What should part time bloggers do to get some exposure? How can we gain new readers when no-one knows we exist? Search Engine Optimisation of our blogs is crucial, but getting noticed this way relies upon the benevolence of Google and other major search engines and there is only so much you can do to influence how and when they index your site. If you are new to the game, chances are hundreds of search results will be ahead of you and most won’t be patient enough to find your nuggets of wisdom amongst all of the options available.
Social sites are seen by many as the “silver bullet” that can help your blog achieve fame and glory without first having to serve your time developing an extensive archive of content, or relationships with your fellow bloggers to get those valuable offsite links. Unfortunately it appears that one of the better known “silver bullets” – Digg – might be the wrong calibre for people like myself. In Do Small Bloggers Have A Chance With Digg?, Steven states:
The Digg voting system is intended to allow the most popular stories to get the most exposure and to prevent users from gaming the system. But one of the results of this system is that it heavily favors blogs and websites with huge audiences while those with smaller audiences are left with much more difficult odds of gaining exposure from Digg.
He also mentions that Digg traffic tends to be transitory and won’t necessarily increase your readership longer term. There are some suggestions for increasing the Digg rates of your posts, but all in all it paints a pretty bleak picture for us part-time bloggers.
Some of Steven’s readers suggest alternatives to Digg they believe work around these issues: Thoof, Mixx, Reddit, Plime and Stumble Upon. They might all be great options but the question still remains: will these or other social sites really help small blogs get exposure and attract new and lasting readership?
To answer my own question I’m going to conduct an experiment. I plan to:
- Establish a baseline: Determine the best way to establish and track my blog’s popularity during the experiment.
- Submit to social bookmarking sites: Simultaneously submit to a group of social bookmarking sites and monitor the resultant traffic
- Submit to social blog watching sites: Simultaneously submit to a group of social blog watching sites and monitor the resultant traffic.
- Review the results: Analyse the changes in traffic patterns.
At each stage I will choose the sites to be evaluated from Steven’s reader suggestions, the options provided by my AddThis plugin, and the top 20 hits returned from Google. While this won’t be the most rigorous scientific experiment ever performed, as I will continue posting throughout and the results won’t be statistically significant, it should be indicative of what a part time blogger can expect by using these tools.
Hopefully the results will help us part-timers determine how best to promote the content we are working so hard to produce! Please leave a comment it there is anything I can change to make the experiment more relevant to you.
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