Getting Traffic To Your Blog - How Not To Do It

There are many ways of getting traffic to your blog. If you truly respect your readers, you 'll write content that's interesting and relevant to the needs of your readers, and you'll use the search engines to advertise your blog. Other people might join a forum, where everybody promises to read each other's blogs. A third way would be to use the magic of RSS, and join your blog to a common feed.

TRAFFIC via RSS

by ananth77 with 2,473 members

Tagged: blog, blog building, blogging, feed, Marketing, promote, rss, traffic

Build your traffic via RSS. Simple Rules : - 1. Subcribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/feed_traffic 2. Update your RSS feed address in the reply. 3. Your feed will be merged with all the other blogs and web sites.

What a deal. All that you do is make your blog part of the Feed Traffic feed, and you get a piece of all of the traffic, from / to all of the other blogs in the feed. This used to be called a "link farm", where everybody would link to each others blogs, randomly. This is just a link farm using a FeedBurner feed as a backbone.

But, there's a problem here - can you see it?

When you redirect your blog feed to the Feed Traffic feed, your blog becomes part of the feed cloud. Each post that you publish goes to that feed - and anybody subscribing to the feed, from your blog, gets a subscription to all of the blogs and web sites that are part of the Feed Traffic cloud. Just as anybody subscribed to the feed, from any of the other blogs and web sites in the cloud, now gets your blog posts.

Your readers subscribe to the feed from your blog, to read the posts from your blog. Your readers don't want to read the feed from thousands of other blogs, they want to read the feed from your blog. You want to encourage people to read your blog, don't you?

This becomes worse when you involve Following, where your Followers subscribe to the feed from your blog. The feed from your blog goes into the common "All blog updates" list in the Reading List for all of your Followers. This puts thousands of unrelated blogs into the Reading Lists for all of your Followers. This makes the Reading Lists practically useless, for Following relevant blogs.

I know of two bloggers who broke off Following with a third blogger, because of the volume of posts in the feed cloud overwhelmed their Reading Lists. I don't think that these two will be the only ones who find this necessary. If you make this technique part of your strategy for dispersing your blog, you might watch your Following community.

Decide whether you want random anonymous readers, or membership in a relevant and interested community. I don't think that you'll get both.

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