Back in the day (circa 2004-2005), most of my blog traffic came from one of two sources: a) blogrolls and b) other blogger's posts. Nowadays, a lot of it comes from Twitter, Plurk, Friendfeed, Facebook and, yes, Google (thankfully).
What does that indicate?
- The conversation is much more distributed than it used to be. Mack Collier thinks so too.
- Blogrolls are less important that they used to be.
As to why I'm not seeing traffic from other's blog could mean that:
- The value of my content is less than it used to be.
- There are more of us talking now so less attention is paid to any one blogger. The competition for attention is higher to be sure.
- I'm not spending enough time commenting on or referencing other's blog posts myself.
Let me share with you a formula I'm starting to use:
- Read - My mother always said, "Son, God gave you two ears and one mouth." It's important that we listen more than we talk.
- Respond - Comment on other blog posts; be a participant in the conversation.
- Reference - Link to posts others have written when writing yours.
One practice I started early on was commenting on popular blogs. It was a way to: a) get the attention of the blogger, and b) drive traffic to my own site.
I've tended to do that less over the past couple of years and it's a habit I'm trying to regain. In my case, that mean reading the AdAge Power 150 blogs. In every niche there are popular blogs to which you can refer. Subscribe to their RSS feed and commit to reading them frequently.
I asked the question in the title of this post, where does your blog traffic come from. I'd like you to respond by leaving a comment.
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