Blogher Bulding Traffic to Your Blog Via Content and Community and Technology

Flickr Photo by Veesees

Elise Bauer, a food blogger who writes Simple Recipes.   She does this talk because she gets a lot of traffic.   She has 1,000,000 feed readers.   She has been experimenting over the past few years.

Content

• Why do you want traffic?   Has to support your goals and capacity.   
• She looks at traffic building in three elements: content, community, and technology that you use to support. 
• Content:  Three most important elements of content - useful, entertaining, or timely.   Do at least one or all well.
• Focus: If you want your audience to grow, you need to focus.  This is important in terms of community building.
• Post frequently but not at the expense of quality, use images and photographs, write well, compelling headlines, shorter posts, keep it real, and use different formats.  If you want to build an audience, use punctuation.
• Invest in a dslr camera - quality good images manner
• Blog about something you care about
• Keep at it

Community

• Difference between broadcasting your message and engaging
• It's not about you unless you are extraordinarily interesting
• It's not about putting your words out there and letting them go ...
• Leave thoughtful comments - don't being an annoying self-promoter
• Plan and participate in events
• Be generous
• Link to blogs at are at the same stage as you

Technology

• Make it easy to load
• Everything in your side bar should have a purpose - a car with a bunch of bumper stickers and can't see the car
• Font size important
• Know the basics of search engines optimization (see the page in her presentation, there are some great tips)

What are your tips for getting traffic to your blog?

Comments

[Bill Kennedy, CA]

Great post! I would just like to amplify the point, "If you want to build an audience, use punctuation." Other bloggers have pointed to the need to write conversationally (i.e. short sentences, write the way you talk, etc.) It almost seems a contradiction to insist on good punctuation and, by extension, getting rid of the typos (typographical errors, e.g. small spelling mistakes or missed words where the intended meaning is clear), but I agree 100%. If you want to sound authoritative and be quotable, PROOFREAD YOUR POSTS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofreading). You could even get someone to do it for you because typos are easier to spot in someone else's work.

Bill

[Alan Levine]

Blogs do much better with a focus on cheddar cheese. I can haz some.

[Jordan Viator]

Great pointers, Beth. I think if I had to point out the one factor that I strive to bring to our blog, it's relevancy. If you can achieve that when writing and adding content to your site - content that is truly relevant to your target audience - then traffic will build and a sense of community will be felt by all who visit, read and hopefully engage with your site.