State of the Blogosphere 2009 - The How of Blogging

Part Three of Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2009 focuses on the How of Blogging. There are some interesting stats on how bloggers drive traffic to their blogs that jumped out at me.

Look at the "self-employed" (that's you and me - professionals and entrepreneurs who use a blog to market their business) numbers.

From most popular to least, we are using the following ways to drive visitors to our blogs:

1. List your blog on Technorati
2. Tag your blog posts
3. List your blog on Google (have you set up a Google profile with links to your blog?)
4. Comment on other blogs
5. Get listed on blog directories
6. Link to blogs on a blogroll
7. Produce content on other blogs
8. Attend conferences for bloggers
9. Create a blog on a broader network
10. Pay for online advertising

How does that fit with your traffic driving activities? It's not really how it plays out for me. My #1 source of traffic is from organic search results and #2 is from twitter. 

By the way, if you haven't listened to my free audio program on How to Drive Qualified Traffic to Your Blog, you can get the audio and transcript here.

Comments

[Scot Herrick]

I'm surprised "offer valuable content on your site" isn't an option for driving traffic. You'd think...

[Andrew FirstFound]

Yeah, I agree with Scot there. In the long term, having useful, valuable content is going to get you more bang for your buck than AdWords.

some good tips though - thanks!

[Denise Wakeman]

I think the "valuable content" option is a given with this report. After you produce the content, you've got to also get the traffic.

[Deborah Smith]

I agree with you Denise. As I was reading down the list I was thinking, where is social media? I get the majority of my traffic through organic search results also. I have found that even though the traffic numbers are much smaller from Twitter & Facebook, the quality of traffic is much better. Visitors who are engaged with me on the social platforms stay longer on my blogs and tend to engage more.