2 Ways to Get More Traffic, 1 Way to not

Today at Zero 2 Hero we celebrate the 15 day anniversary, since this blog is fairly new I have the advantage of testing many different methods of traffic generation and reporting how well each one works.

So today I wanted to share with you my progress and what has worked best after 15 days since my beginning. Lets take a look at 2 ways that I was able to get more traffic and improve my page rank, and 1 way that has not worked well so far.

1. Create A Blog Commenting Routine

By going to blogs that are relevant to my blog and have a relatively large following and then commenting on their posts I can say 100% of the time it has brought new unique traffic to my site within the first day. Also for blogs that are updated less frequently, commenting brings traffic to my blog for days to come. So to help build traffic to your blog I would recommend number 1 to get out there and comment and be part of a conversation.

For every 100 people that read a post mostly likely only 10 will comment, but that does not mean that the rest of the people don’t read comments or click through to see more.

I would like to add that I have never, not once, put a link to my site in the comment post. Simply sign in to whatever service and ALWAYS be sure to update your profile where available. Make sure it has a good looking picture and your website info. So as to not look like a spammer and I try to actually be part of the conversation. Posting your link directly on the comments kind of looks selfish, because you could really care less about the person who’s page is giving you traffic to begin with. So some respect ya know.

2. YouTube Videos

Making videos and posting them on YouTube and other hosting sites has been great, but not exactly the way you think it would be. I uploaded my first video to YouTube and Vimeo. Since then they each only have a handful of views, but they were not that interesting to begin with. I do not think they brought any unique traffic to my blog at all. However what they did do is help to improve my page rank.

In fact when searching for my blog the video’s sometimes come up ahead of my page (for now). Also one person on VodPod added my video to his stream, and that showed up on page one of google as well, even though I did not sign up for VodPod. So videos have improved my page rank and gave me some added visability. Which will down the road lead to more search traffic to my site. I will continue to make videos even if they never get me any direct traffic just because of what they do for my google page rank.

For each video I posted, I have left links back to my website. YouTube linkbacks are a great source for PR.

3. Twitter Advertising

I’ve stopped the practice of following everyone who follows me because after following a few hundred people with the mindset of have to get more followers so I can promote myself it gets very cluttered. No two days could I ever see the same two user names so I felt like it didn’t bring me closer to anyone and my posts were being lost in a see of spammers.

I am certain that there are good ways to use twitter but they involve engaging the people who genuinely have in interest in what you have to say.

Once I can remove all people who are following me for the interest of advertising to me, I will start adding people back that I think are real people.

Although I haven’t had much luck using Twitter to promote my blog, I have seen it alot of other people using it very effectively.

Here are my stats after 15 days since starting this blog:
(From Google Analytics)
91 Visits
217 Pageviews
44 Absolute Unique Visitors

of those
38 referrals from blog comments
2 referrals from digg
2 referrals from twitter
2 other