitors traffic. Is there a certain forum or hub or tool that’s giving them the edge?  You ought to be using at least that to give your unique content a chance.  Tweak your title/description to keywords that people might be searching for rather than whatever terms you think might be unique or cool.  ie. I originally had titled the blog ‘monopoly headquarters’ – but no one actually searches for that – they search for tips, hints, tricks, guides, etc.

8.  Twitter. As over-hyped as it is, social media is still huge.  However I’d recommend being highly strategic about it.  If I had a really solid and important post I submitted it to digg.  I didn’t just add anyone to twitter, each day i spent a minute following people who were using related keywords and hashtags.  Your most passionate users will not only follow you back but refer others to you.

9.  Community building. Respond to people’s comments, invite and affirm the contributions of others, share tools and unique insights, create a space for people to connect with one another rather than just you, etc.  Think through why you’d personally return to your site as a user.

10. Enriching content.

Timely – post really hot content that you’ve just discovered that others can retweet and spread.  Use link shorteners to make it concise and trackable.

Interactive – Use some form of comment subscription ((ie. subscribe to comments plugin, or intense debeate / disqus)

Automate – Use your sidebar to pick up other relevant content.  ie. have a live twitter hashtag feed or create a google-alert so your site can be a portal to similar content elsewhere.

11.  Tools. Make sure you’re using all possible tools at your disposal.  While I didn’t use this, sometimes when you purchase a domain or hosting account they provide some google/yahoo ad credits.  Use free tools like feedburner, popular posts and similar post plugins, and make translations easily available with tools like global translator.  Use google analytics to find who your top referrers are and what key words are hot.

I hope these tips help.  I’ve been blogging for a number of years so there are probably other more nuanced tips that I can’t recall at the moment.  Right now the monopolyhq site is so fresh I’ve yet to get a pagerank which is really the next goal.  Many people are saying page-rank isn’t as important any more, but even so, the principles behind a solid page rank will always remain important.

Do you have other tips for building traffic on a new blog?

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