Rainhat – the band

Chasing traffic

Someone wrote, “He who promotes the most, wins” when it comes to music. With that in mind, I’ve been looking for ways to get as much traffic as possible to this blog and to my website. If you want to do the same, here are some useful things.

I found this video on YouTube by a guy named David Skul. It’s called “6 Tips for Increasing Blog Traffic“, though strangely, I only count 5 ways when the guy goes through it all…? Am I missing something? I suggest you check out the video. Here’s also a summary of the things Mr Skul talks about.

• Make sure the content of the blog is good and interesting. Nobody wants to read about useless junk.
• Technorati. This is a search engine and blog resource that can be quite handy. You set up your blog, include it in your technorati profile, and when you post something in your blog, it shows up in technorati as well. And it’s free.
• Set up nice and proper social network profiles, use them like they are supposed to be used, and link to your blog from the profile. This can be Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, anything you like. Just don’t spam. It doesn’t work.
• Feedburner. This is a handy tool that sets up your RSS/Atom feeds in a simple way. You can use it to streamline your feed to a universally readable feed that works on all devices. Feedburner is a part of Google, so you sign in with your Google account. If you have no clue about feeds or what they are, there’s an excellent explanation about that as well. There’s a bunch of cool features in Feedburner. For example, you can set up a teaser on any page you like to show either short snippets or full entries of the latest stuff posted in your blog.
• Link to other blogs. Linking to blogs that are relevant to what your blog is about, makes your blog a better resource to your readers, and therefore it attracts more readers. Whether the blog you link to links back doesn’t really matter as much.

Do all these things work? No clue. I signed up for all of it yesterday, so I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
One more thing that is really useful for keeping track of your traffic is a hit counter. I use one called Statcounter. It’s free for visitor logs up to 500 entries and breaks down the information about who visits what, how, when and from where, in pretty much any way you could possibly think of. Very good for checking where your traffic comes from. For example: in my case, most of my traffic comes from Facebook right now. There’s some from MySpace as well, and a little bit from search engines. If Rainhat starts becoming more known, I expect the amount of hits from search engines would increase. Info like this from the hit counter will tell you what works and what doesn’t for bringing traffic so that you can do something about it.