How to get more visitors to your website for free
Everyone wants more visitors — and customers — to come to their website, and I bet you’re one of them. If you have the motivation and about an hour or so, I’m going to show you how you can create a blog and use it to promote your website to get more traffic to your site. Best of all, it’s free. All it takes is a bit of action and following some simple directions.
There are many ways to get started blogging. Some are easy, some are more difficult, but all of them can help you get your message out to the rest of the world.
Just as with websites, however, don’t believe the myth that once you build it, readers will come flocking to read you latest pearl of wisdom.
As with everything else, it takes work — marketing — to get your word out to the people who will want to read what you write. You have to let them know that you exist — and that you’ve just published some new information.
Fortunately, there are some automated tools to help you do this, once you’ve done your homework and a little background work.
Not only will these tools help you spread the word about your blog, they can also help you increase the number of visitors to your website. How?
Follow along…
One of the best ways to get more traffic is to make it easy for the major search engines to find you, index what you write, and return your site as high as possible in the search results when someone searches for a keyword you target on your blog or site.
One way the search engine spiders find your site or blog is by crawling the links on the world wide web (that’s why they’re called spiders!), so you want to have links to your writing from as many relevant sources as possible, and you want to score higher by linking to other sites related to what your website or blog is about.
One way to do this is to interact on forums that relate to your area of interest. Provide good information, answer questions, and make yourself useful — but not obnoxious or intrusive. Then, include a link to your website or blog in your signature block.
As the spiders find your entry in the forum, they’ll follow your link back to your site, so you’ll naturally end up in their index.
Cost? Nothing but a little time and thought.
In addition to participating in forums — which is also a good thing because you’ll learn things you don’t know already, you can use your blog to help bring in more visitors by taking several simple steps.
First, you have to create your blog. The easiest and fastest way is to sign up with Blogger.com, where you can have as many blogs with as much content as you want.
Cost? Free.
Go to blogger.com and sign up for a new account.
(Update - December 14, 2006) I no longer recommend Blogger.com for this. Now, if you insist on using a free blog, at least register for an account at WordPress.com and sign up for your account there. You will have many of the tools of a real WordPress account without the censorship you may encounter at Blogger.com.)
Name your blog (save this because you’ll need it in a few minutes) and choose a template. If the name is available, in a few seconds you’ll have a new blog and it will be time to set a few settings and start writing.
Once you have found a name that is available, you’re on your way.
One of the things you’ll need to set in your blog’s settings — there are many, but don’t get bogged down in all that right now.
* Go to Settings and then Site Feed where you’ll want to make sure that Publish Site Feed is set to Yes. Be sure to copy the “Site Feed URL” to somewhere so you’ll have it available. I keep a file in a text editor with a list of all my websites and important information about them. I also keep a spiral notebook with all my accounts, usernames, passwords, and special settings, just in case.
* Click on Save Settings after you set them.
To get maximum exposure to your writings, you’ll want to make sure that each entry in your blog is posted to a separate page at blogspot.com (Google provides both the tools to create and manage your blog at blogger.com and a place to host your writing at blogspot.com — all for no cost to you.)
By posting to separate pages, you’ll give the search engine spiders more opportunities to suggest your blog to anyone who searches for the content you’ll be writing about.
* Go to Settings and then choose the Archiving tab. On this page, I set my archiving to weekly (to give four times as many opportunities for someone to find my site than if it were set to monthly) and Enable Post Pages to Yes so it will create a new page for each entry.
* Don’t forget to click on Save Settings after you set them.
Now you have a blog. It will archive your messages on a weekly basis, each post will be written to a separate page, and you have a site feed that is available to the public.
Congratulations, you’ve just finished the first part. It’s empty so far, but it’s ready to go.
Now, you’re ready to create your first posting.
* Go to Posting and fill in the blanks.
Give the item a title — and use a keyword you want people to find in the title.
Write your article or entry in the large block. Be sure to use the keyword you want to emphasize a few times in the article.
If you already have a website, perhaps you want to write about something on your site. Make sure you link to the URL of your site — to give the spiders something to follow.
If you don’t have a website, you can write about anything you want, and link to a site of your choosing. It’s up to you.
I’m assuming you have a website and are using your blog to increase visibility to your site with the main goal of getting more targeted traffic to your website.
So, maybe you’ve added a new page about one of your services or items. Write an article about it in your blog and link directly to that page of your site, not just to the site’s main URL.
For the spiders to follow your link, it must be a live link, not just text.
You should learn some basic HTML coding for your blog, but if you are using blogger.com, you can use the tools built into the edit window to create your link. At the top of the Edit HTML window, there are several icons. The third one is used to insert a link into your article. Click that link.
Clicking the insert link icon will open a dialog box where you enter the URL of the site. Make sure your url starts with http:// and points to a specific page. Once you’ve done this, blogger will put in an anchor tag (starts with “a href”) that links to the URL you entered. It will also put in a closing anchor tag (/a). These tags are enclosed in left-angle-brackets and right-angle-brackets. Anything you insert between the anchor tag and the closing anchor tag will show up as the highligted text for the link. Try to use a form of the keyword you are emphasizing for this article.
For example, let’s say I want to link to Allen Says’ Instant Guru Blog.
I click on the insert link icon and type in http://instant-guru-blog.LinkToDetails.com in the dialog box.
That inserts a properly formatted anchor tag into my article, but there is no text between the opening and closing tags. I’d remedy that by entering (without the quotes) “Instant Guru Blog” after the first right-angle-bracket and before the second left-angle-bracket.
When the article is published, it will include a link that looks like this:
If you view the page’s source in your browser, you’ll see the actual HTML code that creates that link.
Once you have a bit of experience with blogging, you’ll probably find it easier to type in live links rather than use the tool, but it’s totally up to you.
The main issue is that you should have at least one live link back to a page on your website or a site you want to link to in each article you publish on your blog.
* Now, put your first blog entry on the web by clicking on the Publish Post button and wait a few seconds while it does it for you. This will happen fairly quickly during the mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or early night hours. Generally, it will publish your post much more slowly during the early morning hours or late evening hours when thousands of others are using the service at the same time.
* When it says your blog has been published 100%, click on the View Blog tab and you’ll see how it will appear to the world in your new blog.
Cost? Nothing but a few minutes of your time.
(Note, when I’m creating articles for my blogs, I don’t edit it directly in the window. I create it first in a text editor — not a word processor — just in case something happens and I lose my Internet connection. On a PC, you can use Notepad and on a Mac you can use BBEdit, or any other text editor. When I’m done, I copy the title and paste it into the blogger title box and then I go back and copy the article and paste it into the article box. It also gives me a local copy of the article in case I want to use it for some other purpose, such as posting to another blog or website or submitting it as an article to one of the article directories.)
Now, you’ve completed step one of this process, but there’s more to be done to let the search engine spiders know you have a blog and to get them to spider it and tell others.
The next step is to subscribe to your new site feed from a couple of locations.
I use Bloglines.com for reading sites’ news feeds online and I alway make sure to subscribe to my own news feeds there.
It’s easy and quick.
* Go to bloglines.com and create a new free account.
* Click one of the links to sign up for a free account and go through the process.
* When your account is activated, click on the My Feeds tab. In the left column, click on Add and it will open a new frame in the right column.
* Enter your blog’s URL in the box where it asks for your blog or feed url. Then, click the Subscribe button.
In general, you can select the defaults, especially when you are new to using the bloglines.com service.
* Scroll down and click the Subscribe button.
* In a few seconds, your blog should show up in the left column. Click that link to see your site feed. In the right column, you’ll see your blog’s title and description at the top of the column, and your blog entries below.
Congratulations, you now have a real blog and a live site feed that has been syndicated on one other site.
Now, let’s do something similar at Yahoo.com.
* If you already have a Yahoo.com account, go there and log in.
* If not, let’s go create one.
* Go to yahoo.com and open a My Yahoo! account by following their directions.
* Once you have a My Yahoo! account, go to the top of the page and click the My Yahoo! icon to go to it.
You can add content to this page and customize it in many ways. I find the page very useful for lots of things. What we want to do is to subscribe to your blog’s site feed so the Yahoo search engine spider will know of your blog and go index it, and any sites you link to as well.
I have so many site feeds, that I created a page two on My Yahoo, and you can do that or add your site feed to your main My Yahoo page — the choice is yours.
Let’s make this simple.
* On the left side of the page below the header information, you’ll see a yellow bar. Click on the Add Content link.
* To the right of the Find Content search box, you’ll see a tiny link to Add RSS by URL. Click that link.
Remember when you saved the URL for your blog’s site feed? Now you need to enter that site feed URL into the box.
In a moment, you’ll be taken to a new page that shows your blog’s title and description.
* To subscribe to your blog’s site feed, click the Add button.
Now, you have two subscribers to your blog’s news feed. Or, to look at it from a slightly different perspective, you’ve syndicated your news on two other very popular websites!
Go back to your My Yahoo! page and you’ll see your most recent posts on that page in the module with your blog’s title.
If you want to learn more about RSS and site feeds, Ken Evoy has written an excellent overview — especially for folks who want to market goods and services online — at rss.sitesell.com.
He has also written a new book called “Make Your Links WORK!” that is available free on the Value Exchange site.
* Download the book and read it to learn more about getting more visitors to your site through good link exchanges.
* While you’re there, sign up for the value exchange so you can find good link partners — for free — to enhance your site’s presence on the web and to get more visitors to your site who are looking for what you’re offering.
Now that we know your blog’s site feed is working and you’ve subscribed to it in a couple of places, it’s time to let the major news feed aggregators know you have recently published something. You do this by sending a “ping” to them. Basically, this is just an automated process that says, “Hey! I’ve just updated my blog. Let the rest of the world know it.”
You can go to all the ping sites one at a time, or you can do it the easy way and use Ping-O-Matic! to tell a dozen sites at once.
But, before you can do that, you need to let one of those partners know your blog exists.
* Go to WeBlogALot.com/ping/ and manually ping them the first time. After that, you can use Ping-O-Matic! to do it for you automatically.
* In Step 1, enter your blog’s site feed URL in the box. If things go right, the page will reload and say “Thank you for the ping.” Now you’re in their index.
* The next and last step in this process is to ping your site at pingomatic.com.
* Enter your blog’s name and URL (not the site feed url) in the appropriate boxes. Then select all the sites in the top section above “Specialized Services”. Once you’ve selected them, click the Submit Pings button.
You’ll be taken to a new page that shows your results. Be sure to bookmark that page. If you get an error notice from WeBlogALot, don’t worry about it this first time. It may be that you site hasn’t made it into their index yet since you just submitted it.
Congratulations! You’ve created a blog with a news feed. You’ve subscribed to that feed at bloglines.com and in your My Yahoo! page. Now, you’ve let a dozen of the most important news feed aggregators know that you just updated your blog so they’ll check the site feed and pass it along.
In the future, it’s going to be much simpler. Just follow this process.
1. Add a page to your website.
2. Write about it in your blog and be sure to link to that page.
3. Bring up your bookmark to pingomatic.com for that blog and submit pings.
You’re done. You’ve updated your site and told the world.
You can expect to be listed higher in the search engine results in the coming weeks (as long as you update your site and blog on a regular basis) and you’ll see more visitors to your site. The rest is up to you. Post good content and convert those visitors into customers.
In future installments of this blog, we’ll talk about other blogging services and how you may want to use them.
Congratulations. You’re done.
Cost. Nothing but a little effort.
For extra credit — once a teacher, always a teacher — go to msn.com and sign in or create an account there. Go to your My MSN page and subscribe to your news feed by adding content.
Note: If it doesn’t find your site feed the first time, and you’re sure your URL is entered correctly, wait a few seconds and try again. It usually finds it on the second or third attempt.
For more extra credit — go to Newsgator.com and sign in or create an account there. Subscribe to your news feed(s).
