There has been a lot of progress in this blog project, and I have started to earn money on a regular basis. This actually made me a bit lazy and I went a couple of months without updates on gho.no, and this blog has been hanging for six months both because of lazyness and because of a turbulent real life (I use that excuse often now, I know!).

Anyways, here’s what I have learned – some of this is repetition of my previous posts but most importantly you will see my exact results and use that to get your blog or website further. I got very little response on my free blog hosting post, all though I host my girlfriends blog now, at least someone picked up on it!

My Status

This image is my weekly visitors graph from Google Analytics.
I now have between 100 and 200 unique readers per day on my Networking With Cisco blog. My ‘crowd’ seems to be filled with a lot of people that surf the web at work, because in weekends I only have between 50 and 100 unique readers, but in return the ones who find their way on a Sunday read a bit longer. (Maybe preparing for work?)

The image is my Google FeedBurner stats.
My feed has had on average 31 subscribers the past half year, all though it has become some more lately after I started socializing on Twitter more actively.

My PageRank has now climbed to 2 from non-existing, which is pretty good. I have written about how to get a higher PageRank before.

So How Did I Make It That Far?
I had a lot of progress when I was very active and wrote a lot of content for the site, you must focus on what the reader wants to read about. I think my writing has become better in time, and that my posts has become more informative and exciting to read – but I can’t say that for a fact. But like everything, writing will also improve as you practice it.

By staying active in the blogosphere, follow me on Twitter if you want to keep in touch with what I am currently doing. I can say this much; There is an exciting project which is soon to be complete that you can take part in using.

One of the things I am doing now is analyzing keywords, trying to find keywords which are searched a lot but with few competitor sites. This often means a lot of research to get the information right, but it will be rewarding to see a bunch of search engine users dump in on your site and finding exactly what they need!

Now I want to know how your blogging progress is going, please leave a comment or trackback when you respond.

Tags: adsense, analytics, blog, blog statistics, blog stats, content, google, money, pagerank, traffic

I have been trying, failing and learning for a week now and I have finally figured out something that seems to provide a certain amount of traffic and it also gave me my first frequent reader.

1. Use BloggingZoom to SHARE CONTENT
   http://bloggingzoom.com is proving as a good source for targeted traffic, blogginzoom is a place where you can post your articles to, it is meant to be used as a source for news for people who are tired of the mainstream media (that last phrasing is directly from their site). On bloggingzoom, only content coming from blogs is allowed, and nothing from the mainstream media.I have just written one article which is now in my ‘upcoming posts’, but it has still given me some hits for whatever reason.
   From what I read, people are getting a lot of success from their bloggingzoom traffic!
2. Use MyBlogLog to SOCIALIZE WITH OTHER BLOGGERS
   Socializing with other bloggers and people within your niche have always been a KEY for getting people to read my blogs and websites regularly. If you write about interesting things, people will want to read your blog, of course – but then they have to know that you exist.I have signed up at MyBlogLog.com, which is a Yahoo service for socializing with other bloggers, kind of a community -ish service. My profile is also to be found http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/holm/

3. Use EzineArticles to GET EXPOSURE
   EzineArticles is a very strict article site, but I am trying to get in there anyways – because from what I have heard, it will give you a whole ton of traffic for each and one of the articles you write for them.
   I have written one article which is in for review, I am not sure if maybe the text formatting screwed up my posting – but they will probably respond within a week or so… I hope.. But according to big bloggers, this one is supposed to be very very good.
4. Use technorati to track your popularity, get exposure, etc.
   Technorati is a blog search engine which aims in tracking blog postings and comments and so on.
   I find that technorati is widely used to track the blogs popularity.
5. Post new stories frequently
   I am sad to say that I haven’t really followed up on that on this blog, while my Networking with Cisco blog has been updated several times per day. Anyways, I find that I get more traffic when I post a new post, but that’s a lot of stuff like automatic RPC services and search engines indexing the new page.

   But along with the search engines, I get real visitors from feeds, extra exposure at all the places my blog is broadcasted, Google tends to love me more when I update frequently and there are basically no negative effects so far. Well, except that I had a comment from a person complaining about spending too much time reading my blog – but that sort of things are the thing pushing me forward.

6. Use Twingly for EXTRA EXPOSURE
   Twingly has emerged lately and are have proven me actually with a lot of referals.
   The two largest Norwegian media (newspaper) sites VG and Dagbladet uses twingly in their articles, and so some Norwegian bloggers like a good personal friend of mine, DeeWoo, actually had a massive amount of hits from a couple of the articles he commented on with a trackback link.
   Don’t think about pagerank, the websites displays your URL by loading a twingly javascript, so the Googlebot will not find your ‘direct links’, I am sorry!

7. Use forums to socialize
   I have registered on a couple of forums, and I am seeing some traffic from these forums.
   They are often VERY focused on niches, so the traffic you will receive is often very very good targeted traffic from people who are genuinely interested in your subject – just like you!

Tags: readers, socialize, traffic

Your blog is up and running, you have posted some good quality content to it just to end up with zero traffic. Why aren’t anyone reading these amazing blog posts?, you may ask.

The reason that you do not get any traffic is possibly that noone knows that your blog exists, yet.

There are a lot of ways to attract traffic to your blog, I will mention the main sources now and document each source much more when I have done proper research.

Google
Google is a good source of traffic, in my last post I mentioned google.
I will also give a more in-depth explanation of Google after a while of trying and testing to see which techniques that actually proves effective.

Forums or communities
By posting quality posts to forums or communities, you will eventually gain frequent readers from the URL in your signature. This is also a good way to get in contact with interesting people within your niche, to learn and share wisdom/links/work.

Get linked with other blogs
When you link to another blog, you can be sure that the owner will take a note of it.
You should try to target the blogs that are in the same size as yours, just remember that Microsoft once was a small company.
This is a very good way to build a good fundament for your blog, and also to get a personal network.
Remember that they need the links just as much as you do!

If anyone of you look at this blog as a good choice for exchanging links with, please contact me!

Be friendly
Being friendly with other people in your niche is probably one of the best ways to get readers and links.
If you can offer help in any subject (for example PHP coding), you will usually get at least backlink for the work.
This is also a good way to build your contact network, which is a good thing to have when choosing this path!

Just follow the road you are taking, get off the slow sidetracks and never look back!

Tags: traffic