Not enough people are reading my website, and I'm too impatient

[eurasiaborder]

1. The easiest instrument is Twitter. Type your URL in Bio and just communicate with everyone. But follow only live people not bots. Traffic will grow itself.
2. The second important instrument is forums and famous blogs. Just comment.

[Invader_Stu]

The thing I have learned is you always have to be active. Your blogs url in a few places but that will only get you visitors for a short while. It's best to stay active on forums and other peoples blogs.

[gtodd09]

How have you advertised your site? Is your traffic coming from searches? Set up a Twitter account and post on that every day or so. This will also help with SEO. I found a good free e-book at bloggerspaybackpro.com that they are giving away. It helps you understand how to best utilize Twitter to increase traffic to you blog.

[SEObySwaby]

Originally Posted by DinoDave

First of all, I know I shouldn't be so impatient.
But I'm reading people's threads saying that they average 80-100 views a day and they've only had their blogs up and running for a few weeks.
I've had mine for two months now and I average about 4 views a day. It's a little frustrating, because I do spend time trying to advertise and promote my writing.
I've done press releases
Joined all sorts of websites that seem more than happy to promote blogs
I've posted on Craigslist (interesting results with that one)

I don't know. I feel like I'm running out of ideas. And the reason I started the website was to share stories with others. If I didn't want other people to read my articles, I obviously wouldn't have a website.

And that's another thing. I started up my website from scratch. I didn't sign up with Blogger or any similar websites. It's 100% me.

Any suggestions for a newbie such as myself?

I looked at your site and see a few challenges with it. First of all, I would publish the full pages on your home page, not just the snippet. It gives the spiders more to look at. People too!

I also noticed your page URLs don't match your article titles. Are you changing those page names yourself? Your URL and the article title should have matching keywords. It's OK if the URL leaves out pronouns.

I recommend you read my article on page titles for spiders. Once you start doing that, then you can market your site on these ten sites for easy traffic. (just copy an paste the bolded items in my blog search and you'll find the right articles)

Four visits a day is far too few at this point in the game. I would think you'd be getting several dozen. Take a look at my blog for some other tips for building traffic.

[scfscf]

My blog is also very new. I have been trying to find blogs that overlap subject areas I write about and emailing and/or friending writers of ones I like. Some of them have become my readers, followers, or friends. This morning one of them offered a link exchange (I had just added a section on my blog where I post links to blogs and other websites I have been reading). I've got 3 followers so far, not much compared to some folks, but a big deal to me considering my blog isn't quite 2 weeks old.

[erik]

I think ishan is right about the value of guest posting. That's a great way to boost traffic to your site.

When you get started, it's a real chicken and egg problem. Even if you're producing the most amazing content to ever appear in your niche, if nobody's reading it, there won't be any word of mouth. They say you need to have money to make money, and in much the same way you need to have an audience to build an audience.

One point that nobody's made in this thread is that, early on, you should be spending more energy promoting your blog than writing for it. If you're writing dozens of articles that have a readership of three, there's no way all the time you're investing is going to do much to grow your audience.

So, keep churning out great content, but put at least two-thirds of your energy into following some of the audience-building advice you see in this thread. Good luck!

[dibbs98]

I personally found i have had good responses from forums (although i am quite new to this one) and also going the family/friends route. Hopefully things will spread by word of mouth/email etc. I also haven't had much luck with "submit your url now!" sites and the like...

[Cephus]

The first thing you need to do is find other blogs that cater to the same sort of audience you do and post there. Make sure you enter your blog address in the "enter website here" field. If you find blogs you enjoy, ask if you can do a link exchange. They'll add your blog to their blogroll if you'll do the same for them. Try to find a number of blogs that you can visit every day or so and comment a lot (although not just to get your name out there, be serious about it).

Secondly, see if there are any forums which fit your profile and get an account there. Go post. Put your blog in your sig. If you've written a post that applies to the topic at hand, link to it. Be honest that it's your personal blog. People will slowly start filtering in.

Thirdly, set up SEO. That means properly tagging all of your posts so Google and other search engines will see it. It does take a couple of weeks for search engines to start paying attention, but it does happen. If you look at your site's analytics, the Google spider ought to be your #1 incoming website, they'll hit you constantly to check for updates.

Fourth, provide links for your posts to places like Digg and StumbleUpon. There are Wordpress plugins that will do this for you automatically. Every single huge post-read I've ever had has been because someone stumbled upon it and it took off.

Finally, be patient. It takes time. Sometimes lots of time. I don't think I started getting a lot of hits for 3-4 months, then it went through the roof.

Good luck.

[AMWhelan]

If worst comes to the worst there is always the option of paying for traffic! PPC guarantees visitors but does cost money money money!!!