5 tips to make your blog more popular

by Jean-Baptiste Jung. 29 Comments -

CatsWhoCode has been launched on June 9, 2008. 6 weeks later, we got a pagerank of 4, more than 1500 unique visitors/day, 150+ rss suscribers and many articles has been tagged popular on digg-like websites as such as del.icio.us, reddit, designfloat and dzone.
Here’s how did we managed to have theses kinda good results in only 6 weeks.

Work and patience

It’s not really a tip, but patience is in my opinion the quality any blogger should have. There’s only a few young blogs that manage to gain trafic in their first months of existence. Once the average internet users saw links to your blog on sites he reads, he’ll consider it as a serious source. On the excellent Blog Profits Blueprint, Yaro Starak explain that in its first 6 months, most blogs gives without expecting to receive. 6 months is generally the time you need to gain a certain experience of blogging and knowing how to write good content. Because, even if you’re really good on your blog topic, writing is not as easy as it seems first. When I started my first blog, it used to be my main problem.

Give something to download

A good way to manage to gain visitors is giving something for free. This “something” can be an e-book, a php or javascript class, a firefox extension or a WordPress Theme.
The OpenBook WordPress theme, distributed on my blog, provide daily visitors, some of them even asked for paid support. Plus, the link located in the theme footer gaves me lots of backlinks, which is mostly responsible of CatsWhoCode technorati authority.

Be a Guest Author on a popular blog

If visitors don’t come to you, why not comming to them? Being a guest author consist of providing articles to a weblog that is not yours. The blog owner gains more content, and you gain more exposure and the opportunity to put some relevant links to your blog.
If you’re thinking that it will be a waste of time and energy to give a post for free to another weblog, just think about how many visitors a post on problogger.net, for exemple, shoould provide you.

I’m a guest author for the excellent WordPress-focused blog HackWordpress.com and all I can say is that this blog provide me many quality trafic.

If you’re interested by being a guest author on CatsWhoCode, refer to this page for more info.

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Pillars Articles

One more tip I got from the Blog Profits Blueprint. A pillar article is a successfull article, which generally obtain 20+ comments and is featured on the homepage of a popular website like del.icio.us.
The gain of trafic with that kind of article is impressive: My Top Ten CSS buttons tutorial list article received more than 8000 unique visitors the day it hitted del.icio.us homepage. Then, it received 8 reviews on StumbleUpon and provided something like 1500 to 4000 unique visitors per day during almost a week.

delicious

Even if many of theses visitors will not come back until they’ll see another link, my feedburner feed count increased a lot.

But you guessed it, when you’re writing an article, it’s impossible to know if it will be successfull or not. You can write about the popular topics of the moment to increase your chances, but your article have to be good of course, but it also have to be it the right place and at the good moment.

Sometimes you will write articles and think they will provide many visitors but in fact, they don’t. And vice-versa.

Promote your articles, not your blog

That’s a big mistake I made during a long time with my first blog: Promoting my blog instead of promoting my articles.
Let me explain this: The very first advice any new blogger receive is to leave comments on other blogs to gain a little bit of trafic. Even if this advice is good, if you leave a comment like “Wow cool, thank you”, don’t expect to receive any visitors just because you have a link to your blog url.

Let’s say you wrote an article about a list of 100 WordPress themes. Once you published it, google the terms “WordPress theme list” and leave comments with a link to your list:

“Thanks for your great list. If anyone is interested, I also published a list of the 100 WordPress theme I really love.”

or

Cool post. I really love the XXX theme, but I think YYY theme shall deserve a place in your list. For those interested, I wrote an article about it on my blog.

It goes without saying that leaving unrelevant/spammy comments will not provide you any trafic, and you should be considered as a spammer by blogs owners…

Also, a good way to promote your website is to buy a 125*125px ad space. Currently, CatsWhoCode gives you the chance to put your advertisment on our sidebar for the extremly cheap sum of 15$/month, for a PR4 website. If you’re interested, you’ll find more info and stats here.

Comments (29) - Leave yours

  2. meneame.net said:

    5 consejos para hacer tu blog más popular…

    CatsWhoCode se ha puesto en marcha el 9 de junio de 2008. 6 semanas más tarde, obtuvo un PageRank de 4, más de 1500 visitantes únicos / día, 150 + suscriptores rss y muchos artículos han sido etiquetados popular en digg-como sitios web, como tal, …

  3. Kyle Eslick said:

    @ JBJ – You definitely deserve the traffic you’re getting. That is incredible considering how recently this site was launched. Once your site gets some age to it that will only improve your traffic over time.

    Oh, and you’re always welcome to write at HWP anytime. Your work is of the highest quality and you also do a great job of supporting your posts via the comments. I am not surprised at all at how successful you are so quickly!

  4. jbj said:

    Thanks a lot for your compliments, Kyle! I’m glad you enjoy CWC as I enjoy HWP :)
    For sure I’ll have a new post to publish on Hack WordPress very soon, I’m already thinking about it!

  8. jbj said:

    The CatsWHoCode theme? I thought about releasing it, but the problem is that it’s too much specific to our blog. But I should create a theme with similar design and functionnality.
    I can help you with openbook (answering your questions for free, or going to your blog and do the work for a small paypal donation)

    Greetings shoban!
    jbj

  9. shoban said:

    It would be great if you are doing a release of CatsWhoCode.

    1. Whe I use open book theme… The slide show is not working.
    2. Where can I get the catagory ID?

    Regards
    Shoban

  12. Missy said:

    Wow! Very impressive stats. This blog went from zero to 4 in 6 weeks? Truly amazing.

    The tips you give above are quite helpful, and well expressed. I have been reading recently quite abit about giving away a freebie to gain traffic, RSS subs, and more comments. It’s time i seriously look into it.

    I see you’re a blog theme designer. How much (roughly) do you charge for a custom (but basic) wp theme?

  15. Calvin Cox said:

    Hi jbj,
    I liked what you had to say, especially the one about googling the topic you’re writing about and finding articles with a similar theme in order to contribute something worth reading. I write about blogging all the time and how important it is to a designer’ s business but I still have a lot to learn myself. Thanks for sharing your ideas.
    Calvin

  16. jbj said:

    Glad you liked the article, Calvin! I went on your site and saw you’re from New York, I went there 2 months ago and totally felt in love with the city =)

  18. jbj said:

    I don’t know how is it for a everyday life, I heard that renting/buying a flat is really expensive. Btw, my girlfriend and I already decided that our wedding travel will be in NYC, next year. I can’t wait, really :)

  19. Web design company said:

    Your tips are useful. On one quick glance I have already learned what we are doing wrong for our own blog on web design and search engine marketing. For one; I have been trying to promote my blog instead of independent articles. I am yet to read the blog marketing blueprint so the main tips are yet to come for me.

  22. Sommer-Greenandcleanmom said:

    Good point on not knowing what article you write that will make it to the top. That’s why you just have to write from the heart and of interest. People will decide but you do have to promote your articles not just your site. I’m not to good at this. Sorry, didn’t write an article about any of this! LOL! I just wrote one about being healthy and going back to school and a article on my latest interview with the podcast, more hip than hippie. Does that count? No tech stuff! LOL! Oh, well. Enjoying your blog and articles tonight. Going through and stumbling a few for you!

  26. Mike said:

    I run a computer repair oriented blog (that is also a local on-site repair business) and the tip about posting on other blog sites relative to your own is definitely an outside the box idea. Thank you for writing this excellent post. I will definitely keep your tips in mind!

  27. Jon Wright said:

    Another good reason to promote your articles is that if you blog, by some whim of Google, drops in the SERPs, then you’ll still have traffic coming from the articles.

  28. Sabrina said:

    Even though this post was first written a couple years ago, I think the information that you’ve provided is still relevant. I especially appreciate you discussing how important patience is. As a newbie blogger I had to quickly realize that success is not going to come overnight and that it indeed is going to take lots of hard work.

  29. David said:

    Hey!

    Thanks for the great insight! I am a new blogger on the field but very enthusiastic about the world of digital business and social networks different capabilities, let it be monetizing content or the war between facebook and google. I think blogging is fascinating, especially if you own some good articles! Will try to keep ur recommendations, lets see how it works!

    cheers,

    a fellow blogger!

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