I'm sure not many of you know me, but I've been crawling these forums religiously since I registered a few days ago. I'm already benefitting the rewards of much of your advice, but thought I'd ask, as a total newbie, what I'm doing, whether or not it's "the right thing" and whether I should be doing more (yes, I know the answer to that is ALWAYS yes). I've got a little blog that I started June 1. Currently, the traffic is almost non-existent, as it just started, but I have been pushing it everywhere I can think of. Here's what I've been doing: Adding new content every day. Writing at least two articles from scratch, and many more little 'blurbs' Started submitting it to open directories, starting with the highest page ranked directories I could find, categorizing it as appropriately as I could. I have been skipping directories in which I couldn't find a valid category, under the assumption that it would hurt more than help, but that could be wrong. Promoting some of my articles on Digg and Shoutwire (got 300 uniques yesterday from both) Posting more at sites I enjoy that ALSO have high PR, like slashdot, here, digg, etc., and making sure that I left a link back to my blog. Added the site to every blog directory I could find, including bloglines, blogmemes, etc. Installed all of the common SEO WordPress plugins to my blog, including the crawl page generator, google sitemap plugin and modified title to remove "Blog Archive" and include the article title. I know that there's more to be done, but I don't really know what. What would you do in my position to further the site? Also, I've got a forum that I've been running for years now that has never had ads on it, which I've recently added. It's got a PR4, but currently, CPC ads are doing very little on it. Currently, there is nothing more on it than a forum, which I'm working to change (to add more CONTENT instead of just posts), but what else can be done to leverage a community? I'm not necessarily looking for a magic bullet per se, because I know that things take time (especially in the case of a 1 month old blog), but what am I missing? What else would you be doing? What books, posts, blogs should I be reading to fill in the blanks? Thanks for taking the time to read this.
That's... actually a REALLY good point, and I'm kicking myself for not having thought of it sooner, especially considering I was just reading about the changeover to digg-style content.