Increasing Blog Traffic with Interviews and Guest Posts

Image by Emma Larkins

Every blogger wants to learn new ways to increase traffic to his or her blog. After all, what's the fun of writing online if no one is going to read your stuff? You might as well chisel it onto a block of marble and drop it into the ocean if you can't develop a readership.

Publishing interviews and guest posts on your blog serves to increase visibility immediately, and also to increase number of visitors over the long run.

Interviews

Interviews are great for a variety of reasons.

• They let other people in your industry know that you exist.
• You can learn terrific new things about publishing houses, other authors, techniques for getting published, etc.
• They increase the traffic to your blog, because the interviewee usually posts one or more backlinks, and helps to promote the interview in other ways as well.

Interview with Gord McLeod on Community Fridays

Welcome to Community Fridays! During this weekly event, I interview authors, editors, publishers, and pretty much anyone else who I can get my hands on from the writing and publishing community. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to suggest new participants. Check out current and past interviews here. Only have a minute? Click here for interviews at a glance.

Today's guest is Gord McLeod, tech blogger, fiction writer in the steampunk genre, and owner of the new site Fiction Improbable.

In the comments section on a post on your blog, we had a little mini-brawl over whether it was better to write the first draft quickly or slowly. Just kidding; it was all very civil. Honestly, I'm still on the fence on this one. What, in your opinion, are the benefits of taking your time on a first draft?

The big benefit that comes to mind first is that when you take your time on a first draft you have the time to plan it out well and make sure you’re not missing any vital pieces of the story. Rushing carries the risk that your draft will have giant holes. The potential problem is the same thing though—you have the time to cover ground. A lot of ground. So much ground that you risk not finishing at all, of getting caught up in an unending cycle of editing that leaves you unable to write and make progress.

You Amuse Me Now on Blogger

Not much to mention today, except for the fact that I've switched You Amuse Me over to a Blogger platform.

I was hosting it with Weebly before the switch. I really like Weebly, and I'm still hosting my personal website there. However, I wanted the main part of You Amuse me to be a blog that I'd update on a regular basis, and Blogger is just a better platform for blogging (not surprisingly).

If you haven't checked it out yet, give it a look. Tons of fun and entertaining stuff to see and do. Let me know what you think!

April 2011 Goals Recap

April has just come to an end. Time to see how I did on those goals!

1. Decide on where I want to go with writing fiction. Well... so far I've taken a break from fiction this month. I need to make sure that the passion is there before I throw myself into another project, or spend more time working on my old ones.
2. Write Weird Worm articles. I want to get at least 20 13 7 done this month. I managed to do a total of 13, which isn't too bad.
3. Plan for travel. I haven't made too much progress on this. My mom is trying to drum up support from the relatives.
4. Keep up with exercising. I want to average 10 miles per week by the end of April. I did great with this goal! 51 miles of running/walking/biking, a personal best.
5. Start a cooking blog? This has fallen by the wayside as I realize that at this point, it will be hard for me to optimize keywords for this type of blog, and there probably won't be a lot of potential for income. I've noticed that people who look up recipes usually aren't looking to buy things. As long as I'm trying to increase my income, I need to focus on moneymakers. 
6. Keep improving traffic to my online articles. My Squidoo traffic is increasing slowly but surely. Still looking for the best niche markets to explore, which will help this.

One thing I did this month that I hadn't planned was to submit my first travel writing article. Still waiting for a response, but it's a pretty cool step no matter what happens!

Don't Fear The Blog

Blogging is a great method for growing your visibility in the online writing community. In addition, I've found that it helps to keep me on track with my goal of writing every day. The act of regularly writing articles that I know will be read by other people (at least, according to what I see on Google Analytics) forces me not only to write, but to write something I believe will be useful, interesting, and/or entertaining.

If you're reading this, you probably have a good grasp of what blogs are, and more than likely you have a blog of your own. However, a large segment of the population doesn't even know what the word 'blog' means, let alone how to set one up. And having at least a rudimentary knowledge of blogging doesn't necessarily guarantee comfort with the idea. There are many out there who don't know if they'll be able to contribute regularly enough to build a following, or whether the online community will have any interest in what they have to say.

I started out the same way, not knowing if writing this blog was a good idea or a terrible idea. But so far, so good. It's kept me on my toes with the whole writing thing, and new people continue to stumble across it (and sometimes even come back more than once!). Not to mention all the useful things I've learned while researching what to post on my little corner of the internet.

Bottom line is, it's worth a try to get into blogging. You might even enjoy it more than you think. Sign up for Blogger, Wordpress, or any other blogging platform you feel comfortable with, then read this article on ProBlogger for great tips for building a good blog.

del.icio.us: Social Bookmarking as Promotion Tool

Okay, so I'm pretty sure I'm one of the last people on the internet to discover the site del.icio.us. The tastiness of the name has caught my eye many times in the past, but I've always been too intimidated to give it a look. To me it was some scary internet phenomenon meant only for internet uber-masters, something akin to rss feeds (still trying to figure out how those work.) The mysterious url format threw me off. How would I even access it? Did I need to have a special widget to run it? Would I have to locate and install drivers off a mirror site in China? Would it hurt?

Anyways, turns out it really is just a plain old url, and it's not scary or difficult at all. So just in case you're like me and you're new to the site, here's what you need to know.

To get started, you create a profile, and then add a bunch of bookmarks for your favorite websites. You can add a button to your toolbar to simplify the process. Once you bookmark a site, you enter a description and a bunch of tags. The tags will help you in the future when you've collected links to many sites and want to search for only the ones about, say, Tolkien. Or hot dogs. Except you can't use spaces, so the tag would have to be hot.dogs or hot-dogs.

So how does this link back to promoting your writing? Well, the more times people bookmark your site, the higher it ranks on the Popular list (similar to Digg), and the more likely it is that people will find their way there. Also, you can create a network of fellow users, and share your sites with them. And here's one more thing to try: go to the Popular page, and take a look at the tags there. I'm not saying that you should add a bunch of unrelated tags to your sites, but if you see something there that applies to you, by all means use it. For example, this blog is intended to help people with writing/getting published, so I could tag it as "howto" and make it easier for people to find their way here. It's all about connecting people to the information they want as expeditiously as possible.

Thanks to this article on The Dough Roller for getting me to try out del.icio.us!