Blogging for Writers: 5 (Sneaky) Places to Get Traffic for Your Blog

Posted On August 21, 2014

You’ve got a problem. Oh, you’ve ignored the problem. You tried to tell yourself the problem isn’t such a big deal. You’ve buried yourself in your Facebook page because at least you have friends there.But the problem remains. You have little traffic on your writer’s blog.

Welcome to the internet my friend. You’ve found out the hard way that just having a web page doesn’t lead the reader to drink from the font of your wordsmithery awesomeness. And it hurts even if you don’t admit it. People aren’t reading your posts? Cry you a river. Now do something about it.

What should you do?

There are a slew of things you should do, like post two to three times a week, and build your social media network, and list your page with directories (yes, this still works) and many other things that we will talk about another time. But first things first. Let’s put a bandage on your author’s ego.

But let us quantify what counts as a success for your blog. Forget about getting a million, a hundred thousand, heck, even a thousand unique visitors a day. After doing some research I’ve found that if you get a hundred unique visitors a day, (not hits, that’s something different) your blog qualifies officially as a low volume blog. And if you are getting that, wipe your virtual tears and hold your head high. If not, let’s staunch the bleeding.

What you are looking for are places where people are likely to read your posts. These are places where you spend your virtual life anyway, so finding little corners to spread your particular brand of awesome isn’t stretching you all that much. The following are my recommendations of places to go.

1.) Twitter—It should go without saying that you are grooming your growing network of Twitter followers. If you aren’t you are being a.) snobbish and/or b.) lazy. There is absolutely no reason for you not to go add like-minded and even divergently minded people to your list of followers. Heck, use Twitter search and find new groups. For instance the erotic fiction crowd is fun group and seem to be eager to follow many different people. (How do I know that? Oh, well, never mind.) Still once you follow someone, about half the time they’ll follow you back. If they don’t, you can always purge them from your follow list. Twitter equals free audience. Use it.

2.) Facebook pages—I’m not talking about your own pages here, though you should have yours (yes, as in plural.) What to target are those group pages that allow you to post your blog giving you access to hundreds if not thousands of people you’ve never met and probably never will. Look for such pages in your genre, noting carefully if they allow such posts, and take a critical look at the number of people in the group. If it is a good size, and, in the cases of closed groups, accept you, you are good to go. Go forth. Post your blog there.

3.) Networked Blogs—Oops. Networked Blogs changed to a paid service called Symphony. Sucks I know. I loved Networks blogs, but I have enough things to pay for. But there is something else you can try.

3. B) Google circles. Set up a Google page and set up for your blog posts to autopost to it. Use the search section for find some like minded groups and join them. (Ssh, secret SEO hint. Using Google pages seems to help with search engine hits. Not that they’d confirm that, but it seems to make sense that they’d give preference to their proprietary pages.)

4.) Goodreads—This community of book readers, book writers and booksellers is often an overlooked place to connect with readers. However, gaining new and different friends and followers is as easy as Twitter right at this writing. For people who’ve published even one book (even an indie book) there is the added bonus of getting yourself named an author allowing you to activate the settings that automatically post your blog to your Goodreads profile. Tre’ cool.

5.) Reddit—Many people talk trash about Reddit. But the fact is that many people also engage with Reddit, people you wouldn’t meet otherwise. Go find a good size active sub-reddit and put a link to your blog post. Tried and tested by Beth. It works. The only downside, you have to remember to manually post it. The good news is that in WordPress, if you have your social sharing buttons activated, you can set up your sub-reddit and hit the button at the bottom of your post so you can do it in a few keystrokes. Go stoked. Use Reddit.

See? Easy. Nearly painless. And effective. Go! Go increase the number of readers to your blog. Your writer’s heart will thank you for it.

Photo published under a Creative Commons License as issued by Flickr user Mike Licht