Getting Traffic To Your Blog

[KevinG]

How long does it usually take to get substantial traffic to your blog, and what is everyone's favorite way to do it?

I've been blogging for about 3 weeks and I'm not at all satisfied with my traffic levels, though I'm doing everything I can to drive traffic.

I've got delicious, digg, furl - almost all the buttons available on my site for people to make my articles popular. I've got 2 types of RSS feeds and an ATOM feed available. I've submitted to a lot of search engines. I've optimized my site for the search engines as best I know how. I'm posting new content like crazy. I'm commenting on other blogs in the same genre.

How long does this process take? Am I expecting too much in such a short time?

[Henry]

It's going to take a year to get substantial traffic. Most blogs fail and go idle within 2 months. The top 100 blogs average age is 33 months old.

It's a marathon not a sprint.

Some links:
Micro Persuasion: The Long Tail, the Long Term and Your Blog
Top 100 Blogs have an Average Age of 33.8 months

[Steve]

You won't get much search engine traffic at first.

You can also try posting to carnivals and discussing other bloggers' articles in your blog. Also, your blogroll looks kind of thin. Add some other blogs you like and then shoot the blogger and email that says you added them to your blogroll and that if they like your blog, would they mind adding yours to theirs.

At this point your main focus should be on producing good content and getting people to link to you.

[Dating Specialist]

Exactly. That's why it is crucial to choose a niche to focus on to blog about, because it needs loads of passion and in believing in what you can offer that makes a difference to sustain the blog.

You have done mostly online traffic generation, how about offline? Tell your friends about your blog and ask them to spread the word.

There's a similar thread here too:
Driving Blog Traffic

(whoo, took some time to locate this thread. Goes to show how big and dynamic this forum is )

[Leonard]

I wrote an entry about ways to generate traffic to a website a week ago. You can read it at my site if you like. This is only my 2nd week blogging, though it is not the first time I have a blog. Traffic generation takes time, consistent effort, and persistence. These 3 elements go hand-in-hand.

Because eventually you need to put away time to generate quality content, and quality content depends on your daily consistent effort, and consistent effort requires persistence.

Social bookmarks works well in getting yourself noticed, but to get to the front page of digg or delicious for that matter, requires you to have substantial traffic. I visited political dishonesty, which I believe is the site you were referring to. Perhaps you might want to cut down on the number of social bookmarks and choose only a few popular ones like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon etc. And instead of using Apostolos Dountsis' social bookmarks plugin, you can try sociable. It doesn't clutter and looks more organised.

I'm not yet statisifed with my current level of traffic because of the time constraint I have in marketing it effectively but a check at the stats shows that it is increasing well. And my RSS subscribers have grown from 0 to 12 in 2 short weeks and that is considered quite a relief for me.

[TheBull]

Don't get discouraged. I've been at it for a few weeks and right I'm getting an average of 20-40 visitors a day on my investing/finance blog. Almost all of that traffic has come from joining the PFBlogs.org aggregator and submitting to a blog carnival. From those two things, I've had people comment and link to my site.

I also have started getting some traffic by leaving comments on other blogs and forums like this one. Making yourself known is what helps. Don't count too much on the social bookmark items, they won't make your posts more popular. With those you are pretty much praying that someone submits your post and then praying that more people vote it up.

For me personally, I tend to be a numbers guy, meaning that I check my site stats (I use Google Analytics) almost daily to see what is going on. This is especially true for monday and tuesday after the blog carnival comes out. I also pay attention to the bounce rates and popular items. While I haven't taken action on those, I'm watching them with the goal of using that to better my site and my articles.