Psst! I’m Invisible

Today’s post on how to lose money deals with getting your website in front of users (aka advertising). Taking the old “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” riddle and applying it to your website or blog, you get “if you make a post to your blog and no one knows your blog exists, does your post generate buzz?”.

Users have to know that your blog exists to get traffic. Otherwise, you got it, you lose money today! Even if you are naturally an introvert, there are ways to publicize, advertise, or otherwise tell people about your blog that won’t stress you too much. I’m going to cover 5 Ways to publicize your blog without raising the introvert alert.

1. Ping! Ping! Ping!

If we are talking about a blog, then you surely know about pinging the ping services. Heck, the default install of WordPress auto pings pingomatic on new posts. I’ve seen rumblings that pingomatic pings were sometimes dog slow in the past, so you may want to add additional ping servers to your blog. Others I’d recommend include (but are surely not limited to):

1. http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
2. http://ping.feedburner.com/
3. http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
4. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
5. http://www.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

You can add as many as you want, but these in addition to pingomatic will likely boost your traffic significantly if you are putting out quality content. Beware – the more ping services you ping, the slower your posts will be processed when you create them. It is a trade-off, and each person decides for themselves what this is worth.

2. It’s Delightful, It’s Delicious, It’s Social (networking)

If you are reading this, and you do not know about Digg, Delicious, or Stumbleupon, then you likely need to spend about an hour searching and reading about them. These services (among the tons of social networks that you discover with a little searching) have the potential to drive huge traffic to your sites (again the quality content caveat applies).

Specific ways to drive traffic to your site is to include their little widget buttons so that users can vote for your articles. In it’s most innocent form, you would create great content, have users come to your site, and have them provide the first vote for your content. This really is not the greatest solution (not even a decent solution). Why? Users submitting your content to a social network will create their idea of what the title and description should be — quite possibly not a very optimized combination (for either traffic or buzz generation). If your content is great, do the submission yourself. Make it buzzy, keep it non-spammy. It will pay off in the long run.

There are lots of schemes out there to boost the performance from social networks. All I’ll say here is, read up before you buy in to any scheme. And the ultimate caveat — if it sounds too good to be true, it likely is too good to be true.

3. What Do You Think (commenting on similar blogs)?

I’d be willing to bet that you are not blogging on a completely unique topic. More likely, you are blogging on a topic that is covered by many other bloggers. I’ll even go so far as to guess that you visit some of these other blogs regularly. Have you ever thought about actually participating in these blogs by commenting? If not, you are missing out on a great way to start getting your blog’s name in front of potential users. Potential users who probably have the same interests that you are using on your blog.

Comment, regardless of whether they have no follows in place. Yes, you always want links to your site (in particular followable links). But in this case, you can use well thought out, non-spammy, comments to create a buzz for your site. Search engines give you rankings, but users who actually come to your site can be more beneficial for actually generating links. Give users every reasonable chance to come to your site.

4. Directories

There are as many diverse opinions about the value of pursuing directory links as there are people spouting opinions. (Yes I know that mine is just adding to the disarray). So my position is simple. The big guys (BOTW, Yahoo) are likely worth getting a listing it. Yahoo is a recurring cost, BOTW has a one time option or a recurring option. For the remaining directories I have a general rule that I use — if a directory is highly ranked for a search phrase like “KEYWORD directory” (where you obviously replace KEYWORD with the keywords most related to your site), then it is likely worth a few minutes effort to submit to if the cost is marginal. “Highly rated” is subjective, but my own preference is top 10.

5. You Got To Have Friends

Ok, so even the most introverted person I know has friends. Tell them about your site. If they are familiar with the topic at all, tell them to stop by your site to give you some feedback if nothing else. If your site has the magic content, they will likely subscribe to your RSS feed. Users who read your RSS feed are likely to come back in the future as a topic of interest comes across their reader. Traffic = potential money. No Traffic = no money.

If you are the type who just prefers to work on your merry way, not really talking about your blog with friends, how about this simple solution. Include your blog URL in your email signature (also your forum signatures if allowed). No, this is not going to cause a sudden rush of traffic to your site. It will actually surprise you though how the clicks from these links will be consistent if not spectacular.

Tiny Traffic = Big Traffic?

I’m not saying all of these suggestions are going to send you so much traffic that your server crashes. I am saying that if you are reading this post, looking for tips, you likely have very little traffic. When you have very little traffic, every little bump up is a step. My general believe on blog traffic is that it takes small bumps until it reaches some critical mass. At that point you are going to start experiencing something closer to exponential traffic growth than linear traffic growth.

Don’t leave money on the table. Get the traffic, and monetize it!