Small Drops In The Page View Bucket

Last week, I was asked by the folks at Creative Weblogging to write a few paragraphs on increasing page views on your blog. Here is a slightly cleaned up version of that “advice,” which was forwarded to the bloggers. It’s certainly not complete, but it addressed what I felt was “low hanging fruit.”

While there is no magic formula that is going to increase your page views overnight, here are a couple of things you as a blogger can and should be doing to help.

Respond to comments: If someone takes the time to comment, return the favor and reply to the comment. In addition to replying on the website itself, take a moment and send an email to that person thanking them for the comment. Maybe even sent the text of your comment along. The idea here is to build a community around the blog. Comments beget comments, which begets page views.

Mark your sites with StumbleUpon, which is not only a great way to get your site out there, it’s also a great source for material if you’re looking for ideas for your blog. It requires a browser plugin that allows you to tag sites. Each “tagging” takes less than a minute.

Microblog it: If you are using Twitter, Jaiku, Hictu, or some other microblogging service, consider adding your blog to the RSS feeds on these sites. In the case of Twitter, you need to use an external service like twitterfeed.com, which will periodically poll your RSS feeds and
inserts posts in Twitter. Do this if you already participate in these kinds of sites already, or intend to participate. Creating a user on these services just to feed in your posts from elsewhere is considered rude.

As I said, none of these things are going to be a magic bullet. However, it takes many, many raindrops to fill a bucket. Implementing these suggestions is relatively straightforward and will not cause you undue burden.

Did I miss any other low-hanging fruit? Let me know by leaving a comment!