Thanks for dropping by and for those well thought out words of wisdom.

I will break those down and apply them to my situation this weekend.

I had been thinking about a .pdf document to give away to increase visibility and readership. Now all I have to do is create it !

Should be able to create a good list with it, too.

Here are a couple of tips I’ve picked up through my experiences:

1. Blog Hot News – Stay on track of the latest news items by scanning news sources. Check out places like Yahoo Buzz (buzz.yahoo.com) or Google News to see what people are searching for. Pick a good topic and blog about it. Write up something really interesting, perhaps, a different angle, a different perspective. If your website has a decent ranking and you have a decent amount of readers, this can be a great way for other bloggers and news sources to find your write up and spread the word out.

2. Spread Virally – There’s nothing quite like having something viral orginate and spread from your blog. This is a WHOLE topic in and of itself, but is by far one of the most successful ways to get a load of traffic.. fast. Create something that people would WANT to spread. Maybe you could create a brilliant little quiz that, when they finish taking it, gives them their results and HTML code that they can drop in their blog and share with their readers. Be sure to include a link back in the code .

3. Write Tutorials – A a good part of my traffic comes through tutorials I’ve written for various open source projects like Wordpress. People find them useful, they use them, and then they tell others! When you’ve written a good tutorial, submit it up on places that accept them. Write something exceptional.. it’ll spread .

Those are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head.. Keep up the good work Mike!

-Jonathan

Thanks for that advice. I’ll give it a try.

BTW – I love the header on your site. Looks like a road that will go where you want it to take you.

One thing I’ve found interesting at least temporary is writing about a subject that’s currently ‘hot’ but apply a different twist. Then, go to various sites that have posts about this topic as well and post comments (comments, mind you, not spam!).

If you do it right and your article is of good quality it might get ‘picked up’ within the blogosphere and result in quite a lot of backlinks.

I tried this with my take on RSS and content theft and it got picked up by waxy.org and later on by quite some other sites. I didn’t experience that before so it seems to be working nicely.

A second tip: If you’ve written a high quality article: submit it to as many sites as possible. Of course bookmark it on del.icio.us with all appropriate tags (important!), furl it etc. etc. Don’t forget digg.com either. It got me many incoming hits.

Note: If you post to sites like digg.com it better be a GOOD post or it won’t have any effect. People hate clicking on links that lead to shitty content

This is not the holy grail or anything but slowly but surely it works. I’m seeing a rise in backlinks to my blog lately which means the hard work pays off if you hang on in there long enough.