Hey Guys and Gals I run a smallish maybe even medium sized blog about Japanese Culture and I am currently looking for ways to increase my traffic. I am already signed up for all the Social Networking sites offered on the Onlywire service and I am submitted to a few of those RSS Feed sites. e.g. animenano.com I hear that directories are a good way to go and have submitted my site to dmoz, but does anyone have any other directory recommendations or traffic boosting ideas. Thanks Asch
U use HubPages? Or Zimbio? I promise that if use them with the correct keywords, you will get some traffic. Create a HubPage and write a Zimbio article -(make sure to link your blog through Zimbio and post it too) After you do both of these, write articles at Ezine and Buzzle -Link to the hubpage, and the Blog on ezine. And link to the blog from Buzzle.
You need to get your name out there, participate on forums, and blogs and before you know it you should start to see traffic trickling in.
Submit your site into 10 to 15 directories daily. That will help you a lot. You can also promote you site in your signature. - Digital -
Honestly, I find 99.99% of directories to be a complete waste of time. Most of them are filled with spam, which ends up hurting you more than it helps.
You could try searching Yahoo Answers for any questions related to Japanese culture. Answer those questions as sensibly and grammatically as you can, cite your blog as the source of information, and provide a link to it.
I would start with finding 5-10 blogs related to your topic, subscribe to them, and start commenting on a daily basis (or whenever they publish new posts). ... and use Twitter, start following people that tweets about japanese culture (you follow them, they'll follow you). - jens
Definitely comment on similar blogs, adding your link in wherever possible. Join forums related to your topic, and advertise your blog in your avatar and signature, as well as a thread if it is allowed by the specific forum. Make a Facebook fan page and a MySpace and horde in friends in your niche interest. Start a Twitter and post recent news and blog updates. Ping your blog at Pingler and other sites to allow search engines to spider your blog when you have new content so they can update their searches to accommodate you. Also, make it a point to Digg all of your blog posts. Also Stumble them, and submit them to Redditt, Mixx, and Delicious. This will bring in quite a bit of traffic. Whatever you do, don't buy anything. That's a horrible route to take. TRUDGERNAUGHT
There are plenty of great comments here already, but you could write some articles to submit to article directories. Be sure to include your url in your signature or resource box. Also, try submitting content oriented blog posts to blog carnivals. Good luck.
Thanks for all the tips I am slowly getting round to all of the things mentioned that I am not already doing. Can anyone suggest some good directories to submit too as I google searched but I have no idea which ones are reputable or not.
Well, Participating to your niche related forums, blogs will bring you more referral traffic(Direct hit from there) as well as Organic traffic (traffic via search engines, as the niche related links are being considered as the strong in the eye of our big "G" - Google)
I don't want to make my post look like spam... but I have just posted a few days ago top 10 articles links about blog promotion... When you read them it looks that most important things in blog promotions are great content, social bookmarking websites, building your link popularity thru directories, comments on other blogs, forums etc. When you know how to use twitter to make people retweet your posts is great marketing tool as well...
Also joining blogger and other social networking sites such as twitter/facebook will help you to increase traffic.
Have you created a sitemap of your blog and submitted it to Google via Webmaster Tools? I have a client who blogs on a regular basis about restaurants she visits and these post often appear in Google above the restaurant's own website with the obvious increase in traffic.
Submit your blog in Blog Directory and Rss submission and do social bookmarking of post. this will help you.