Every blogger, blogs because they want people to read their stuff or to make money, and that means you need traffic.

So if you're into this sort of things you've probably seen like one thousand lists of how to get more traffic to your blog and realised that they all say exactly the same stuff and that they don't help you at all!

Then you start to think "well of course they all say the same they just copied each other without even giving it a try".

At least I did... so I decided to create my own list with the things I did to get more traffic and how well those worked if they worked at all...
 This list will get updated with results and new ways to get traffic often.

1- Join Entrecard - My Entrecard Review
Grade - C

2- Use LinkWithin - My LinkWithin Review
Grade - B-

3- Make it easy for people to social bookmark your posts - How to do it and my review.
Grade - No grade yet

4- Use Twitter - How to auto-Tweet your blog posts and my review.
Grade - B

5- Comment on other blogs - My Review
Grade - No grade yet

6- Use a signature on forums - My Review
Grade - B-

7- Trade Links - My Review
Grade - B or F

8- Advertise on Project Wonderful - My Review
Grade - A

If you have any suggestions about something that I should add to this list, liked the post or just want to share your experience leave me a comment!
Also please follow me on Twitter.

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

Entrecard

Grade - C

Review:
Yes, Entrecard works. You can get a lot of daily views with this if you spend 10 do 15 minutes "dropping" on other blogs.
My problem with entrecard is that you get people to come to your blog, but you don't get them to read it... They come in, look for the entrecard widget, drop you a card and close the site. Number of posts read? ZERO.
And I mean it... the bounce rate from Entrecard visitors is like 95%.
Does that mean that Entrecard isn't worth it? Well... no.
For lots of diferent reasons it's way better to have 60 unique visitors than 10... even if the 50 extra don't even look at your site! Sure active users are what you want but cheer number is important too.
Also think that even if you get from Entrecard 50 "Ghost visits" and 1 that really reads and comments your blog that's one more than you would have if you weren't on Entrecard. And maybe that one will bring a few friends, that will be up to the quality of your content of course.

How to get more traffic from Entrecard:
Some websites create some very usefull Drop Lists that list sites that use Entrecard that follow their criteria, some list sites with Entrecard widget above the fold, some list only sites with a certain theme.
You should try to join as many of those as you can as some people use them to make their daily drops.
Here are the Drop Lists I'm listed in:


If you have any suggestions, liked the post or just want to share your experience leave me a comment!
Also please follow me on Twitter.

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

LinkWithin


Grade - B-

Ok, first things first: What is LinkWithin?

LinkWithin is a widget for your blog that offers your audience a different way to navigate your blog. It adds a related posts option at the end of each of your posts, and it does it with thumbnails!
So if you go to any one of my posts for example Episode #20 Related Stuff at the end of the post you get links to Episode #19 Related Stuff, Episode #8 Related Stuff and Episode #11 Related Stuff  and it looks like this:

Now if you're thinking "that won't bring me more traffic!" You are right... but it will really help you to keep the visitors you get. Make them see more of your blog than just the most recent post or the 2 or 3 more recent posts.
Also because the visitor chooses which posts to see instead of just scrolling down the posts the odds that he gets to see those posts that are interesting to him are much better and so are the odds that he is going to return, or even subscribe.

If you have any suggestions, liked the post or just want to share your experience leave me a comment!
Also please follow me on Twitter.

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

Grade - No grade yet - I'm not using this for enough time to have a justified opinion on it.

What is it?
Take a look at the end of this post and you will see this:

This allows your readers to submit your post to a few social networks which will hopefully bring you more visitors.

How can you get this on your blog?
WordPress - The "Sociable" plugin allows you to have this on WordPress.
Blogger - The method I used was provided by this site. But you can probably find others online.

If you have any suggestions, liked the post or just want to share your experience leave me a comment!
Also please follow me on Twitter.

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

Grade - B

Tweets are powerful. Tweets go places...How many followers do you have? You can advertise your blog to them and the rest of the world through Twitter.
So how about tweeting your blog updates? Every time you post to your blog a new Tweet is sent with the title of the post and a link to it.
This works very well and depending on the number of followers you have you can expect to see several new visitors per Tweet.

How to do it:

FeedBurner - If you use FeedBurner (and you should) there's an easy way to do this (this is the option I use).

Go to the Publicize tab and then choose Socialize on the menu on the left.

Then just add your Twitter account and the options you like and it's done!


Twitterfeed - This site let's you do exactly the same thing and it also supports Facebook!

Fell free to leave a comment with your results or suggestions and if you liked this post please follow me on Twitter


(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

Grade - No grade yet - I don't really have a formed opinion on how well this works yet.

Most people really want other people to comment on their blog, it's cool to have feedback and know if someone agrees with you or if they think you're an idiot. So it's normal that whenever we get a comment we take a look at whoever did it. This is especially true with small to medium blogs, let's face it, if one blog gets 50 comments per day the owner isn't going to check the blogs of all the people that commented, you'll be lucky if your comment ever gets a read...

Does this work?
I believe this may work and I do comment on other blogs whenever I read something that is worth a comment but I am yet to take a few hours to "power comment" which is what you have to do to take something out of this method of getting visitors to your blog. And this is the main problem I see with this technique, it takes too much time and effort.
Note: Never make comments like "nice", "interesting" "Visit my blog!". If your not going to take the time to actually read the post and give your opinion about it don't comment. Just leave. Those comments are annoying, and personally I just delete them.


If you have any suggestions, liked the post or just want to share your experience leave me a comment!
Also please follow me on Twitter.

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

Grade - B-
You probably are registered to at least a couple of forums, right?
Most of those allow you to have a signature some in image, some just text. The idea here is to use that small space to advertise your blog.
This supposedly works better if done in a forum within your niche but I wouldn't know about that as my blog is quite generic and I really only use 2 forums that allow signatures and they're sports forums.

Here's my experience:
Site: http://www.hattrick.org/
Description: It's an online game with a very active forum.
Sig type: Text Only
My Signature:
http://www.ticapod.blogspot.com/
Things I Care About:
Podcast About... Stuff
Result: I see regular visits from this during the days in which I'm active there.

Site: http://www.contra-ataque.com
Description: It's a Portuguese forum about football
Sig type: Images alowed
My Signature:

Result: Even with the better looking signature, the fact that the forum has less users than the other one makes for less traffic from this source.

The animated banner that you see there is provided by FeedBurner

It's really cool as it's automatically update every time your feed is updated.

So of course the more active you are the more your add get's to be seen and if you are a heavy forum user and are not using it to promote your blog you are really missing on something as it is time you already spend on the forum so it takes zero effort from you.

If you have any suggestions, liked the post or just want to share your experience leave me a comment!
Also please follow me on Twitter.

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

Grade - A or F

Confused by the grade? Don't be...
It's really easy to explain.

Text links are awesome! They are just great. Not only they bring you traffic, they also improve your PageRank that is used by search engines (Google per example) to determine how well your site does in the search results.
So there's two kinds of links on blogs: They can either be inside an article or post or they can be sidebar or blogroll. Either type is great...
So good text links: Grade A!

Here's the bad part:
They are freaking hard to get.
The one that aren't hard to get are just garbage.
I'm talking about those sites that let you trade links. I've been there. 99,9% of the sites there link to you in a page that is not even linked to their site, that contains like 1000 links and has zero content, nothing more than links. So you get a link in the middle of 1000 links on a page not linked anywhere and that no one will ever see.
Grade F!


If you share this problem and would like to trade links with me you can either leave me a comment here or contact me using this form.

Also, if you have any suggestions, liked the post or just want to share your experience leave me a comment!
Also please follow me on Twitter.

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

Grade - A

Why do I choose Project Wonderful:
First of all you get to advertise for free. Yeah that's right! As every ad spot works as it's own auction, whenever there's no active bid on one of them, you can just bid for free (as most ad boxes don't have a minimum bid).
Second, you don't pay for click and you don't pay per impression... you pay per time.
This means that if you search the marketplace well you can find really awesome bargains.
Here's one example of one of the bids I have running.

(Click on the image to see it in full size)

Yeah, that's right.
I have, only on that bid, 252 unique clicks for a total of 19cents. (over a period of 42 days)

Now, you may be thinking "that sucks for advertisers!" Well... it depends.
For example, since Project Wonderful features geographical targeting (among other targeting options) US traffic is much more expensive then other geographical locations.
But... this is a guide to get more traffic not to make money.

The only reason I have Project Wonderful ads on the blog is that  I use that income to advertise there. In fact... I have never, ever put one cent out of my own pocket into Project Wonderful and yet I've been advertising with them for a few years now.
That is a big advantage in relation to Adsense for example in which you can't spend you money on advertising AND you have a very high withdrawal limit that small sites really struggle to meet (if they ever do), on Project Wonderful when you reach 10$ you can cash out.

By the way, if you are a Project Wonderful user you can probably get some free advertising in this website! Just go to our advertising page and chose the one or all the Project Wonderful ad spots available.

If you have any suggestions, liked the post or just want to share your experience leave me a comment!
Also please follow me on Twitter.

(this post is part of a series on "How to get more traffic for your blog".)

In episode #21 I talk about:

• Caviar is stupid
• Caviar tastes like S*** 
• Caviar Spoons are also stupid
• Caviar comes from Iran...

Yep... it comes from Iran...

This is a spoon made of horn (don't ask me from what... I wouldn't use it anyway)

Wikipedia article on Caviar.