Buzz on web design contests, awards, and giveaways for bloggers. Win prizes, network, make new friends, and promote your site.
There is a free method for driving traffic to your site. It involves publishing mini-blogs that provide back links to your main blog. The mini-blogs need to be related to the topic of your main site, but subservient to it (sub-niches to your niche).
For example, I want to attract traffic to my niche blog, àlaFurBabies, which is about pets. So I created a sub-niche Squidoo lens about a popular dog breed, the Bichon Frise, that links back to àlaFurBabies.
In theory, A sub-niche mini-blog that reaches a narrow (but avid) audience will rank higher in search engine results because there is less competition. In my example, there are fewer sites devoted to “Bichon Frise” than there are for “Pets.” My Bichon mini-blog still needs to compete for search engine results (there’s always that caveat), but among far fewer competing sites.
The mini-blog that ranks is in position to link interested visitors to the main website. You can create numerous mini-blogs on different topics that all relate to the main website topic, thereby driving targeted traffic to the main site from many sources that you control. Remember, regardless of the competitive standing of your mini-blogs, they are providing topic-related back links to your main site.
Is this traffic-building method effective? I don’t know. I’m experimenting! Undoubtedly, there are many factors involved.
In addition, your mini-blog has a different IP address from your main blog. This is important for those of you who have a paid hosting service that allows you to have several blogs, and who might be considering linking from one to another. If all your blogs on the hosting service have a shared IP address, the back links are less impressive to search engines.
By the way, don’t link from your main site to the mini-blog. Cross-linking looks like swapped links to search engines, and reduces the credence they give your back link. Just use your mini-blog to link to your main site, and leave it at that.
What are the drawbacks with this method? First, you need to create and maintain another blog. Secondly, you now have two blogs to which you’re trying to drive traffic. (Sounds crazy, heh?) If you create multiple mini-blogs, there is even more work to manage.
What’s the up-side? Mini-blogs are relatively fast and easy to set up. Nor do they require rigorous maintenance.
With time being a precious commodity, how frequently should you update a mini-blog? At the beginning you must update often, so that search engines will notice it. Once the back link to your main site is established, you can ease up a bit. TIP: Choose a mini-blog topic that is easy for you to update!
Once you create a mini-blog, such as a Squidoo lens, you belong to a blogging community. The more involved you are, the more attention you can attract to your site. There are always interesting benefits in community, but it does require more of your time and energy to contribute in a meaningfully way.
If you like the idea of mini-blogging, Squidoo is good place to begin. There is a helpful “Health” assessment system that alerts you to pitfalls as you create a lens. You can click the “Health” tab, for instance, to see if the tags you entered for your lens are search engine friendly or if they need to be improved.
But there are plenty of others to check out: Tumblr, Posterous, HubPages, and Vox, to name a few. Each try to offer something unique. Tumblr has a tremendous array of themes from which to choose. Several allow you to post via email. A lot of them let you share in advertising revenue.
Some people create hundreds of HubPages and Squidoo lens. Find the super bloggers at these services and study them. Aside from the benefit of creating back links and driving traffic to your main site, reportedly there is money to make on the mini-blogs themselves from advertising!
If you’re already into mini-blogs, what has been your experience? Do you utilize them to direct traffic to another site? Which services do you use? Have you earned advertising revenue? What’s your best mini-blogging tip?
Related posts:
Interesting idea. I’ve never been into mini-blogging that much, but I’ll try it in future. With some time, I think it can work very well in supporting the main website.
It’s encouraging that you also think mini-blogging can be effective for supporting a main site. It surely does take time…and energy!
JoAnn,
I’m using Posterous for miniblogging which feeds directly into my Tumblr blog. I’m not seeing much traffic coming from them though, but perhaps I’m not using them in the way that you suggest. I should consider including more backlinks. Thanks for the advice.
@Ileane
.-= ileane´s last blog ..Posterous – Lifestreaming or Not? =-.
Hey very interesting idea and good information given by you for driving traffic to our website.i will look at this.Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for commenting, and good luck with your site traffic goals.
Although I don’t agree with everything there are some good valid point made here.