So, my question is how do people get the word out that their website or blog exists? Do blogger invest in ads? Is is just through word of mouth? Or searching Google? I'm just curious how does a website build it's popularity. Do you just put your website up on the web and hope people find it? I know you can make your site SEO friendly, create sitemaps and such but what other techniques are used?
Thanks, John
Among hobbyists, the usual approach is to make a polite announcement on related forums, and when a subject comes up on a forum or blog that you have addressed on your blog or web site, include a link as a part of your response.
Among professionals, advertising, advertising, advertising.
Well, this site was started by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky (if I'm correct), so they both mentioned it on their blogs. Then they asked for people on those blogs to join the beta version. By the time the live version came out, people were already here. Then... wait for word of mouth to spread. If your site is great, they will come.
The big thing is, build a good site! have good quality relevant content. SEO and page linking will help. Most search traffic comes from Google imho. I would suggest http://www.google.com/webmasters/start Submite a sitemap would be high on my todo list. Also Use relevant and unique - page titles, Friendly urls and relevant H1 tags
Hope that helps
I used Myspace as my own free advertising engine, perhaps a bit a-moral but it did the trick till I caught my server on fire.
My blog has been running for about a year and a half. I tried some tricks or tips on promotion that I read from around the Internet. Sure, you can get some activity bursts from promotion on other places, but I've found that the number one factor for a blog is simply to have good quality content. You can trick people into visiting with clever reddit or digg titles, but they'll never turn into repeat visitors. With quality posts, the search engine and referrer inflow will be steady.
If you only blog for popularity or money, and don't really care about putting out worthwhile content, it will show, and the people will not visit your site. I changed pretty early on from quantity over quality to quality over quantity. After all, ask yourself: wouldn't you rather subscribe to a blog that gave you a great read once a month rather than a blog that flooded your reader inbox with shallow, forced posts?
Having a community of users is very important in having a popular site. Typically your site would have a message board of some sort where users could interact with each other. Also having a large source of reference information is also important. Once you have your site up, you need to go out and promote it. It takes time, be patient but never give up promoting it.