Blog Traffic Jam
September 22nd, 2008
I’ve been researching tips on how to improve the web traffic to my blog and here’s the top five that I’m going to experiment with:
- Be controversial! I’ve learned first hand that death by ten thousand flames on slashdot.org is good for site traffic.
- Blog on wet weekends - apparently people catch up on reading when there’s nothing better to do. Given the soggy summer that they’ve just had I assume that the British have now read right the way to the end of the internet.
- Choose blog titles more judiciously. While it’s amusing that people have wound up here when searching for fairy tales, tv-shows and movies, I’m not sure that people searching for “open source database” or “enterprise open source”, my target audience, will have found the blog.
- Lure popular technology bloggers to point to my posts. That should result in their readership visiting 25B and hopefully they’ll return. The ZD Net post “Ingres Gives Fortify Security Study a Good Fisking” caused a significant spike in traffic. No doubt it also caused a similar spike for the “fisking” entry on dictionary.com.
- Tag each post with “girls, girls, girls in open source”. Alternatively, tag posts with “Open Source Security” - apparently that’s the one tag that’s more popular than “Girls, girls, girls”!
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:20 am
How fast does the traffic flow away? Are we into a Mexican wave style traffic Jam that pulses down the wire or more of a 125 mile M25 Jam? (for the Non-UK amongst us the M25 is the London Outer Ring Road). Perhaps there’s a space for the talking-blog for drivers stuck in real traffic Jams.
September 23rd, 2008 at 6:34 am
Well, in my case I came to your blog following a link you left on another blog that I read time to time. As far as being controversial for the sake of getting traffic I found that, at least in my case, I stop reading such blogs.
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:33 am
To Tragicomix: Yes, I agree! I should clarify that being controversial for the sake of generating traffic would be off-putting to the readership that I’m trying to cultivate, but being controversial and stirring up a conversation wiith the community can be insightful. Last year I hosted a session at OSCON titled “Databases Don’t Matter” - that tittle alone filled the room! The conclusion was, of course, that databases *do* matter, but it was a very interesting debate.
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:59 am
Emma, there is no “fisking” entry at dictionary.com (though you will find a good one at wikipedia.org). P.S. I believe this comment fits the definition of “fisking”.
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:06 am
MikeT You’re absolutely right! That’s where I found the definition! I’ll have to do better fact checking in the future
September 29th, 2008 at 4:10 am
Emma,
you might add ways of browsing your blog. E.g. by putting on the sidebar :
a) recent comments
b) most popular articles
c) random articles
d) a list of related posts at the bottom of every article
Michel