Blogging Series Part Three: Traffic Building

This is Part Three in the series of posts I have been offered to write all this week for the newly created blog for journalists Fleetstreetblues. Building up traffic and subscribers When you have first set up your blog, have a topic for the content, managed to get a neat template, (paid or unpaid) and have a short but catchy domain name, it stands to reason you will only have one loyal reader, YOU. After you have showed your blog to friends, family, your boss at work, and maybe a handful of other loyal insiders, then where does the rest of the traffic flow from? Here are some key ways to build traffic to a blog. Some take time, others you can just do on auto-pilot. Search engine traffic The myth that you simply submit your blog to Google, and then watch the traffic flow, is far from the truth. Google traffic takes weeks, if not months, so chances are you will have to be  'active' in the first few months of your blog. Blog commenting Here lies the plan. Look at the top blogs in the niche you have chosen. Find out about them, and become loyal readers of their blogs  — adding them in your sidebar links. Comment in their blog posts and leave your thoughts and opinions. If you have something worth saying, say it. Yaro Starak often writes that positive and negative publicity is all good publicity. It means people are listening to you  — even if they are slagging you off. Digg and StumbleUpon Chances are you have heard of these sites, and you need to bookmark your site to these, and FAST. You need to download the toolbar for StumbleUpon, and start stumbling on blogs and websites within your niche. According to another internet marketer Caroline Middlebrook, you can get a rush of traffic from Stumbleupon. Trackback and links If you are HTML literate, then linking to websites of a higher ranking actually drags your website higher up Google and the other search engines. From this comes traffic. So it pays to learn basic HTML. It also helps with designing your website. Learn Javascript too. Content is king Finally, I mentioned in the previous post about  'pillar' articles, these are what make a blog attractive to potential subscribers. Aim to write at least two pillar articles per week on something related to your niche. If you are a journalist, and for example are writing news or comment pieces on your blog, you could even pass on what you have learnt on your journalism training course? What's a recession?