Once you have found very cheap web hosting, selected your domain name, installed your blog, and got it customized the way you like it, you might be a little puzzled on how to get people to actually visit your blog. Nothing is more discouraging than typing out well thought and well put together articles only to see your hit counter increase by spam bots and nothing else. This article will attempt to address some methods in which you can increase readership of your blog and get the hits to pour in!
Have you optimized your blog for search engines? Different blogging tools have a variety of search engine optimization features available for users of every experience level. You might have the greatest content in the entire world but without a little bit of search engine optimization, even the search engines will not notice you. If you are at a total loss, contact your very cheap web hosting company for some recommended search engine optimization vendors to get you started.
Building upon search engine optimization, all of your posts should have “tags.” Most popular blogging tools come with some type of tag insertion features to help you add search engine optimization to your blog. For example, if your blog post is all about how to finance a car, you might want to consider some tags of : “car financing,” “auto financing,” and “how to finance a car.” These are just suggestions, of course, you would really want to make your tags relevant to your article. The tags are what enable the search engines (and in turn, the users) get to the specific information they are trying to acquire.
Do you have any sort of network? If you are not sending people to your website or developing link relationships, the search engines will not pay much attention to your website. There is a slew of free social networks available on the web today that you can get involved with and building a presence within. Send users to your website, but do not build your presence around that link. It must be integrated seamlessly so people do not label you as a spammer. Get yourself out there. Make friends, acquaintances, and build business relationships.
MySpace and Facebook get around 250,000,000 unique visitors per month (combined). If you grab the attention of only .0001% of that market, you are still picking up 250 additional users per month which will give you a big increase in viewers!
One cannot stress enough the importance of diligence and patience in this process. If you are not determined and give up after one month, your blog will inevitably fail. Keep refining your search keywords for more relevant search results.
Get out there and look at other blogs to see what they are doing. Is your content significantly different from other blogs about your topic? Is your blog designed in an appealing way? Check out sites like blogsearch.google.com and Technorati to search blogs and get fantastic ideas on how to develop your site into a more popular hub for your selected topic.
There are professional consultants and experts that can assist you with getting your site to the center stage. Contact your cheap web hosting company to see if they have referrals or professional organizations they work with on a regular basis that may be able to assist you with development of your blog. If your cheap hosting company is unable to offer assistance, you can always seek an independent contractor to assist you with your project. Sites like elance.com and rentacoder.com allow you to request bids on your projects but have processes in place to protect your investment in addition to the coder’s work.
Last but probably the most important factor of all, update your blog! Static content is out dated and completely unappealing to the user. Try to update your blog at least once a day with relevant content. There are many ping services offered by blogging software that are often free to use. These services will send a “ping” or notice to the popular blog search engines that you have updated your blog. Sites that update frequently get preferential treatment by the search engines and as such end up with higher rankings.
Ensure that your very cheap web hosting is able to keep your website online at least 95% of the time. If your site is down for an extensive period of time, the search engines will quickly punish your ranking and could remove you all together from the listings.
