How To Blog and Start a Business

Vibrant Ways To Generate Traffic And Build Relationships

by Cheryl Ragsdale on March 8, 2011

Generate Traffic

We’re all in a hurry for the world to beat a path to our door. Traffic is King!

We blog because we want to serve other people in finding the knowledge they’re seeking or to help them find an entertaining place to spend their time.

We want our hard work acknowledged by people visiting our blog on a regular basis. We want to see growth in traffic over time to feel like our blogging efforts are working. What most of us need is a plan that works to keep us motivated.

I’ve found something that helps me to meet those needs.

online friends

WP Plug-In That Tweets Your Oldies But Goodies

A tool that I’ve just started using – that is working beautifully for me – is called Tweet Old Posts. It’s a wordpress plug-in. It’s easy to install through the wordpress panel.

What’s a little more complicated is deciding which posts you want to exclude.

This ends up needing some tweaking as you go along. I set up my plug-in to tweet posts older than 45 days. No problem so far.

I soon realized that some of my “old posts” posed a problem for me. I needed to do some blog maintenance to update the old posts that were being tweeted. Plus, I needed to exclude anything related to holidays – like Christmas, for instance. Oops!

It’s best to keep a sense of humor in the beginning. In addition, if you are too busy to keep up with freshening old links or making necessary changes to content, don’t get your knickers in a knot. If the post hadn’t been “retweeted” by Old Posts, you would never have known the changes were needed.

I’ve noticed:

  • an increase in traffic
  • an increase in retweets
  • an increase in my self-appreciation for the body of work I’ve created on my blog

I check my twitter stream every day to see which random posts have been tweeted. I click the links and allow myself to feel pride in the words I’ve written and the comments I’ve received. Very rarely do I visit one of my posts and think “maybe I should delete this”.

Give Tweet Old Posts a try to increase your traffic immediately. Your Golden Oldies will warm your heart too.

Build Community To Drive Traffic

Creating relationships and building community online takes longer than activating a new plug-in. Let’s use twitter for our next tool. To generate traffic through twitter requires that you have followers and that you follow people.

It took a few weeks for me to get the hang of twitter. I really didn’t understand how people could parse out a conversation with everyone twittering at once. Now, I use Hootsuite to help me sort through the babble to discern patterns so I can follow the flow of the conversation.

That sounds harder than it really is. Just imagine being in a room full of teenagers. Everyone is talking at once – especially the girls – yet, those kids can follow each other’s trains of thought very easily. We all know how to do this.

Here’s a fun video about why we love twittah…

There are endless ways to build community online. Social media sites like facebook and twitter are familiar avenues to build traffic by promoting your posts and building your friend lists.

By virtue of the fact that you are on the comluv site, I know you understand that commenting is a great way to drive new visitors to your blog. What about some new ways that you might not have tried yet to establish new connections?

Have you tried any of these other ways to meet other bloggers?

  • Find a commenting group to join or create one yourself
  • Search #bloghops or just blog hops on twitter to see who is offering an opportunity to band together with other like-minded souls in search of more followers or fans
  • Do the same thing with facebook fan page “like”. I just started participating in a Wednesday facebook fan page follower group. I found them by searching for #bloghop on twitter.
  • I run blog carnivals on my blog each week. I have a badge on the post that directs bloggers to submit their relevant posts through blogcarnival.com. I find this useful for developing relationships more than it really drives traffic.

Vibrant Ways To Generate New Traffic

When I first started blogging about a year and a half ago, I bumped into an opportunity to participate in an ebook collaboration for a good cause – breast cancer awareness. All I had to do was to submit a post I had already written. The two authors combined over 100 blog posts into one ebook that was then sold to raise money for Breast Cancer Research.

I was quite pleased with myself for being included and for helping out with a worthy cause.

Looking back, I’m even more pleased with how things went after the ebook went live.

As part of my goal-setting, I wanted to make connections with other bloggers. I needed to learn EVERYTHING and I was in a big hurry (per usual).

I decided that I would contact everyone in the book who looked interesting to me to say hello and to see whether they would like to guest post on my blog. My reasoning was – if they say no to a guest post, maybe they’ll leave a comment instead.

It worked! People are amazingly generous in the blogosphere.

Many of those guest posts continue to gain views and appear on my Top 25 Hot Posts list. Not only that, I am still very much connected to those bloggers.

Joining in with people’s projects has generated traffic for me – yes. But even greater benefits have arisen.

  • I’ve met many of my virtual friends in real life
  • I’ve been the leader on video projects or have contributed my smiling face to other people’s video projects
  • I’ve run contests on my blog and participated in other people’s contests
  • I ended up being featured on the cover of a book called “50 Athletes Over 50 Teach Us To Live A Strong and Healthy Life“

That last one is important

Cheryl Ragsdale with Yahoo film crew at florian martial arts center

Cheryl Ragsdale with Yahoo film crew at florian martial arts center

Because I was on the cover of that book, Kristen from Yahoo (yes, that yahoo) started a conversation with me that led to her bringing a film crew to Boston (from California).

Kristen creates and publishes videos for a show called Second Act – Vitality on Yahoo News

If I hadn’t started blogging, this opportunity would never have happened. My show is scheduled to be published during the first week of April. Look for it to appear on the Yahoo homepage. (What?!) You’ll know it’s me because I say, “My name is Cheryl Ragsdale and I’m a Mixed Martial Artist“.

You never know who you might meet – inside that ever increasing flow of traffic around you – because you left one more comment than you usually would or retweeted someone’s post or followed someone who provided a timely piece of information.

Keep your eyes open. Keep moving forward. Opportunities are everywhere.

Don’t be a stranger – tweet me!

This article is part of the Traffic Generation Blogging Contest, please add a comment and tweet it to support the author.

I share blogging tips, stay young from the inside out tips, funny stuff and my opinions on the latest mixed martial arts events at That Girl is Funny blog.

Website → That Girl is Funny

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