I'm in desperate need of help!

[Mouchois]

I'm fairly new to the blogging game. About a week in, now.

I think I'm doing fairly well, but I have no clue where I stand. I'm in a smaller niche, well... I was in a smaller niche. I recently decided to expand my post content into several other areas, but staying focused on one certain idea.

My blog started as an awareness blog for Teacup breeding through my Teacup Himalayan, Melvin, who started life pretty hard.

Over the course of a couple of days, I decided it was harder and harder to just post about a cat, so I decided to use Melvin as a character and now I'm working on a schedule with several niches.

Schedule is as follows:

SATURDAY: Caturday!
SUNDAY: Freewrite
MONDAY: Movies, TV shows or Melvin's YouTube Favorites
TUESDAY: Teacup awareness
WEDNESDAY: Music
THURSDAY: World news
FRIDAY: Games and Fun

I started this schedule this Saturday, so I don't have anything in the other fields, yet. Right now, my blog is just cute pictures of a cute cat and some random cat info.


What are some tips you have for me to drive more traffic to my blog and also what are some good sources of information for those areas (maybe your own blog?)

Any comments will help.

Thanks in advance.

[Mouchois]

I'm also wondering, what are some ways that I can drive continual traffic to my blog that actually WORK?

I'm a complete newb and need manuals. Lol.

[lorryholly]

I went on Digital Spy Forum and put my link on there. 331 views to date in 3 days. Question here is- how do I post a blog on here?

[Nathan]

Mouchois,

First, welcome to the blogging community.

The first thing that you need to remember as a new blogger is to have patience. Every blogger enters the field looking forward to tons of traffic, but they don't realize that it may take months before you get good regular visitors to your blog.

Developing your cat blog will require much work, but I can see that you are already on the right track with your posting schedule. Its good to have regular content, but don't wear yourself right at the start, because many days you may have only a few visitors to read your blog anyway. At the start, posting every other day works fairly well.

As far as attracting new visitors to your blog, you will want to try to parallel tracks of promotion. First, you must try to get search engine traffic, second you want referral traffic.

Search engine traffic is traffic from people who look up "Teacup Himalayan" for example and see your blog in the search results. They click through and visit it. This is one of the most reliable long term forms of traffic, but it takes months to develop.

Basically, you boost search engine traffic by writing descriptive, keyword rich posts and post titles. You must also create valuable blogroll link exchanges with other pet bloggers to boost your blogs PR, which is Google's measure of your blogs informational value. If you have a high PR, Google will send more traffic to you, by showing you in search engine results more frequently.

The second kind of traffic you want is referral traffic. This is traffic from other sites. It may come from other blogs that you have exchanged blogroll links with, or it may come from Twitter, or from forums like this.

Find a cat forum, and talk about your cat, with a link or two to your blog. People will see and visit.

Talk about your cat on Twitter, with links to your blog.

Basically, you want to create links everywhere to your blog and blog posts. This attracts traffic and boosts PR.

Some free advertising services such as Entrecard and CMF Ads can also help you to get traffic when you are new, but the traffic is usually not very high quality, consisting almost entirely of people who visit you page for only a few seconds before leaving.

It can be good to get some comments and perhaps a few regular visitors, but in the long term you need to work on building PR, and building a strong web reputation and following.

Blogging is a long term project. As long as you keep this in mind, you will be able to continue the process and enjoy it for years to come.

If you have any questions feel free to ask them. The members of Bloggeries will be glad to help.

[Mouchois]

I've yet to understand Twitter.
I mean, I'm young and have been on Facebook and Myspace and totally understand how those work, but how exactly DOES Twitter help? It just seems to be such a jumbled mess! Haha

[Mouchois]

Also, I'm curious as to if I'm doing all that well. Being a new blogger, I have no clue what kind of numbers I should have or what to expect.

My blog is currently up to around 200-500 unique views daily and I have 35 Blogger followers as well as 71 feeds. For a blog that is only ten days old, is this good, normal, or terrible?

[swillard8]

that's amazing! Really well done! You have profited from a good marketing technique it seems! Everyone loves cats really so you appeal to millions

[sarahlam]

Wow, you get that traffic in just ten days? Amazing..

[Mouchois]

I think it helped a lot that Melvin was featured on quite a few larger blogs within the pet niche. I actually didn't know that that was good!

[sarahlam]

Well, now you just need to maintain the excellent stat and gain as many traffic as you need according to what Nathan has mentioned in his post. He provided very good explanation on what you can do.