STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

fairywings · Dooney & Bourke

Blog Questions

Elle · Hermes

I'm not a blogger myself but I follow plenty! What people seem to do there is leave a comment on a blog they follow, and put a link to their own blog in the name section of the comment. That way other commenters (or the blogger themselves) can easily click through to your blog. You can also feature another blogger on your blog if they have some awesome idea/project/wisdom that works with what you typically write about - shoot them an email and let them know you are going to feature them, so they can direct their bloggers over to your blog to check it out!

I know there is a way to check your blog statistics ... I think through whomever you use to blog (blogger, typepad, etc). Not sure how to find them though ...?

joy0302 · Kate Spade

Fairywings- It can be really hard to drive traffic to your blog. I have found that posting comments on others blogs helps. I also signed up on: http://www.delightfulblogs.com/ and made some really great bloggy friends from that. Also try new ways to get people excited about your blog. I do a weekly feature now about Etsy shops and each shop I feature offers a prize. To enter for the weekly giveaway you get one entry by commenting on the shop and an extra entry for being a follower to my blog. That helped me gain many followers. Also post as often as you can. I find that the more I post the more my blog finds followers.

I use this counter for my blog:
http://www.statcounter.com/

http://joydevivredesign.blogspot.com/ is my blog. Feel free to check it out if you would like. I have added several different things to try and change it up a bit in the past few months. I am no blog expert, but have learned some since I have been getting into it so if there is anything I can help you with feel free to ask.

Best of luck with yours. They really are a lot of fun!

Kelly · Hermes

n/m...I was going to say that you should post your link here but then I saw that it's in your sig!

-- Edited by Kelly on Saturday 10th of October 2009 08:29:54 PM

Aurora · Marc Jacobs

If you are running a wordpress blog you can install the WordPress Stats plugin and it will give you information on hits per day, popular posts, search terms, and if they click on links to leave your blog (and which ones).

I tried statcounter but it was way too much information and half of it I just didn't understand. I liked the simpler one I mentioned above.

For followers are you submitting your individual posts to any of the social networking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, blogsvine, etc? That is one way to get people to your blog and possibly come back. Another is integrating with Twitter. Every time I post a blog post it automatically tweets it for me and people pay me a visit that way.

You could also do traffic generating sites if you just wanted people landing on your page (for a higher page rank) but most people don't spend time on your site that way and won't leave comments. I finally quit doing that because it was time consuming. If you did go that route, I used clickthru, easyhits4u, trafficg, and blogmad.

Blogging goes in spurts for me. Sometimes I'll have a ton of visitors (mostly related to my daily memes) and other times I won't have but a couple. I just keep chugging along with it all.

kenzie · Chanel

I've found that Google Analytics is the best for tracking blog traffic. You can get all kinds of details about your traffic with it. And it's free.

As for getting more followers? Yeah, it's tough. You have to be diligent about posting regularly, then you have to evangelize your blog without being spammy. So like others mentioned, comment on other blogs, use it in your signature on message boards, get a Facebook page for it, tweet your posts, digg your posts, etc, etc, etc. Also, make sur your blog and posts are search engine optimized. I get so much organic traffic because of that (and I know what they're typing in to find me).

It takes months of diligence to really to build a following, but it can be done (I'm slowly seeing increases in traffic to my blog).

-- Edited by kenzie on Tuesday 13th of October 2009 10:51:58 AM