Hopefully the title of this post got your attention (post headings are an entire topic for another post). Ok, so far we've come up with a domain name for our blog, we've opened a hosting account, selected a blogging platform, setup Google Analytics, and have started posting some decent content. Now comes the hard part - attracting visitors.
There are a number of good ways to attract visitors, but by far the most important thing is to get as many other people as possible to link to your blog. Links are what makes the Internet work. More importantly, they are a primary ingredient in the top secret search engine ranking algorithm. The more people that link to your site, the easier it will be for even more people to find it. You will be ranked higher on Google searches and will have greater chances of someone stumbling upon your online masterpiece.
One of the best people I have seen at building link backs is Carl Ocab. This kid is amazing. He is only 13 years old (actually 14 now I believe) and holds the #1 Google search spot for "Make Money Online". He has earned it though. He is always offering something that makes it worth linking to him. Whether its a contest, a free preview, or whatever, he provides an incentive for people to visit, link to him, and leave comments on his blog (fyi...leaving comments is a great way to get a link to your blog!). Carl has an interesting post that offers 69 suggestions to build traffic. Interestingly enough, almost all of them are ways of getting links to your site.
If you are curious to find out just how many people are linking to your site, Google has figured this one out too (shocker). Simply do a Google search like so: "link:buzzmyblog.com". It will show you all the sites that link to yours that Google has indexed. I am at a whopping 3 right now - Whoo Hooo! Carl has 3210. Looks like I still have a lot of work to do.
Leave me a comment if you've got any other ideas about building links and attracting visitors. Remember what I said about leaving comments to get more links to your blog!
