Here are some tips I’ve learned from nearly two years of blogging and consistently raising my site’s traffic from month to month, often doubling it from previous months. Compared to some, I’m a rank newbie and have no business offering you any sort of pseudo-sage advice, but whatever I have to say below has already been said by others smarter than me. Most of it is hard-won insight that has worked for somebody somewhere, sometimes even me.

Since some of these tips are from smart, expert bloggers, I’ll cite some URLs for further guidance. Maybe you’re already using some of these approaches, but maybe there’ll be something new here for you. A handful will have no direct noticeable impact on your blog traffic, but will help make your blog more useable — which brings the long-term benefit of creating loyalty and thus repeat traffic —which is what you’re ultimately after (in terms of traffic, that is). Some tips are tech-related, some have nothing to do with technology at all.

Some tips I don’t even mention because I assume you’ve already established the basics. Like, I’m sure you actually have something to say beyond fluffy’s latest furball episode, you actually have an operating RSS/Atom feed, and you already know how to string a couple sentences together now and then :: grin :: Why belabor the obvious?

And now, ranked loosely by what I believe have the most impact, in descending order:

Tip #1: Use Standard Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks

There’s a lot that can be said about SEO tricks. Some are good, some are so-so, and some tricks are downright evil (like re-purposing other people’s content for your own, and splogging). I don’t recommend every SEO trick in the book, but there are some standard approaches to optimizing your site that no ambitious webmaster or blogger should overlook.

• Submit URLs to the major search engines.
• Use keywords in your posts. Use keywords in the metadata in the HTML header, too.
• Make sure your post’s title and summary/abstract are in the metadata as well.
• Make the article title the first part of the page title (in the title bar).
• Put “key” words and phrases in the titles of your posts.
• Use <h1> and <h2> tags for titles and section subtitles within the page.
• Name links intelligently, so that search engines can add relevance to the link. So, instead of “click here to learn about me”, use “Learn more about Rich Tatum, the BlogRodent.”
• Use title attributes in the hyperlinks.
• Use alt attributes in the images.
• Get others to link to you. Be friendly and link to others, too. (It’s reciprocal, in the end.)
• See
• SEOmoz
• SEOmoz’s SEO Guide for Beginners
• SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors
• Problogger’s Search Engine Optimization Articles and Resources
• AListApart’s High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization
• Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
• Google’s SEO Guidelines
• Yahoo!’s Search Content Quality Guidelines
• MSN’s Search Guidelines for Successful Indexing

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Tip #2: (For corporate bloggers, especially) Come down from your ivory tower

Traditionally, magazine editors and corporate writers don’t really interact with their reading audience except through boilerplate in response to letters-to-the-editor and the occasional article sidebar. I’ve noticed that this tradition is hard to give way when old-school corporations (especially publishing oriented companies) first start blogging.

Though weblogs began as a one-sided journal-like view of the Web, they have matured into a fully social phenomenon. While there are a few popular one-sided weblogs of note, most of the highly-trafficked blog sites feature writers who engage the audience in conversation. This doesn’t mean that the post author has to respond to every comment posted on a weblog, but when questions are raised and challenges issued, the post author(s) should at least make a showing.

Weblogs are a hierarchy-flattening environment. The author who writes from his high castle and merely deigns to publish comments without responding to them will come off as uninvolved, arrogant, deaf, and unengaging. If your involvement consumes too much time due to the heavy volume of posts, moderate your comments and institute a firm policy on who gets approved. Simple “Amen” or “Attaboy” comments can be discouraged for not adding value while comments which contribute substance can encouraged. This could lower the volume of comments while increasing the value of the dialog, and hopefully make it more worthwhile to participate.

Unfortunately, as your blog ages comment spam will inevitably appear on older entries, and nobody wants to mess with that. So many blog authors now disable commenting for anything more than a month old. Depending on the nature of your audience, the kind of dialog you like to foster at your site, and how attractive your blog is for comment-spam, you may need to do this as well.

Just remember, it’s good to have a higher ratio of comments to posts on your site. (See Stowe Boyd’s articles: “The Social Scale of Social Media: The Conversational Index” and “The Conversational Index: Thoughts After The Deluge“.)

By this measurement, BlogRodent is doing okay, even counting the 466 “ChurchRodent” terms I’ve ported over as posts my CI is 1.74 (1,120 comments/645 posts). If you remove the ChurchRodent entries, my CI jumps to 5.63.

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Tip #3: Don’t be shy: comment on other blogs

A surprising amount of traffic can be generated just by being involved in the conversation on other blogs related to your niche. A thoughtful, well-written comment will induce readers to check out the commenter, and this can lead to really good conversion rates. (Presumably, the reader who liked your comment will probably like your posts.)

To this day, I still get hits from months-old comments I’ve left on blogs like Leadership’s Out of Ur and Dan Edelen’s Cerulean Sanctum.

Don’t be crass, though. Post comments that genuinely contribute to dialog. Don’t just troll for hits.

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Tip #4: Share the dialog: use trackback links

Similarly, follow the blogs of related content in your niche market and whenever you see a post you like, post something reviewing that post, commenting on it, praising it, or critiquing it — and link to it. Whenever you quote another blogger, link to the original post. And when linking, use the trackback URL so that the post you’re pointing to (if it’s enabled with trackbacks or pingbacks) will automatically create an entry on the target post that indicates you’ve commented on it. This creates a sort of virtual “bridge” between the two posts on separate blogs, and readers from both blog sites will discover the other weblog. This is a great way to generate traffic from sites that have audiences similar to your own.

Again, don’t be crass. Like happiness, traffic is best found while pursuing other goals. Generating trackbacks for the sake of traffic will only generate ill will and the deletion of every trackback you send out. Be a participant, not a parasite.

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Tip #5: Guest post on others’ blogs

This is even better than commenting or generating trackback entries, because you also get the benefit of transferred credibility. Plus, you may very well convert a fellow blogger into an active reader. And when active bloggers read your blog, they’ll eventually link to another one of your posts — driving more traffic to your site.

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Tip #6: Invite guest bloggers

Because they will point to their own guest commentary on your blog, and their audience will come to see what their favorite blogger has written on your site.

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Tip #7: Provide email subscription tools

In addition to the various RSS feeds that blogs naturally provide, you should also provide a way for visitors to subscribe to new blog posts and the latest comments via email. (Yes, that’s two separate channels: both blog posts and post comments.) On the one hand, some users don’t use RSS news readers, don’t care to, and don’t want to learn how. But they would like to know whenever you post new content to the blog. Give them a way to subscribe to the new content via email.

You should also provide a way for anybody to subscribe to the new comments and updates for each article on the blog. Thus, every time a comment is added to a single article, an email goes out to the subscribers to that article. This will continue to drive traffic to articles long after they’ve “matured” and the rest of the blog has moved on to greener pastures. After all, people will still be landing on the old articles for years to come, and they still want to contribute to the conversation. When a month or so has passed and someone discovers the article for the first time, his or her new comment will remind the old subscribers to that article, and they’ll return to view the post and the new comment.

The goal here is to convert visitors into relationships, and the RSS/newsfeed channel isn’t the only way to do that with a blog.

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Tip #8: Email-This-Post-to-a-Friend

That doesn’t really need much explanation. Please tell me it doesn’t.

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Tip #9: Provide a full-text feed

In addition to the abstracted partial feed that is placed in the auto-discovery tags for the blog (the abstracted feed only sends out the first x number of words, forcing users interested in new posts to visit the site for the full monty), you should also offer a full-text feed for those who want it. Many bloggers insist you should make your main site feed a full-text feed, but that’s really up to you.

If you do offer a full-text feed as an alternative to your main feed, promote it somewhere in your sidebar. Some blog readers only subscribe to full-text feeds, and if you don’t offer one, they won’t read your posts — ever. These are the die-hard news reader aggregator types who don’t want to click through to see the full post just to find out if they’re interested. Without a full-text feed you’ll lose them as audience members but with it you’ll still have them hanging around. Don’t worry, they’ll stop by to comment and view comments as well. (Remember, comments don’t go out in the full text feed, so users will want to visit to see what others are saying.)

I started out offering an abstracted feed summary for BlogRodent, but since my latest redesign I’ve started offering a full-text feed instead. Part of my rationale for doing this is that I don’t want more traffic, I want more readers. In fact, the more readers I have who enjoy the blog from within the comfort of their feed-readers, the less work my server has to do. So, it’s actually better for me to deliver more feeds and fewer pages. It costs less. Literally.

If you have advertisers, don’t worry. You can still deliver ads via feeds, if you must. And loyal readers will be back to comment, so you’re not losing eyeballs. Just unnecessary page views and frustrated subscribers.

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Tip #10: Use FeedBurner for all your feed URLs

There are a few reasons for this.

• Using FeedBurner simplifies the subscription process for many users since FB provides numerous “chicklets” and methods to subscribe for folks who get your FB feed URL. (FeedBurner can also solve the problem of notifying subscribers by email if they don’t use a feed reader.)
• FeedBurner will automatically ping the aggregator ping sites like pingomatic.com, which gets the word out to dozens of other RSS sites and bots that your site is ready for re-indexing and re-syndicating. This keeps traffic fresh.
• Probably the most important reason is that FeedBurner provides detailed stats for your subscribers, the posts they visit, the clickthroughs, and etc. Data is good, know what works for your readers is even “gooder.”
• Using FB also prevents a resource drain on your server — especially if you’re on a hosted shared account (like I am). Feed readers often ping sites every 5-15 minutes, and this is a really unnecessary drain on your server resources, especially if you only post once every other day or so. Let someone else bear the brunt of that bandwidth burden. FeedBurner does so, happily. (You could also try RSSCache, but I prefer FeedBurner.)

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Tip #11: Give Google a Sitemap

Make it easy for Google to find new content and re-crawl updated content by forcing the blog to create a new sitemap.xml file every time a post and comment are updated. The sitemap.xml is a quick way for Google (and other search engine ‘bots) to find what’s fresh and reindex it for their search community. With the right template, Moveable Type can do this automatically. See:

• Google Sitemaps — Google.com
• Add your URL to Google — Google.com
• Google SiteMaps for Movable Type — now with correct Last Modified dates (Anders Jacobsen’s blog)
• Arne Brachhold’s “Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress 2.5“
• Cameron’s Thoughts : Sitemaps — Latest Update

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Tip #12: Get indexed by everybody else, too

The Google sitemap helps other search engines discover content as well. And also be sure to submit your URL for inclusion in all the big players: Google, Lycos, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. This is standard Search Engine Optimization work. A shocking amount of all site traffic is from first-time visitors hitting the site through searching. Capitalize on it. (I get approximately 70% of my first-time visitors via search engines.)

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Tip #13: Get into Technorati, and use Technorati-friendly keyword tags

There are a lot of blog-indexing sites out there for people to search blogs with. Aside from using Google.com and BlogSearch.Google.com the most popular site, by far, is Technorati.com. So, you need to add the blog URL to the Technorati database, and you also need to “claim” the blog entry (See; “Technorati Membership“). This means you have to paste some unique ID into a blog post or somewhere in a blog template so that TRati can visit you homepage and verify that you have control over the content in the blog. Then you can view reports for your URL and provide other identifying data for the blog.

Beyond that, every post should have some hyperlinked URLs that Technorati (and other tag-and-keyword-indexing search sites) can see that will help categorize your blog post according to the meta-data the editor supplies. This allows users on other sites to follow a conversation around the blogosphere and discover posts on CTI blogs by keyword — driving the auto-discovery of the Blog.

So, a post on Billy Graham’s latest appearance would obviously have the keyword “Billy Graham.” The TRati-friendly “rel” tag would look like this:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/billy-graham/" rel="tag">Billy Graham</a>

Notice that this hyperlink is not much different from a normal hyperlink except in two respects. One: it links to the tag-name in Technorati as a lookup tool for other blog posts with the same tag-name. And, two, it uses the rel=”tag” that Technorati introduced and has become standard fare for blogging metadata. (See, for example, the actual results from Technorati for “Billy Graham.”)

Technorati Help: Tags
technorati.com/help/tags.html

Note, categories in Moveable Type are automatically created as “rel” keyword tags. And also note that you don’t have to link to Technorati … any link will work fine as long as the visible content is the tag. So, this would be fine, too:

<a href="http://christianitytoday.com/search?query=billy+graham" rel="tag">Billy Graham</a>

Technorati needs to be pinged to be notified of new posts and therefore new tagged conversations. As long as we’re using FeedBurner in our feeds, FB will automatically ping Technorati when the new post is published. (You can always ping Technorati manually.)

For suggestions on keywords related to content, see:

• Google Keyword tool
• Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Also, see: Top 10 Reasons Why You Need a Technorati Account

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Tip #14: Predict the future

If you see something shaping up on the horizon that looks like it will be of general appeal or — especially — of hot interest to your niche audience, blog on it early … even if the early post doesn’t generate a lot of traffic. The earlier you get indexed by the search engines, the more easily you’ll be found when the predicted event comes to pass.

This really doesn’t require predicting the future as much as it requires paying attention to the incipient and fomenting trends of the now.

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Tip #15: Swim in the stream

And even if you don’t get there ahead of the rest of the bloggers, if you can at least spot what the current hot topics are, you can still get in the conversation and draw new readers to your blog just by jumping in and swimming along. For example, nobody could’ve predicted Ted Haggard’s fall from grace, but I can guarantee you that Gordon MacDonald’s post at Out Of Ur is very highly visited.

Keep on top of current emerging conversations with tools like:

• Alexa.com’s Movers and Shakers
• Technorati’s Popular News
• Technorati’s Popular Blogs
• Technorati’s top-level Popular page also shows the most active recent searches.
• Google’s Zeitgeist
• Yahoo! Buzz Index
• Populicio.us

For more see David Holmes’ Web Zeitgeist

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Tip #16: Clear, web-oriented post titles

Don’t be clever. Don’t be cute. Be clear, direct, and descriptive. Readers are extremely pragmatic, only clicking on links they suspect will satisfy their actual curiosity and need for information. If you must be clever, combine the clever and the pragmatic into a single line separated by a colon or a dash, like “Naked blogging: On how to write transparently.” Etc.

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Tip #17: Friendly, intimate, and humorous

Blogging is essentially a social phenomenon, but we’ve all been trained to avoid sociability in our writing: we’re warned to avoid the authorial “I” like the dengue fever. But readers are looking for a personal connection with the writer, and once they feel loyal to whoever’s behind a blog, they’ll not leave soon, and will be back for more, more, more. This requires a certain amount of intimacy and even transparency that most writers and almost all professional editors are not used to providing. But the reward is a loyal and fervent audience.

Humor is also, clearly, a good tool for this kind of virtual relationship-building, but the risk is to overdo the humor (don’t be trite) and to overdo the transparency (I find your bowel movements neither entertaining nor informative).

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Tip #18: Put hyperlinked blog URLs in email signature files

Just another way to expose people to your URL. You can go even further and insert an image in your signature that shows your latest posts. FeedBurner has a Headline Animinator that let’s you do this. I use something called “RSS PNG Signature“, which is a PHP file that turns a feed into an image. (See it in action here and here.) Unfortunately, I can no longer find the code for this PHP code in the wild. If you need it, download my live feedsig code here. Follow the comments and modify it to your own PHP installation and feed details.

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Tip #19: Original content

Content, content, content. The more original your stuff is, the more likely you’ll stand out and readers will continue to come back for more. I’d write more about this, but, frankly, I would be unoriginal. Others have written more and better about it.

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Tip #20: Unoriginal content

Sometimes, swimming in the stream of current popular interest means writing a review and covering the ground others have covered — but doing it better, with more comprehensiveness, and adding value by injecting opinion and commentary. In one sense, this is still original content. But, in another sense, it feels “unoriginal” or derivative because you’re aggregating links and content from other bloggers and websites on a single topic. But this provides a service to your audience when they learn to trust you for an authoritative, unique, and incisive view of current events.

This is what bloggers are best — and worst at.

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Tip #21: Give back

Provide something of value to the audience that they simply cannot get anywhere else and give it away for free. Provide lists of specialized links, articles with critical advice, downloads that provide great information. MP3s, PDFs, Movies …. Too many blogs have no real substance behind them, and even the ones that do have substance don’t make it easy to get to the meat of it in one location. So, if you have a blog series on, say, the top preaching mistakes and how to avoid them, after the series is complete, bundle up the contents as a well-designed PDF file and offer it as a download.

The stuff you’re giving away will attract attention, people will link to it, and you’ll drive more traffic.

One great posting strategy for giving back that is always sure to generate some attention and may likely get you bookmarked on the social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, is to offer “Top Ten” posts, or bullet-point advice. Guy Kawasaki does this frequently on his site to great effect, often providing something like “Ten Tips for Great Interviews” and he invariably gives 11 or 12 tips as a “bonus.” (See: Guy Kawasaki’s “Best Of” index)

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Tip #22: Use StumbleUpon.com

This is a dirty little secret of blog marketing … social networking sites can actually help drive traffic.

Create an account at StumbleUpon.com, install the toolbar, and whenever you’re at a site relevant to your blog audience, review it and give it a thumbs up. Also: every time you publish an article on your blog, review your own article, and give it a thumbs up. (Of course you would! You love your writing, don’t you?) This article then gets randomly promoted to visitors who like the same types of websites you like.

You will get an extra few dozen or more hits a day that way from people who would have never discovered your site otherwise. But, and this is the beautiful part, they like the same kinds of sites you like, and they may very well like you.

Other sites can be used similarly, such as Reddit, Furl, Netscape, Del.icio.us, and etc.

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Tip #23: Swag

People like to get stuff for free. If you have magazine subscriptions you can give away, offer one for the blogger who generates the most referrals (or just buy one, it may be worth the money!). Offer mousepads for the 1,000th feed subscriber. Offer free T-Shirts via Cafe Press for the best comment posted in a particular article.

This could backfire, though, in the amount of time spent tracking the “entries” and responding to inquiries. And even after you close the contest down, people will still be contacting you about it, so make sure it’s worth your time.

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Tip #24: Advertise on related sites

Buy Google AdSense ads. Buy ads on the Performancing ad network. Contact bloggers directly and offer to buy ad space on their blog for a set period of time. This works.

Or so they say

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Tip #25: Be niche

Too many weblogs try to be too many things to too many people, and they wind up diluting their audience. Focus on a niche theme and interest area that you can specialize in and hammer it home.

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Tip #26: Interview people of interest to the niche audience

Interesting people interviewed well drive traffic and interest. If you have a preaching-oriented site, interview the best known preachers. If you have a book-focused site, interview writers your readers want to know about. If you have a theology site, interview professors who teach theology. Interview pastors with a theological mindset. If you have a Chevy site, interview mechanics.

Interview anybody you can get your hands on, even if it’s only 10 minutes and you just get three bullet points out of the interview — people want short blog articles anyhow. And the interviews don’t even have to be on the phone, they can be re-edited condensations of an exchange of emails over time.

Guy Kawasaki does this to great effect: whenever he’s at a convention or in a new location, he finds somebody to interview and posts the results on his site. (See his “Ten Questions” category on his blog: <blog.guykawasaki.com/best_of/index.html>).

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Tip #27: Be brief, be scannable

Articles which are consistently too long simply don’t get read. That’s not to say an occasional lengthy article will be suffered as long as you’re developing a faithful audience that wants more of what you’ve written. But if every single post on the site is a magna carta, they’ll lose patience with you and move on — because everybody is suffering from information overload.

Follow Jakob Nielson’s usability advice (<useit.com> and especially the page on how to write for the Web <useit.com/papers/webwriting>).

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Tip #28: Cross-promote within your personal blogosphere

Almost every social bookmarking and “Web 2.0″ site gives you a blog-page when you sign up for membership. While I don’t want to publish my blog articles in a dozen different sites, every once in a while I’ll push an article out to one of my other blogs to keep things interesting. And I always publish as my first (and sometimes only) post a “This is not my home” article, linking back to my main blog, including post titles that best highlight what I do. (See my Yahoo! 360 blog for an example.)

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Tip #29: (For publishers) Promote the blog within your magazines

Make sure the blog URLs are also included in the relevant mastheads of your magazines, newsletters, books, and publications. Pick the best posts and republish them as articles. Mention the blog in an editorial now and then. Feature the best comments in a letter to the blog editor section. Create ad spots in the magazines. Use the magazines to build buzz (and use the blogs to buzz about the magazines.)

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Tip #30: Cross-promote within your blog

Be sure to use the plugins that automatically find possibly related posts by keywords. Also, whenever referencing a post that was written in the past, be sure to link to it — and find ways to reference the best posts of the past once in a while to float them back to the top and introduce new visitors to the best of the old content. After a year or so, put a list of “top ten articles” in the sidebar, and review it every quarter. Or create a page of “Best of…” article links and reference that in the sidebar (perhaps as a “More…” link under the “top ten” sidebar item.

There may also be a plugin for your blog platform to automatically “resurrect” an older random article from the archives to feature it on your blog’s front page. I used to do this on my blog (until I got nervous about server resources and republishing my homepage for every visitor) and I set the third article from the top to be my “From the archives….” spot.

This keeps your new audience aware of the history of your site, keeps interest in older articles a little fresher, and consistently exposes Technorati and search engines to the content deeper within your site.

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Tip #31: Track your referrers

Every good blogger keeps an eye on their blog logs looking for referral links (that don’t come from search engines). Whenever you spot a valid referral link, it means somebody, somewhere has linked to you. It’s a good idea to drop into a blog mentioning one of your posts to thank them for the link — even if the comments associated with the link are inflammatory. Plus, it helps you discover bloggers in the same niche content area who you may want to add to your own blogroll, link to in your sidebar, or invite as a guest commenter.

Also, monitor blogs that mention your site by using Technorati’s tracking tools as well.

But, whatever you do, don’t publish a raw, dynamic list of referrer URLs. You’ll just get hammered by spam-bots trying to get their “referrer spam” into your list.

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Tip #32: Start a meme

These can, too often, be frivolous or silly, but they can be insightful and useful, too (See <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme>). One meme I took part in was a listing of books read … favorite books, one book I couldn’t do without, one book that should’ve been banned, and the fellow who started the meme tracked many of the responses and aggregated them. (See “The One Book Meme: My Response“.)

This kind of thing is most powerful when you have begun building a community around your blog.

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Tip #33: Post three to five times a week

Or, at least, once a week, regularly. Too many posts a week, though, can drive people away for fear of information overload. Too infrequent a posting schedule keeps you off your readers’ radar and they’ll start unsubscribing from your RSS feed.

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Tip #34: Use imagery in the posts

Again, the same principle that works in magazines works in blogs: People need eye candy. But think like a designer: Don’t use art just for the sake of art itself: choose imagery that supports the contents of the post. It will not only help visually communicate the point you are driving, but it also helps break up the uniform “gray” of unbroken text.

The right image can really make an article pop. A complete lack of imagery (and their textual cousin, pull-quotes) looks rather boring.

Keeping your posts attractive and visually interesting keeps your audience happy and loyal — and coming back for more.

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Tip #35: Be patient: slog, blog, flog

As a variation on “crawl, walk, run:”: Be patient about traffic and numbers. First you have to slog your way through getting your blog listed in various indexes and feed aggregators, you have to slog your way though owning your blog on Technorati, getting all the proper widgets and plugins working, and fine-tuning your RSS feeds, etc.

Then you have to blog, blog, blog. Get content on the site, build some depth, demonstrate consistency, slowly start building up a community, get people posting comments.

Then you can flog your blog by encouraging cross-links, commenting on other’s blogs, soliciting guest commenters, and responding to comments in your own blog.

It’s a process, and it traffic doesn’t happen overnight, but with patience and discipline, the audience will come and stay.

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Tip #36: Blog about sex

Really, you don’t need me to write much on this one, but it can be done tastefully, and interestingly. For example, if you’re a preaching blogger, consider an article like, “How to preach about sex without blushing.” Just avoid being salacious, offer something useful and interesting, and keep it within your content theme. Traffic will happen.

One of my most visited articles is about Justin Berry, who used to operate a porn site as a teenager, and is now State’s witness in the fight against child pornography. I didn’t write it for the traffic or the salaciousness, but it nearly brought my server to its knees.

Or you could just mention Brittany Spears, Jessica Simpson, Pamela Anderson, Antonella Barba, or any of the latest hotties du jour. But that’s baiting, and it won’t pay off in the long run.

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Tip #37: Be extreme

In a related vein, I remember an article posted in Out of Ur about a poet at the “Scum of the Earth” church in Denver, who recited a poem that included the F-Bomb. That’s guaranteed to be a top traffic generator on Out of Ur. It certainly was when I merely blogged about the post over here on BlogRodent (see “F-bombs, poets, and church. Or, ‘When church goes intentionally awry!’“).

But beware being too extreme. Controversy always generates interest and excitement, but it’s not something you want to get into the habit of doing.

Unless you have a lot of time on your hands, I guess

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Tip #38: Get listed

I mentioned slogging earlier. Get listed in the relevant sites mentioned here:

Robin Good’ Sharewood Tidings
RSSTop55 — Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites

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Tip #39: And more …

For more useful and interesting blog promotion strategies see:

ProBlogger

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[tags]AdSense, advice, AdWords, Alexa, AListApart, Arne-Brachhold, Atom-feed, Best-Of, blog, blog promotion, blog ranking, blog strategies, blog strategy, blog-promotion, blog-strategy, blogging, BlogRodent, BlogSearch, Buzz-Index, Cafe-Press, Cerulean-Sanctum, content-quality, Conversational-Index, corporate-blogging, Dan-Edelen, Del.icio.us, dialog, FeedBurner, full-text-feed, Furl, Google, Google-AdSense, Google-Sitemap, Google-Sitemap-Generator, Google-Sitemaps, Guy-Kawasaki, Headline-Animinator, insight, Jakob-Nielson, keywords, Leadership, loyalty, Lycos, meme, metadata, metrics, Moveable-Type, MSN, MSN’s, Netscape, newsfeed, Out-of-Ur, Pentecostal, PHP, pingbacks, Populicio.us, ProBlogger, promotion, ranking, Reddit, referrers, Rich-Tatum, Robin-Good, RSS-feed, RSS-Submission, RSSCache, RSSTop55, searc-engine-optimizaton, search-engine-ranking, SEO, SEO-Guide, SEO-tricks, SEOmoz, site-traffic, sitemap, SiteMaps, Stowe-Boyd, StumbleUpon, StumbleUpon.com, tagging, Technorati, tips, Top-Ten, trackbacks, traffic, traffic generation, tricks, usability, useit.com, visibility, Wikipedia, WordPress, Yahoo, Zeitgeist[/tags]