This makes the last post of this series. For me it was great fun and I hope, you could generated some serious extra traffic for your blog by following the previous 24 articles. Please let me know about your experiences.

This series has so far received more that 6.000 visitors, which is more than a months total number by now. What a success for me. More important, the number of RSS-subscribers raised from ~40 to 138 today, look:

It has been rising before the series, but from the start of it, the raise goes even steeper.

Questions to readers:

• Did you like the series and want more?
• Have you written a series on some topic yourself?

My next series will be a bit different, it´s about blogging mistakes, but I´d like to try some new of distribution for it. …coming soon

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Thank you for visiting my blog. There are new posts here every day. Staying updated is easy: Just subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe to FREE eMail updates. Thanks for visiting!

Linking out to other blogs can increase your traffic. Sounds backwards to you? Here´s how sending out visitors to other blogs helps you increase your own traffic.

A link to an article on another blog provides your readers with additional, valuable information about your topic. This increases the value of your post tremendously. People get more value from your post and will notice, maybe bookmark you or even subscribe to your blog with hope of more value to come.

The other blogger, who you have linked to, will definitely notice the link. Bloggers are statistic addicts and will probably check for new links to their blogs on a regular basis. Most of them will try to give back the link live you gave them in some way. Maybe tomorrow, in a week or at another point in future. Depending on the quality of your posts, you may also gain a new regular reader of your blog, especially if you share similar topics.

Plus, by linking to another blog post, you´ll create a trackback on it, which appears within the comment section of the linked post. I am receiving a good share of my traffic via these trackback links.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

For blogs, there is one tool almost every blogger does come to use at one point of time to make the most out of his or her blog. It´s FeedBurner and there are good reasons to use it, whatever blogging platform you use.

FeedBurner is republishing your blogs RSS-Feed and adds some feature to it making it even more useful and user-friendlier.

Reasons to use FeedBurner
The most interesting reason to use FeedBurner is, that thy enable you to know how many people are subscribed to your RSS-Feed. As these readers are the ones who keep coming back to your blog, you should be interested in their number and how it has developed over time.

Your readers can easily subscribe to your Feed if it is handled by FeedBurner. They are offering a wide variety of services to use for reading your content. Starting with email or Newsgator, people can also use Bloglines or MyYahoo and many other services to keep up with your blog.

Best of all: Many bloggers do start their blogs on hosted platforms like Blogger, WordPress.com or whatever. They´d lose all of their subscribers when they decide to move the blog to its own domain as the URL of their RSS-Feed will change. No problem with FeedBurner here as this URL can stay the same as it is a FeedBurner URL like mine:

I could use this URL even if I´d move this blog to a domain totally different. Even though, I won´t do this.

Showing your subscriber count
Just yesterday, I put a litte chicklet to my sidebar, showing how many people are subscribing to my feed. At this moments there are:

There were discussions round the blogosphere whether bloggers should display subscriber count. I have chosen to display it now as the count is getting to a stable basis.

Do you think there is an effect on this? Are people more likely to subscribe when they see that many others have before?

FeedBurner FeedFlare
The FeedFlare feature adds some information to the end of each entry what can look like this:

This can make readers of your RSS-Feed click through to your site to leave a comment or something. Again, more visitors for your blog.
You can easily change these infos or add more of them to your feed. Just go to your FeedBurner-Account and click on Optimize and then FeedFlare. Select the items you want to show and that´s it.
There is even an API which lets you create your very own FeedFlares, I´m planning to write an own article about APIs in the future.

Subscription by E-Mail
FeedBurner also provides the possibiliy to let your readers receive an E-Mail whenever a new article is being posted. To not overcrowd your readers inbox, you can choose to send one E-Mail a day at a chosen timeframe. Just scroll down a little bit to find the 2 ways to subscribe to my blog.

I am offering the E-Mail option for my readers, but it does not seem to be accepted that much. This may be different for oher blogs, especially depending on their topics and their readers. For me, it´s only about 3% of all my subscribers using the option to follow my blog via E-Mail.

Do you offer E-Mail subscription on your blog? How does it work for you?

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Have you seen a huge traffic spike coming from StumbleUpon recently? If not, this is for you. Many of my posts do get stumbled and some of them pull in a really massive traffic spike. Here is a screenshot from Google Analytics that shows the latests spike:

On Sunday, November 18^th, I published my ranking of Blogs about Blogging and StumbleUpen users obviously liked it. Plus, my daily traffic rose significantly from that day on.

How to start with StumbleUpon
It´s quick and easy, just go to stumbleupon.com and register with them for free.

After that, you can download their toolbar, which is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers.
The toolbar provides with several buttons, but the most important ones are these:

Now, you can stumble every webpage you like, just with a click on the blue thumbs-up button which says: I like it. Other users who have similar interests now get showed that webpage. Users are being shown new website, every time they click on the Stumble!-button.

Getting traffic from StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is known for delivering huge amounts of traffic in short terms of time. If you get connected with other users sharing the same interests, you get more traffic as your friends will be shown your stumbled webpages first. As you are reading my blog, I´d assume you are interested in my topics, so feel free to visit my StumbleUpon-Profile and add me as a friend.

It´s no problem with stumbling you own websites, though some users don´t like it. Be sure to stumble only pages which provide value to the community.

Stumblers will come to your site and tend to rate it within a few seconds. So make sure a few points the serve them well and get the most out of this traffic.

• Make sure, there is a lot of content on your site, which attracts these user and cannot be scanned with one short visit. Chances are, they will come back later to read more of your writing.
• Remember to provide visible possibilities for a quick subscription to your RSS-Feed or your via E-Mail.
• Do not overload your page with ads and other crappy stuff, which can make your site look unprofessional.

What others wrote about StumbleUpon
Let´s collect the best articles of the blogosphere about StumbleUpon. Have you written an article about StumbleUpon on your blog, or know someone who did?
Please contact me with the link and a short 1-2 sentence description of the post. I´ll assemble them and will publish the whole list next week. Let´s create the definite resource list.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Each and every time, we all spend much time on writing posts for our blog. Then it comes - the magic moment, when the post is finished and you are about to hit the publish button to let the world know your newest thoughts.

But wait! We want our readers to actually read that post and maybe respond to it. Let´s take a few extra moments to check the post again before publishing it.

Spell Check
Nobody is perfect and we are all making mistakes all the time. Please spend one or two extra minutes to spell-check the post you have spent so much time on writing it, before hitting the publish button. It is so easy and it makes your readers feel a lot more comfortable while reading your post.

There are several ways to spell-check your post quickly, over at lifeiscolourful.com you can find detailed hints on browser- and online tools which help you avoid grammar mistakes in your posts.

Check Your Images
Darren Rowse taught us to use images in our posts, to take them to a new level recently.
Putting images to your posts grabs more attention for it especially in the RSS feed they make your post stand out from other long long lists of pure text.
Be sure, you are tagging your images for more traffic as I recommended it an earlier part of this series.

Use the post-slug Feature
By default, if you are using an optimized permalink structure, WordPress uses the post title for creating the posts URL. Therefore this posts URL should be …/things-to-do-before-hitting-publish.html, but it´s not. I have used the post-slug feature to change it.

So this posts URL actually is …/publishing-posts.html. Why did I do that? I wanted to reduce words in the URL which are of no use for search engines. Many of these words I used as the title for this post, won´t be used by people searching for such information. This posts URL has now just 2 word instead of 6 which rises their relative value for search engines.

Link to Older Posts
As your blogs archive grows bigger with every new post you write, you will find more and more possibilites to link to some of your older posts when mentioning their topic. I have done this here in this post a few times.
Try to find these possibilities and add a few links to some of your older posts whenever possible. This will not only add some context to your post, but it might also encourage your readers to visit some more pages of your blog.

Plus, search engine spiders will follow these links and crawl your old posts again. This can help you rankings for posts which do not have many incoming links.
Some of readers might also be somewhat new to your blog. This makes a great opportunity to show them some of your popular posts from the past. Not every new reader is going through maybe hundreds of posts when he or she discovers your blog.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Social bookmarking sites can drive massive amounts of traffic to your site. People can join them anytime and search for information what makes it easy to get connected to other users sharing the same interest.
You are already writing interesting and useful content, why not submit them to as many social bookmarking sites as possible. Choose the most accurate categories available and tag your submissions properly. By this, other users will easily find your content and visit you.

I collected 30 social bookmarking sites for you and added link to reviews of them.

30 Social Bookmarking Sites

1. StumbleUpon
   Read more about StumbleUpon on: lostartofblogging.com




2. del.icio.us
   Read more about del.icio.us on: vandelaydesign.com




3. Digg
   Read more about Digg on: sleepyblogger.com




4. Propeller
   Read more about Propeller on: riceblogger.com




5. MyBlogLog
   Read more about MyBlogLog on: marcorichter.net




6. Technorati
   Read more about Technorati on: marcorichter.net




7. Slashdot
   Read more about Slashdot on: networkperformancedaily.com




8. Reddit
   Read more about Reddit on: searchenginepeople.com




9. BlogLines
   Read more about BlogLines on: sephyroth.net




10. Sphinn
    Read more about Sphinn on: marcorichter.net




11. BlinkList
    Read more about BlinkList on: mashable.com




12. Furl
    Read more about Furl on: dollarsblog.com




13. Newsvine
    Read more about Newsvine on: business-opportunities-blog.com




14. BloggingZoom
    Read more about BloggingZoom on: bloggingnotes.net




15. Fark
    Read more about Fark on: shoemoney.com




16. Clipmarks
    Read more about Clipmarks on: venturebeat.com




17. Icerocket
    Read more about Icerocket on: blogforward.com




18. ShoutWire
    Read more about ShoutWire on: towkeyprint.blogspot.com




19. Blinkbits
    Read more about Blinkbits on: wordpress.org




20. BlogPulse
    Read more about BlogPulse on: coach-resources.blogspot.com




10 more without review:

21. Blogmarks
22. DZone
23. Kaboodle
24. Simpy
25. Spurl
26. PlugIM
27. BlogMemes
28. SpotBack
29. Tailrank
30. Rollyo

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Have you ever used Yahoo! Answers to get traffic for your blog? It can drive a number of visitors to you with very little effort. There are thousands of questions being asked, what means thousands of places to put your name and a link to your blog on.

Getting Traffic from Yahoo! Answers
There is no topic, you cannot find a bunch of questions upon on Yahoo! Answers. Go find some questions on your blogs topic and try to answer them with your very best knowledge.
Write a professional answer to it in an easy to unterstand way. Below your answer, don´t forget to mention your name and your blog together with link to it.

Every questions answered by you can bring in a handful of visitors to your blog. Try to answer 5-10 questions a day, and that will really sum up for you. Go to the category that fits your blogs topic the best. There is an opportunity to subscribe to an RSS-Feed for that category. A subscription helps you not to miss a single question and often you will be able to submit the first answer to a question. That will bring in even more visitors.

Quality answers can be chosen as Top Answer what will move your answer on top of the others.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Do you think, responding to your readers questions and comments can increase traffic? Yes, of course. Your readers will feel abandonded without your interaction. They will feel like not getting noticed after they left a comment on one of your posts.

If you enter the conversation with them and discuss your post by responding to every comment they leave. More comments are likely to come in and your readers will get the feeling of being part of your community.

How to get more readers
Going through your recent posts and looking at the comment count will reveal a very valuable information. Some of your posts will receive many comments from many readers, and other posts will not even get a single comment.

And here comes a no-brainer: Look at the topic of posts with less comments or no comments at all. What´s the story? Your readers don´t seem to be interested in these posts topics. So, just concentrate on topics you have written posts before which got a large number of comments. It´s that easy.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Today we are going to see, how Google Analytics can help you getting more visitors. Analytics provides you with comprehensive usage and traffic statistics and - best of all - it´s FREE.

Google Analytics is very easy to install, if you have a Google account already, it´s a matter of minutes. There are tons of other statistic tools out there and you can spend loads of money for them. Other free tools do require a small logo and/or a link being placed on your website.
With Analytics there are no such strings attached. Just place a small piece of code to every page and you are done. No logos, no links, no hazzles.

When you first login to Analytics, you might not discover the deep value of the provided information instantly, but there are some that can really help you to get more visitors to your blog.

Analysing Traffic Sources
As it is kind of In-House solution, Google Analytics is one of the best tools to analyse your traffic coming from search engines. Here is a screenshot of my google traffic for the past 4 weeks:

Look for the keywords Analytics provides. It will tell you which search phrases brought traffic to your blog, and for each keyword you can track it down to the time spend on your site or the bounce rate. So you can easily find out, which topic should be expanded because it´s already driving valuable traffic to you.
Examine the bounce rate of these keywords. The lower that value, the more visitors coming via this keyword have visited more pages on your site, what is - of course - good. Several keywords will show a very high - if not 100% bounce rate. This traffic is worthless for you - obviously those people looked for something different and walked away immediately.

Analysing this data shows you on which topic you should spend more energy, and which topics are not worth working on them.
Doing this on a regular basis will help you building more content which attracts visitors and how to stop wasting time on worthless things.

I´m going to add more advice on Google Analytics here soon, please consider bookmarking this post.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Time to take a closer look at some underrated way to increase traffic today. We are going to talk about conversations between bloggers right on their blogs which involves their readerships and therefore means great exposure for both blogs to a new audience.

Cross Blog Conversation

What is a cross blog conversation?
Basically it is about writing kind of an open letter to another blogger on your own blog leaving an open question for the addressed blogger. If the question is answered in a post on his or her blog, the conversation started and can be kept up for a while. Keeping the topic of this conversation related to both blogs is important for making this work.

Benefits of cross blog conversations
For bloggers, holding a conversation this way offers some great benefits:

• You can share traffic and links
• Your blog is exposed to the other blogs readers
• It is a social networking tool for both
• You might get to know other bloggers

This series is about increasing traffic, so let´s see how to pull traffic out of a cross blog conversation.

It is important for this to keep the conversation up for more than just a question and the answer to it. That won´t be what I´d call a conversation. If you manage to keep it up for a handful of question and answers about a topic related to both blogs, your readers would like to follow the conversation on both blogs, so you´ll probably get new readers from this. There may be a lot of readers who did not know your blog before and will come to see, who the other blogger is as they see that you show some expertise within the conversation. And hey, they are interested in the topic so it should be easy for you to turn them into regular readers.

How to start a cross blog conversation
You could start this easily by just writing a post which asks some other blogger a question. Maybe about how he or she managed to be as successful or how he or she thinks about a special topic. It could even be like an informal interview. Or you take a topic being posted about recently on the other blog and add some new information to this and ask a question about it.

If you put a link to the other blog, the blogger will problably notice that as bloggers are keeping an eye on who is linking to and writing about them. You could shoot them an email before and ask, whether they are interested in this kind of conversation, at least think about an email to them after you published your question post, letting them know the link to it.

Now watch your incoming links for the answer. If it pops up, you got this thing started and can continue it if you like. It´s that easy.

Quickstart
I am planning to do this more in the future. If you like to try this: Just ask me a question in a post on your blog and I will surely answer it here - a benefit for both of us.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Have you seen traffic coming from mybloglog.com to your blog lately? If not, there´s something wrong, because you really should.

What is MyBlogLog?
MyBlogLog.com is a blog community which is now owned by Yahoo! You can use MyBlogLog for building a community around your blog and stay in contact with readers and friends. They offer a lot of tools to build your blog community:

• The MyBlogLog widget
• Messaging community members
• Blog stats and traffic metrics
• Adding friends
• Join other communities
• Showing your RSS-Feed

First Steps with MyBlogLog.com
Of course, very first step is to sign up with them. It´s free and if you have a Yahoo! ID already, it doesn´t take a minute. After that, edit your personal info and add some information you would believe other would like to know about you. Do not forget to add a picture of you to your profile to make it less anonymous.

Same goes with adding your blog. Do not forget to upload a screenshot of it. That will become important later.

Make some friends
Now visit other people and read their profiles and check which blog(s) they author. You may leave them a comment to introduce yourself. Or add them as a contact, just click the button in the upper right corner.
The person can see, you added her or him as a contact and might visit your profile or even add you as a contact too, which will make you friends.

Also consider joining their community. Visit a blog profile and - of course - the blog itself. If you like it, why not click the button and join the community.
This will make you visible to others as your uploaded photo will be shown in the community members section or the list of recent visitors. These other may visit your profile, it´s all about networking.

You are allowed to add up to 15 people as a contact per day. Plus, you may join up to 15 communities per day.
If you visit a community profile page frequently, there is a default setting in MyBlogLog which will autmatically make you join this community on your 10^th visit. (You can edit or deactivate this option)

The MyBlogLog.com widget
You can put the MyBlogLog widget to your blog´s sidebar. It shows pictures fo your recent readers every time they visit your blog while they are still logged in to MyBlogLog.com. If they are not yet a member, they can join your community by just clicking a link in the widget. It may look like this:

This is just the default look, you can fully customize all colors to blend with your blog´s sidebar. You can also choose to show big or small images (The above shows the big ones), how many images to show and so on.

The MyBlogLog widget becomes relevant now, as we come to:

How to attract traffic from MyBlogLog?
Many, many blogs do have this widget installed in their sidebars. (Actually, I don´t.) We can use this to generate some traffic to your blog.
First, make sure, you are logged in to your MyBlogLog account and you have a photo uploaded to your profile. Then go out visit blogs you like and which do have the widget installed.
This will leave your photo within the widget as you are now a recent visitor or recent reader, which can of course be seen by following visitors to that blog.

If you manage to attract their attention, they might visit your MyBlogLog profile to see who you are. Maybe they will add you as a contact or join your community or even visit your blog. That´s what it´s all about.
I am not talking about hundreds of visitors per day, but I am seeing a steady flow of traffic coming from MyBlogLog.com to my blog.

Have you joined my MyBlogLog community yet?

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Are you keeping your secrets secret? You shouldn´t. As blogging is about giving and taking, you should rather share your secrets with your readers.

Giving them somekind of “secret” information can boost your basis of daily readers. If they know, there will be more secrets to be revealed soon, they
will love to come back.

Share your secrets
Everyone can have secrets, that could be shared with others. This might
be a deeper insight into your blogging success, such as How I made $xxx in yy days or something like How I lost 20 lbs. in 2 weeks.

Something, your readers would also like to do or to achieve and maybe are not sure, how to do it. You know, how to do, because you´ve done it before. Just let
your reader know, how you´ve done it and they will love you for that.

Some of your readers might be blogging within the same niche, so that means their readers might also want to know about your secret. These bloggers will love to put a link to you and send you visitors. Great way of building links.

Some shared secrets
This often comes out as some kind of “How-To” posts, but it´s no obligation. Here some examples of shared secrets on blogs, I´m reading regularly:

• How I Gain 4,691 RSS Reader In 1 Month
• 27 Lessons Learned on the Way to 3000 Visits a Day…
• How I got a Google PageRank 5 in 3 months

Please go through them. Don´t you think, you would have something similar to share with your audience? Sure, you will.

Try to think a moment about your blog from a reader´s perspective. What questions would you have, if you were a reader of it, not its author? Maybe you´d see a FeedBurner chicklet saying, that 2843 readers are subscribed to it. Wouldn´t you want to know, how the blogger managed to get there in his 3 months of blogging?

You can tell them, and you should tell them. That´s why they read your blog, they want to learn from you.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

List posts are very popular on many blogs. They can drive massive amount of traffic to your blog and may raise its awareness to unknown levels. Look at digg.com or del.ico.us and you will find a large number of lists of all types being extremely successful.

You can find several list posts on my blog too and I can confirm, that some of them do belong to those being most popular according to my stats.

• RSS Subscriptions - The Ultimate Resource List
• WordPress Plugins - The must-have A-Z
• 11 ways to build links to your blog
• 10 Ways to Improve Your Blog’s SEO in 5 Minutes or Less

Why you should write list posts

Christian Watson over at smileycat.com recently collected a list of 11 reasons for you to write list posts.
Basically he lists up reasons, why list post will help you as a blogger:

11 Reasons Why You Should Write Long List Posts

1. It´s good linkbait (I told you )
2. It improves your research skills
3. It forces you to read widely on a subject
4. It helps you discover new information
5. It´s a good reference tool for yourself
6. It promotes your site to others in your field
7. Lists are easy to write
8. Lists are easy to read
9. They make you think about your audience
10. It drives the discussion
11. It can be a source of new articles

Please read Christian´s article here: smileycat.com

You know, this post is part of a series of posts on how to increase blog traffic. That´s exactly the effect of the last reason #11 in the list above. I originally planned to make list of ways to increase traffic, but then I realized that just listing them up wouldn´t do enough, so I decided to write a new article on every point and the idea for this series was born.

And - as you read this - it can be said it works.

Why posting lists works
List posts are very easy to read. Most visitors, especially coming from social media sites often do not spend too much time on your site. Making a list helps them to scan your post very quickly. More of them will stay and read the whole post - and maybe some more. A post with lots of long text paragraphs is more difficult to promote on Digg or Stumbleupon for this reason.

Lists with some kind of “TOP”-something as a headline are very, very popular. What do you think are the most successful Top-Lists? Top-10? Top-3? None of this. It´s Top-7, what surprised me first. Russ Jones at thegooglecache.com scientifically proved why 7 is the new 10, so expect my next list to be a little shorter.

How to write nice list posts
Writing lists can´t be that difficult, so here are only a few points to keep in mind, when it comes to your next list post.
Making your post highly scannable is important every time, not only on lists. You should highlight your keywords, so your readers could get a quick overview on your writing without reading every word. If their first impression make them like what they see, they will definitely go deeper into it. Just put the important key facts in bold.

Are you trying to show directions or a sequence of steps to be taken? Then please number your list. This is a very popular mistake, many bloggers - including me - are making very often. (My next series will help all of us with that)

If it´s not about posting a Top-List of any kind, having more points on a list is always better than less. Don´t limit yourself here. You have valuable information to share, don´t leave out a single point. But please do not fill your lists up with some crap just to make it longer.

What about you?
I would bet, you have posted a list on your blog before too. What´s your experience with them? Did they work well for you?

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Don´t want to miss a part of this series: Subscribe to my RSS-Feed

Have you ever thought about how someone experiences your blog on his or her very first visit to it? What is their first impression of your blog? Do you make them want to stay longer or even come back regularly?

For most blogs, first time visitors make the biggest part of the traffic. According to Google Analytics more than 85% of my visitors have been first time visitors.

Therefore it´s really worth it thinking about how they feel.

Make Your Visitors Feel at Home
Many blogs tend to tell their stories from a first-person perspective, using I, me, myself over and over again (I pledge guilty too). Wouldn´t you think, writing from a second-person perspective would make your readers feel much more at home. You might have noticed, that I am trying to do this in this post a lot.

First Impression
How do you greet your new visitors? Is there something special on your blog, only visible to new visitors? Here on my blog, I am using a very nice plugin from Richard K. Miller which adds a small welcome message to an article for the first times a visitor come to this blog. I am saying thank you for the visit and advice new readers, that there is an RSS-Feed they can subscribe too, if they like or have my posts being delivered via E-Mail.
The plugin does all the work for me, I don´t have to do anything after its installation. If you don´t use it yet, go grab it now.

What about you?
If you have one, go to your own blog and try to see it, as if it was your very first visit on it. What do you think? Do you warmly feel a home? Think a second about the design of your blog. (btw: How do you like my design? Let me know.)
Does it attract you to read more, and go deeper into the blog´s archives maybe? There is one question, your blog has to answer to a new visitor: What can you give me?. Does your blog answer this?

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

Don´t want to miss a part of this series: Subscribe to my RSS-Feed

What is technorati?
Technorati basically is a service tracking, what is popular on blog. They are tracking more than 100.000.000 blogs. Go to technorati and register for an account for free, if you don´t have one yet. After that, you can claim your blog and see, which other blogs do mention your posts and who put a link to your blog.

How to start
First, you have to register for a free account with technorati.com. After your free account has been created, you can claim your blog. Technorati is going to ask you to put a small piece of code into a post on your blog to verify this blog is really yours. Simply copy and paste that code to a new blog post an publish it. Then click the button release the spiders on the claim page and they will crawl your blog immediately.
After the code has been found successfully on your blog and technorati therefore validated your ownership, you can delete the post with the code again.

Next step is to enter some information about you. Technorati displays some information on your account page, so use this to let your readers know, who you are and what you are blogging about. Maybe add a photograph too, I recommend this to apply a personal touch to your account. Nobody want´s to read from some quiet anonymous who hasn´t even a face, would you?

Final step is to enter some keywords - or better tags to your ablog information. Technorati´s whole system is based on tags, so enter some that describe, what your blog is about in general.

What are tags?
Technorati tags are basically like keywords helping technorati to categorize your blog post. Putting a tag on your post will get it directly into the search results on technorati. Look at my tags on this post which are being shown automatically at the end of the post. They look like this:

Next time, anyone will search for traffic on technorati, this post will be included in the results. Of course, this cannot guarantee you a #1 position, it´s only for making sure, your post is listed on the results pages.

How to add tags to your posts
To be found on technorati, you have to tag your post with relevant tags. Just put this line of code at the end of your blog posts:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/YOURTAG” rel=”tag”>YOURTAG</a>

(Replace YOURTAG with anything fitting to your post.)

Make your life easier and use a plugin for doing this. I am using Bunny’s Technorati Tags here on my blog which makes it really easy. Just put the tags you wish to add to your post into the tags-field in the editor. That´s it, all done.
This doen´t take more than 20 - 30 seconds- Half a minute of your life being spent very well.

Did you find this useful and do you like this blog? Please consider adding my blog to your list of favorite blogs on technorati. Just click this button. I will see you add, and will definitely visit your blog in return.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

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