How to get people to know about your blog or website

by Kobus Venter

Just follow these basic tips to get people to find your website. I hope others that start off on WordPress finds this and keep working at getting traffic. If your stats show only a handful of visits per month, it means no one knows about your website and it’s not showing up on the first page of a Google search! I have the following suggestions:

1 – Send out some blog posts, but post from your home page if possible (unless you create a static home page) and remember to add keyword tags and categorise your posts. If you have a website for your business then create a blog page, but post at least once every 2 weeks. The serious blogger has broken into laughter at this point no doubt, but how many genuine fans do they have – and who wants to be a professional blogger anyway – I just don’t have time for that. In my opinion if you want to build a fan base, blog about things that interest you and Google / WordPress will do the rest. My rule of thumb is if you see a dip in your page visits after a few weeks, send out another blog post or post a gallery containing photos with some descriptions at least. If you write informative posts, people will link to it. No one wants to hear what you ate for supper last night – leave that for Twitter or Facebook – actually no leave that out period!

2 – If you’re getting over 2000 visits per month be grateful for this allocation. Remember that your content has got you this far, not paying towards Google AdSense, and it has been a relatively free ride. If you want to sell stuff online I would recommend against using WordPress.com. You’ll need WordPress.org. I found a happy medium in that I still use my WordPress.com account, but refer people to a hosted (D9 Hosting) WordPress.com site as my landing page for people wanting to pay through PayPal for products and services. I use a PayPal Business shopping cart through a free plugin (Easy Digital Downloads). If you want 10,000 visits per month, and increase your turnover well then be ready to pay $$$. For upper end websites you would need to get email lists going and get spammy, more $$$ in hosting fees and $$$ to get Google AdSense going – not forgetting $$$ towards creating a high-end shopping cart. Moving to WordPress.org means losing some forum support, free anti-spam and most importantly loosing keyword tags which is WordPress.com’s free SEO service to you, meaning more $$$ to pay for SEO. You get the picture? You want to show up on the first page of a Google search page – that’s it – and it can be done without much fuss and extra $$$.

3 – Send your post links to a blog carnival (http://blogcarnival.com/), contribute to discussions by joining Yahoo, Google or LinkedIn groups and leave a link to your website and other Social Media accounts.

4 – Link to other websites through a Blogroll on the side widget or in your text. Whomever you are linking to will no doubt see it in their Stats page and may even link back to you. Google algorithms will pick that up and boost your site.

5 – Open a YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account and maintain your colour and logo theme throughout it. When you upload a video to YouTube be sure to have links point to your website and Social Media sites. Activate Publicize on WordPress.com and promote posts automatically to Facebook.

6 – When you send out emails, design a footer that includes your contact details, Social Media profiles and website address.

7 – Post images often as people will often land on your page after trolling Google Images or Yahoo Image Search and lately through Pinterest.

8 – At around $18 per year you are certainly getting a bargain if you get more than 2000 visits to your website per month, but achieving that and more is possible without paying a cent more by following the above guidelines. You’re getting visits because Google thinks your content warrants being promoted to the first page.