Craig Soup Web Design Blog

When you first start building a blog, the temptation to spend all of your time increasing traffic is almost unbearable. However, if you want to create a successful blog, the most important thing you can do for it in the beginning is to just start creating some solid content. If your website has good, solid content that’s worth coming back to, then eventually someone will notice and word will spread.

On the other hand, once you’ve created some solid content, you’ll want to start exploring different ways of building traffic to your blog. There are endless techniques for doing so, and there are entire blogs devoted to teaching these techniques. But you have to start somewhere.

Well, for my School of Flash blog, I recently started exploring some of these techniques, and in just a couple of weeks, I’ve been able to boost my traffic from 20 visits a day to over 400 visits a day. If I was able to do this in just a couple weeks, imagine how much more traffic I’ll be able to pull in over a few months and over a couple of years.

So, how did I do it? Well, it’s difficult to point at any one thing, considering I’ve been trying so many, but I did want to share with you a couple of things I’ve done to boost my traffic so much. Following is a list of techniques that will help you get the traffic you’re looking for.

1. Submit your site to search engines. This is step numero uno! If search engines don’t know about your site, then how do you ever expect to achieve any organic traffic? If you want to know if Google has recognized your site yet, simply do a search on Google for your domain name (i.e., search for “craigsoup.com”). If you get no results, then your site hasn’t been recognized yet. So take the time to submit your website to all the search engines and directories you can get your hands on.
2. Include a link to your RSS feed. Make it a big link! This is how you get people to continue coming back to your site. I would suggest using Feedburner for your RSS feeds. It’s a wonderful free tool, and it also allows you to build forms to get your readers to subscribe using their email addresses.
3. Build traffic through social media. This is the one that gave my site a big boost. Through a combination of Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and MySpace, I’ve been heavily marketing my site. Every time I create a new blog post, I submit the post to Digg, and this has brought me an increasing flow of traffic. Another blogger even saw one of these posts on Digg and linked to it on his own blog (which is why it’s so important to create QUALITY content)!

   My latest monumental surge of traffic, though, has come from StumbleUpon. Just like with Digg, every time I create a new blog post, I go to the page for that post and vote for that page on StumbleUpon. I did this last night when I posted a new tutorial on ActionScript 3.0 Masks, and this morning I woke up to find that I had a record number of visitors for the day . . . and that was at 8 IN THE MORNING!

4. Post regularly. If you’re a sporadic poster, don’t bother. It will be practically impossible to build any sort of steady traffic if you only post once a month. Try to post AT LEAST twice a week. Every day, if possible!

There are hundreds of other things you can do to build traffic, but this is a good start. What have you done to increase traffic to your website?

As some of you may have noticed, things have been pretty quiet on this blog lately. Well, they’re about to get even quieter, but for a good reason.

I recently started a new blog called School of Flash, and I intend to put a lot of effort into making this new blog into a valuable resource for anyone interested in Flash. So head on over and let me know what you think.

Also, let me know if there are any questions you have or any tutorials you would like to see.

As you’ve probably noticed, I have historically posted about whatever was on my mind. Most of it has been design-related, but every now and then, I’ve thrown out a few things that really have nothing to do with the world of design or freelancing.

That’s going to change.

I plan on refocusing my blog in an effort to make it more relevant to anyone out there who may be reading it. Instead of writing whatever comes to mind (I’ll save my personal blog for that), I plan to create posts that deal with with design, freelancing, and sometimes blogging.

Hopefully this narrower focus will enhance the quality of my content and keep readers coming back.

Thanks for reading!

If you want to learn more about the lucrative world of blogging, then let me suggest a site which also happens to be one of the most beautiful websites I’ve ever laid eyes on: BlogSolid.com.

At Blogsolid, learning about blogging can be both educational and aesthetically pleasing (and nobody is paying me to say that)! Maybe I haven’t totally recovered from my nap just yet, but I can’t stop staring at this site. I would venture to say that this website, second only to my wife, is the most visually pleasing thing I’ve seen all week!

But the great thing about this website is that the beauty doesn’t stop with mere aesthetics. Blogsolid has also been very well structured. In fact, it’s almost like three blogs in one. The “solid basics” section contains a series of posts on the fundamentals of blogging, and the “solid growth” and “solid power” sections delve into some more advanced topics for making your blog all it can be.

So head on over to Blogsolid and allow yourself to be both inspired and educated all at the same time.