How to Direct Traffic to your Blog

This post was originally posted on BlogPressive.com for Impressive Blogging - http://www.blogpressive.com/2010/08/27/how-to-direct-traffic-to-your-blog/

I've always wanted a website that has grew and grew, and I've always wanted to give tips to others withsmaller blogs on how to make a success of traffic building. Since I started blogging in 2008, only 2 years ago, I feel as though I may not have made a huge success on those 'famous' names such as Lisa with 2CreateAWebsite or Rob with RobsWebTips but I feel as though right now, I have made enough traffic come to my site, and it'll keep growing but it's about time I shall share my tips on how to direct traffic and also target traffic to your blog.

Discussion Boards, Forums and Signatures

When I joined Host Gator to host my personal blog, JonnyRowntree.com, I didn't take much notice of how much the company helps out their customers reach maximum potential on the web. Yes, I've been with different hosts such as GoDaddy with the Hosting Connection and Squarespace with the Developer Forums, but there has never been a web host where I have been comfortable making posts with suggestions on how the host should grow, considering they may already be enough static websites and blogs on their servers. I do however communicate with the Hostgator (or sometimes I call them Gator) community and submit ideas about blogging packages and ask for feedback and information to others who use a package that is new to me. Now, discussion boards and forums are key to maximizing traffic to your blog or website. The past couple of the weeks I have been posting on the Hostgator forums, I must have received about 20 to 30 referrals per couple of days and on Wednesday, I made double the amount of traffic when I relaunched my website. Now, not only does posting on discussion boards and forums help you communicate with others who are interested in the same topics your website talks about but they are obversely interested in web hosting and website development, another reason you should find forums useful.

Social Media and Twitter Hashtags

Target traffic using social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Myspace because who doesn't use any of those sites at this moment in time? Make your readers stay connected to your blog using those sites, implement share buttons on your posts to enable sharing to these networks and you're going in for the kill. Now, how about targeting those readers? Well, on Twitter you can use #hashtags, which work with the search function and funnily enough, tweeters watch them for new posts and before you know it, you're targeting them. Of course, its different on Facebook as you can join pages that contain a discussion board and talk about the same topics you talk about on your blog. Overall, social media is sometimes off at targeting traffic in my opinion.

You can find our Twitter #hashtag, which is #BlogPressive.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is great for connecting with new readers on different blog and forwarding them to your blog. Not only are you reading this on BlogPressive, but you may also be reading this on TekSocial (hello!) too! Allowing guest posters on your blog is a great way of directing traffic as now only are you sharing about your latest post but the guest poster is sharing about their latest post, making your traffic go through the roof and you're collecting more followers. For instance, I'm a guest poster on TekSocial and soon TutorialZip so I'll be targeting 3 audiences, my own environment and 2 out in the wild! I also accept guest bloggers on BlogPressive, like Jack Kirk who joined us yesterday for a Hostgator review.

Comment Discussion

How do you target traffic and visitors? Are there any tips you can leave us or others that are really helpful? Leave a comment below.

Mac & PS3

As a mac user, I found it pretty frustrating that the PS3 does not currently support .mov files. When it comes to this problem, I am torn; on the one hand, I feel sony should introduce support for .mov, but on the other I sympathize with them for apple's use of the .mov format- blatantly disregarding the 'soon to be industry standard' and the 'i33t'ness of the format for the consumer market.

But I digress. As with many tech reviewers, I want to offer a solution to this dilemma, otherwise what use would this article be? The answer can be found in Quicktime Pro. Although this solution is not cost free, the productivity one can gain from Quicktime Pro is priceless, so head on over to the apple website and buy yourself a copy. Besides, here on the creativeone.tv, those who are against supporting the mecha that is apple are few and far between and Quicktime Pro can only be another step toward Apple Nibanna.

Now you have your copy, the solution is simple. Quicktime Pro offers a .mov to mp4 pass through method that provides lossless conversion. Think of it as reorganizing the zeros and ones of a .mov file to fit in a .mp4 wrapper. It is the same PS3 supported h.264 data after all, just in a different package that the PS3 can't read. The only downside of this method is that the .mov file must use the h.264 codec, the standard deliverable codec of today. Codecs like DV-PAL etc will not work, but for the standard consumer this will not be a problem.

Simple steps are laid out below.

1. Take you .mov file with standard h.264 compression and open it up in Quicktime Pro.
2. Open the file menu and select 'export'.
3. A dialog will appear, from which select 'Movie to MPEG-4' and hit options.
4. Another dialog will open up, from which select 'passthrough' under the video format selection box.

OK it all and save to a desired destination. On my standard macbook, a 4 minute clip doesn't even take 10 seconds.

It is that easy, but if you didn't catch it, you can watch it below;

If you are on a tight shoe string, MPEG streamclip offers a free alternative to QTP, but the conversion is not as fast and is not lossless as every frame is essentially re-encoded- unlike the passthrough method which just changes the wrapper without loosing any quality or resolution. You can check out MPEG Streamclip here. I won't go into details on how to use MPEG streamclip, but if you need any help, contact me.

If you have any questions, message me on youtube and I will happily try to help to the best of my ability.

I would also like to take the time to say thank you to Mr DeFranco for allowing me to become a part of this community. I can't say exactly what I plan to bring to the table, as I honestly don't know. I just know I am a student film-maker living in a tech filled, hectic world and my blogs and videos will reflect that.

Speak to you all soon....

-Adam

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