Webupon

Notice: This is part 2 of a four part series. Part 1 may be found here:

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So you have the snazzy blog. You’re posting every day. You have a vague feeling that you’re attracting an audience. But who?

Tracking Visits

You need to know who is reading your blog. There are a couple ways you can do this. Some blogging services offer free tools to analyze the traffic your blog is getting. You can then sort and view this information in lists, charts, and graphs.

But what if your chosen service doesn’t have such tools, or you are required to pay to access them? Simple! There are many free blog trackers online that will do this for you. Typically, you put a small snippet of HTML code on your blog and sign up with a service. When someone visits your blog, the code will be loaded, and the website will register a visit. You can then log on to the website to see how many visits you got, and even find out information such as where in the world your blog readers live!

Some blog trackers will put unwanted ads on your page, while some will not. The one that I would personally recommend may be found here.

As to the HTML side of things, the method varies by site so I can’t help you much here as I’m trying to keep this guide relatively open-ended. But be reassured: cut and paste is the maximum amount of “coding” expertise  you’ll need.

Building an Audience

If you’ve only been blogging for a short time, the numbers you got from the tracking tools may have been less than stellar. Don’t worry — it most likely isn’t because you’re a poor writer!

Think about how many fantastic “underground” bands there are. They make great music people want to hear, but almost no one does because these bands don’t have good marketing — for the music industry, a record label would be a good example.

The key is to get people to be aware that you blog even exists. “If you build it, they will come” is NOT applicable here!

The simplest way to start is to tell your family and friends. Send out an email saying something along the lines of “Hey, I made a blog, check it out”. You can email them when you post something new as well — it’s up to you how annoying you want to be!

You can do the same for myspace and facebook as well, and any other sites you belong to. If you post on forums or make comments on blogs you can put the blog link into your signature or the “Website” field of the comment box (I use this for my triond page).

All of that was simply taking advantage of the tools that you already use. Here are some tools that you may be unaware of but want to start using:

• Twitter

Ah, chances are you’re already on Twitter (that’s what it seems like these days anyways). Twitter is simply a site where people group together to stay in touch by answering the question “What are you doing” in 140 characters or less. When people like to read your “tweets” (posts), they can choose to “follow” you. This means that they will automatically receive your “tweets” without even bothering to visit your page!

Some people on Twitter have over 500 followers — this means that every time you post an article you can tweet about it and instantly get the message out!

• RSS feeds

RSS feeds are another way to get your content out. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. This sounds complicated, but really just means that whenever you update your website, your RSS feed is updated as well. Anyone with an RSS reader who subscribes to your “feed” while instantly get a notification whenever your site is updated.

This helps you retain readers who enjoy your content but are forgetful when it comes to “checking back” for new content.

RSS does require outside effort on the part of the reader, and if you create a feed explain what it is and offer your readers to subscribe, but don’t force it. Chances are, if they already use the technology they will subscribe if they like the blog. If they don’t, chances are one blog won’t convince them to start using it.

Creating the “feed” does require more technical skills than the other methods, but it will pay off well eventually and still is not very difficult. The blogging site you are on may already have a procedure for creating these — try that first.

There is various pay software that allows you to create these, but some may force you to pay or be on a trial basis.

To be honest at this point though, creating an RSS feed from scratch is beyond the scope and length of this article. I may write another one just about that topic in future.

• Search Engines

Search engine marketing and getting a website higher on the search engines is a topic all by itself as well. For the highly motivated web marketer, books have been written about optimizing keywords and such. Here I have a few simple tips.

Put the tags in your blog to good use. These are lists of words that you type after your post for organization, and if you use the correct tags, your blog and it’s articles will be easier to find.

Also try to have a number of “keywords” on your blog. To go back to the gardening example introduced in part one, you might want to pick a couple keywords that you think people are likely to search for. There are also tools to find out exactly what people have been searching for. Here is a tool provided by Google that can analyze your site content and attempt to create some keywords. Then, try to use these keywords in your tag section and in your articles (without sacrificing the quality of your writing of course!).

Also, you can directly submit your site to search engines. This is a fantastic resource for doing so. You can manually add your link to any one of fifty search engines, or you can do it all at once. Be warned that you need to submit your email and will be signed up for a weekly newsletter if you do the automatic service, but you can unsubcribe at any time.

If this is sounding like internet marketing, that’s because it is. If you want to expand even further into this field,  there are countless resources on the Internet to help you — but don’t get scammed! Most of the “miracle millionaire” internet marketing programs are scams.

Anyways, you’ve got visitors, but what about money? In part 3 we will learn how to Monetize your blog.