5 tips to make your blog more popular

Posted by Jean-Baptiste Jung on Jul 28, 2008 in Blogging Tips • 23 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.

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