How to drive traffic to a very new blog?

image by- Juhansonin
I started my first blog back in 2006 about two and half years ago from now.The blog was about 'Tourist places in India".This was followed by two other blogs, one on 'Medical studies' and another one on 'Hill-stations in India". Although I have abandoned these blogs now but I learnt a lot from them.Particularly the first one.One thing that was common to all these three blogs was there were no visitors until a few months of starting these blogs.

While running those blogs I learnt a lot about driving traffic to new blog and this is what I am going to discuss in this post.I have learnt these tips from my earlier experiences as well as by taking a look at activities of other bloggers in the blogosphere.



Indeed, it is quite a difficult task to drive traffic to a new blog.You don't get anything from search engines as a new blog is never ranked higher or may be not even indexed. You might not get direct traffic and links from other blogs as word about a new blog is never out until a few weeks (or even months) has elapsed since starting it.


Timing of promotion of a new blog is important-

Timing of starting blog promotion is very important. In my opinion you should not jump off to a promotion campaign until you have published 20-25 pillar posts .By being early in promotion you might disappoint the visitors if they find just 1 or 2 meaningful posts on your blog.
So, my advice here would be to accumulate some quality content and then get your hands into the promotion.

Having said this, I would now set off quickly to actual tips.

Tip #-1- Announce your new blog from an existing blog-

According to one of the surveys conducted by Technorati, vast majority of bloggers write on more than one blogs. So, I will presume that most of you already have a blog.You can just capitalise on your existing blog to drive traffic to the newer one.

Take an example, Just about a few weeks ago Darren (the man behind Problogger) launched his new blog- TwiTip.com.And guess what, he announced his new blog from Problogger.net. Now, see the results.At the time of writing this post, Twitip.com has 3529 subscribers.This,I think, is enormous figure for a blog just about a few weeks old. You can yourself watch this tip in action.

Of course, majority of you don't have that much reader base as Darren but even 50- 100 visitors coming to your new blog matters.
Alternatively, you may also place a banner-link of your new blog on your older blog.

Tip #2- Be a guest blogger in an already established blog-

Recently I came across a very nice but relatively new blog- howtomakemyblog.com.This blog is written by a very nice guy Marko. The blog came to my knowledge because Marko featured as as a guest blogger at probloggr.net.

Here is that guest post I am talking about. According to Marko ,he got 287 visitors from that guest post and also 60 subscribers just after his post was published (source). Now, these figures might not sound like great but it is really great figure for a blog which is relatively new. At the time of writing this post Marko has more than 200 subscribers to his blog.

My conclusion on this is, a new blog requires an initial offshoot to take off in the blogosphere and I reckon guest posts to be the fastest and relatively easier way to provide that off shoot.

Tip #3- Start commenting on related and well established blogs-

Commenting is the easiest method to drive traffic to a blog. Although you won't get flood of visitors to your blog by commenting but by being a consistent comment maker you can gradually build traffic to your blog. Just take care of following points while commenting-

1. Comment on blogs with high readership
2. Be first to comment on a post.
3. Make your comments useful and unique
4. Make your comments eye catching by making use of bold and italic tags.

More details on comment making in this post- "How to master the art of comment making on other blogs?"

Tip #4- Make full use of social media-

Web 2.0 has already taken its full effect and it would be insane not to use social media sites in the era of web 2.0. One of the biggest reason why I am a fan of the social media sites is because they give instant results. You submit your pages to these sites and manage to get some votes and booom, you start seeing a lot of visitors coming to your pages.

Again I will take the example of Twitip.com. One of the reasons why twitip.com took off too quickly is because Darren made use of his strong profiles on social media sites to drive traffic to this blog. I have often seen Darren voting his posts on Stumble Upon. Furthermore, he always announces his new posts on Twitter. Here is the screenshot of one of the updates Darren made on Twitter-

Now, Darren has more than 25,000 followers on Twitter and announcing his new post updates to those thousands of followers means thousands of visitors to his blog.

Apart from Stumble upon and twitter many other social sites are there on internet and making use of these sites is an excellent way to generate some traffic to your blog. Also a blog needs to have an unique content to get viral in these sites but I have seen many average and some below average posts also getting some traffic from social media sites.

Tip #5- Advertise through Adwords-

Personally I don't prefer this method but many bloggers advertise their blogs during early days and once they accumulate some readers they pull off those ads. This can be an excellent way to drive traffic to anew blog but it is not free and might not be suited for many of us.

These are a few ways a new blog generates some traffic. Driving traffic to a new blog is pretty difficult undertaking but it can be achieved by keeping yourself motivated and trying hard. The initial times are hardest in a bloggers life and if you win this situation ,I am sure you can cruise along nicely later.