Sean Writes:

I started a blog but I am having a lot of trouble getting any traffic.  Do you have any ideas you can share with me on how to get more people to my website?

MR. GOOD ADVICE RESPONDS:

First you have to make sure you are writing something on your blog each and everyday, so that the people that do stop by have a reason to come back.  If you don't do this you will quickly lose the few faithful readers you may attract.

Second, try and write about things that people are likely to be talking about on any given day.  People have a tendency to do web searches on google and other engines for whatever is the hot topic of the moment and it's those search engines that will direct traffic your way.  So, if you are writing about things that people don't really care about at the moment you are probably gonna have much less traffic.

With regard to search engines, make sure you register your website with as many as possible.  Here are a few links of the most important ones:

Google  DMOZ  Alexa  Bing  Altavista  Alltheweb  Webcrawler  

 Ask  Exactseek  Gigablast  AIM  What-U-Seek

There are a number of companies that will charge you to put your blog on hundreds of search engines, but I'm not sure it's worth the money.  I suggest you try doing it yourself and see if traffic increases without spending the extra money.

Another important thing is to link your website to as many other websites out there on the web.  So make sure you visit other people's blogs and websites and make plenty of comments.  When you make those comments always try to include a link back to your own website.  Remember, it helps if you visit blogs and websites that have plenty of traffic themselves!  If you blog is on a specific topic then visit the websites on that topic that are the most popular and try and steal off a bit of their traffic!

Good luck!