Driving Traffic to Your Blog by Edith Yeung, part 1

Every once in a while we find a great blogging article worth sharing with our readers, and this one from Edith Yeung is important. Edith shares her own experiences driving traffic to her fairly new blog, and she is apparently having success.

We'll break this up into two parts, each one sharing three important sites you can use to increase traffic to your own blogs. I don't know about you, but I always learn when I see people doing things and who can break it down into steps and numbers. Even though these items aren't new, they are worth repeating. Enjoy.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Website or Blog
by Edith Yeung

I recently left corporate America to pursue my dream to positively impact the lives of 1,000,000 people by March 15, 2008. In order to achieve this, I have been intensely building both my public speaking skills as well as my website blogging skills.

I love speaking in front of a live audience and I also believe in the power of technology and the ability to help people even when I am sleeping. Since EdithYeung.com was launched on April 2nd, 2007, I am grateful to have had 811 unique visitors in the first 29 days.  For the first 9 days in May, there have been 497 unique visitors.  My goal for this month is to surpass 5000 visitors. I believe I can do it.

Several friends from National Speaker Associations (NSA) have asked me to write about my lessons learned (so far) about driving traffic to my website. Keep in mind that the following is based my own personal experience and results. Obviously there are many other ways to drive traffic, but I prefer methods that are simple, repeatable and incur zero cost.

Here we go:

BlogCarnival.com - A blog carnival is basically a community that creates online “magazines”.  Each carnival is a collection of blogs and articles focused on a specific topic. You can submit your blog to multiple carnivals. If the carnival organizer likes what you submitted, they will publish your work on their website and will link back to your site. (For Example: Networking Carnival (May 4, 2007 Edition) )

Blog Carnivals are an excellent way to drive traffic and meet other experts on topics that you are interested in. I typically visit Blog Carnival once a week and submit my articles to various carnivals in time for their “Next Edition” coming up. One third of my traffic comes from carnivals that I have submitted to.

Digg.com I 'digg' everyday. Digg.com is a reader driven social content website. Once you become a Digg.com member, you can submit content, read content submitted by other users and “digg” the content if you like it. The more people “Digg” you, the more popular your blog would become. The “Digg” community has a very large readership. One quarter of my traffic comes from Digg.com.

To be continued...

Comments

[Marilyn Bohn]

I blog almost every day and I was thrilled to see another place besides on my web site that I can send blogs. THANK YOU

[Bill Dueease]

Edith, Digg has been a real supporter of blogs. What other blog group would you recommend that might attract a different audience than Digg?

[Edith Yeung]

There are two websites came to mind right now.

1) ShoutWire – I just got on the front page of this site with 30+ votes. J (For example: http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/90946/Be_The_Best_at_Just_One_Thing)

2) Dailyhub - http://www.dailyhub.com/DailyHub - More business focus.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Edith Yeung