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?

Until recently, I’ve always used the website tracking tools offered by my webhost. For the most part, they were decent tools, but I have several domains on the same server, and it was difficult to weed through all the information to figure out how each domain was doing individually.

Enter Google Analytics.

I had certainly heard of Google Analytics (Who hasn’t?), and I had even heard that it was a fantastic tool, but for some reason, I had always assumed that all analytics tools were the same.

I was wrong. After using GA for only two days, I can already tell that it’s going to be much more informative, much easier to use tool than I could have imagined. So, why is it so handy?

1. First of all, it allows me to view each of my domains separately. Might not sound too exciting, I know, but after a year of using the tools I’ve been using, you’d be excited, too!

2. It’s remarkably easy to use. The different categories of statistics are easy to access and easy to understand. And if you DON’T understand a certain statistic, you can easily click on the “About this report” link on the left side of the page, and it will explain everything for you.

3. It’s a great teacher. Along with explanations of what each report means, Google Analytics also gives you suggestions on how you can improve your stats.

4. Easy link tracking. GA has an amazing “site overlay” tool that opens up your site in a popup window and shows you visually how often each link was tracked (see picture below).

All in all, Google Analytics is an amazing tool that anybody with a website can benefit from (not just web designers). I avoided it for so long (for no good reason), and with my new Flash blog (http://www.SchoolOfFlash.com), I finally decided to swallow the red pill, and I’m glad I did.

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.

Just when I was beginning to think that I couldn’t hate Microsoft any worse, they have to go and prove me wrong.

In an effort to “help” protect us from bad websites, Microsoft’s latest release of the worst browser on the planet (Internet Explorer 7) has started randomly labeling sites as “suspicious” in order to kill commerce.

Okay, so they’re not really trying to kill commerce, and I’m sure their labeling tactics aren’t RANDOM, but from what I’ve read, there seems to be no common thread among people who have had their websites labeled as “suspicious” by Internet Destroyer . . . I mean Explorer.

And the real kicker is this . . . If Microsoft screws up (which seems to happen more often than not) and labels your site as “suspicious”, then you have to go to their website, fill out a form, and wait around for them to “check out” your website to make sure everything is alright.

Get over yourself, Microsoft, and stop trying to “help” people who don’t need it!

GET FIREFOX, EVERYONE!!

Well, the Flash Forward conference is in full force, and Boston is beautiful! The weather here is absolutely perfect right now! The sun is out in full force but without the oppressive heat of late-summer Texas. In this weather, I’d be just as comfortable in a light sweater as in a short sleeve polo . . . which is fortuitous, because all I brought was short sleeve polos and t-shirts!

The sessions so far have been great! Thus far I’ve been to sessions on Flash games, the SWX data format for Flash, and website branding on social media sites (digg, twitter, MySpace, etc.)

One quick note on MySpace . . . Even though it’s ugly, bulky, and downright icky, MySpace can still be a very powerful tool for driving traffic to your website. There, I said it. Enough about MySpace!

I’m really excited about the next session I’ll be going to. It’s called “One Man Bands - Flash Animators Going it Alone.” Aaron Simpson will be the speaker, and I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.

More later!

I’m catching a plane to Boston this afternoon for the Flashforward Conference, which starts tomorrow. Telling my wife goodbye this morning was harder than I thought it would be, but it’s only for a couple of days, and I’m sure it will go by in a flash (pun intended)!

The speakers at this week’s conference include Aral Balkan, founder of OSFlash; Chris Georgenes, an amazing Flash animator and the owner of Mudbubble design and animation studio (can’t wait for this one); Seb Lee-Delisle, a well known Flash game programmer and animator; Erik Natzke, an amazing designer; and many more!

With such a great lineup, I can’t help but get excited about this! Plus, it’ll be a lot of fun meeting up with other Flashers out there and finding out what other people are doing with Flash and other Adobe products.

I’ll keep you updated!

I was feeling creative today, and I had a picture that I had taken of some old, torn up wallpaper, so I decided to make a little banner out of it. It’s a little dark, but I like the results. Let me know what you think.

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.

I’ve created a set of web icons with a very clean, glossy look to them. They’re available in red and green, and they’re FREE! Should you desire them, you can use them for whatever you want, as long as you give props to craigsoup.com.

The file is in Adobe Illustrator format. Anyways, check them out, and let me know what you think.

Click here to download