Where’s the traffic?
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So, you’ve finally gone off the deep end and put up your first weblog. Now the first thing you’re going to want to do is get people to read it, right? After all, what good is a blog if the only person to read it is the one who wrote it? That’s rather like Robinson Crusoe with a set of those tin-can-telephones we used to make as kids - sure it works, but who cares?
There are many pages of material written about search engine optimization and weblog promotion written by people who know a lot more about the subject than I do, so I’ll leave that discussion up to those sources for the most part. HERE is an article to get you started.
One thing I have figured out is that if you want visitors to your site, you have to have articles related to what people are searching for. With all the thousands of blogs on the internet, there are plenty of sources where the average netizen can find what he’s looking for. Face it. While your comments on the stories you’ve copied from cnn.com and reuters.com are interesting or humorous, and while the stories about the behavior of your aunt’s cat are cute, the vast majority of people just aren’t going to be searching google for terms like “my Aunt’s cat” or “shoelaces“. (NOTE: it wasn’t until I got the URL for that last link that I realized there actually ARE websites decicated entirely to shoelaces. My point has been proven.)
If you scan over the archives for this website and then look at my hit counter (668 hits as of this writing - and that includes 500 or so hits that shouldn’t count) you’ll see that I’ve done quite a bit of writing about stuff that nobody seems to be interested in reading - outside my circle of friends and family (There, now I sound like a cellular phone service :P) From what I personally have seen, the blogs that are the most useful, and, therefore, the most used, seem to be the ones where the writer has a lot to say about a few subjects as opposed to the ones (like this one) where the writer says very little about a plethora of different subjects.
While I can’t seem to think of any one subject in which I would classify myself as an expert, I can think of several subjects I know more about than the average Joe. For example, most people aren’t aware that Windows can be used with just the keyboard and no mouse at all. It’s a pain in the posterior, but it can be done. Most people don’t have a clue what all those different settings on the digital camera they got for Christmas actually do. Therefore, in the interest of trying to make something that people see as useful, I will be adding a new category, “How to …”, in which I will be sharing my slightly-less-than limited knowledge on a few subjects.
I do, however, reserve the right to continue making the occasional entry about my shoelaces, my dogs, the price of tea in New Zealand (China is SO overrated), or anything else I want. 
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, traffic, How+to
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