Increase Your Blog Traffic To Become Rich And Famous
Okay, I came up with this title to simply play with you, but if you are like so many bloggers who want to take their blog to the next level, then read on and I’ll share some blog building tidbits 
with you.
No, I don’t have the definitive guide for increasing traffic to your blog and, therefore, possibly helping you to increase your personal wealth. However, I did stumble upon (literally) Richard Alan Tatum’s (RAT) BlogRodent blog and I like what I read.
39 Tips To Improve Weblog Traffic And Visibility is the title of Tatum’s article that caught my attention. No, you aren’t likely to hear about Tatum around the blog circuit mentioned with the usual blog gurus (whoever they are), but you’ll appreciate the tips he willingly shares in his article.
Take tip #1 for example: SEO tips. You probably know about using keywords in your titles (something I don’t practice all that much) but did you know that the
< h 1 > and < h 2 > tags for sections and subsections is good practice? Although Tatum did not explain why I have read that Google loves them as the Googlebot searches for these types of tags when indexing a page. So, if it is good enough for your favorite bot, it should be good enough for your blog.
I know some of you are very good with tip #26, which is interviewing people and posting that information on your blog. Personally, this is something on my “to do” list, but I think it needs to move up to the top of that list. A real traffic generator as you might imagine.
Most definitely tip #27 should be practiced regularly and that tip has to do with being scanable or read quickly. Blogs should contain short, pithy articles (in my opinion 250 to 300 words max is usually best) with the occasional lengthy article just that — a once-in-a-while event.
For brevity’s sake I’ll shut up and let you read Tatum’s article. Maybe you will find just as I have some good information to sift through and to apply to your own blog. Happy blog building!
FYI for future posts - my feed reader (google) took that h1 tag and interpreted it as a directive and bolded and enlarged the rest of the post…
Thanks, Beth. It did that on my end the first time I posted it, but when I separated things out, it stopped. I can’t tell via my feed, but I now have h1 and h2 spaced apart.
Thanks, Matthew, for the link-love and the very kind words! I especially appreciated the fact that you took the time to really read the article and interact with it … more bloggers should do the same!
I thought about expanding some of these tips to explain better why they work, especially the SEO section, but it was already a far too-long article as it was!
Anyhow, I hope the links in the SEO tips section will lead folks to great resources to further help them along this line, since SEO tips can take up several full-length articles themselves.
Thanks, again, for the great write-up!
Rich.
BlogRodent
By the way, just a note …
Your blog post is proof that social networking sites like StumbleUpon.com actually work!
I favorited my blog post on the “39 tips” and immediately saw traffic start to arrive. Then, just yesterday, I created a $20 promotion campaign with StumbleUpon, which guarantees me 100 visitors a day until I use up my bank. StumbleUpon generates very targeted traffic, which I like.
So far the experiment has proven successful.
Regards,
Rich
BlogRodent
Thanks, Rich. I did the “scan-able” thing for your article which is written in a style that I like: a list. So, it was easy to pick out various tidbits and to hone in on them. Later, I did a more thorough read and then I bookmarked it for additional reference at another time.
Yes, Stumble Upon truly rocks. I bet you could have saved yourself the $20 too as I was simply clicking along until I found your blog. The layout is clean and the title jumped out at me, so my curiosity was piqued.
I am not sure how much my readers are aware of the strength of Stumble Upon. I’ve included about 20 of my sites and pages of work and have seen some nice surges in traffic.