Wow! It has been a trying couple of weeks. I am not an IT person but, I wish I was. We have repeatedly had trouble with posting on both http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/ and http://bertsboobtubeblog.com/. While it has been extremely frustrating, Bert has been a trooper and just kept writing his way through it. He has been able to make a workable situation out of a problem that was threatening to shut us down before we even really got started. I only tell you this to sort of explain where I've been lately.
Now on to another traffic driving tip. We have signed for all the gadgets that people can use to track and follow us. Facebook, RSS and my sons' personal favorite, Twitter. I don't really understand some of these. I mean Facebook is pretty self explanatory and, as I've outlined in a previous artlicle, has led to some good traffic tresults for both of our blogs. I think I understand the basics behind Twitter. But, whether I understand or not is irrelevant. We are up to almost 100 Twitter followers and we are generating multiple visits a day from this.
So, check out the sites and follow us on Twitter. If you're a blogger, let us know and we'll follow you on Twitter as well.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Craigslist
What is the subject of your blog? As you can see, I have http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/ that covers movie news, reviews and opinions. I also have http://bertsboobtubeblog.com/ that tackles television news, reviews and opinions. My son provides the content for both sites, often posting two to four times a day per site. It is my job to find readers for his blogs.
So far we have e-mailed all of our family and friends that we could find e-mail addresses for. We have set up a Facebook page (Feel free to send us a friend request. Look for Berts Blogs). Now, I have taken out Craigslist ads advertising each site.
Please understand that the number one thing driving visitors to either of these sites is the quality and the quantity of my sons posts. But, all of the above mentioned things that we are doing does send a few visitors each day to each site. I must admit, however, that Facebook has sent us the most traffic of any of these.
So, what are you doing to drive traffic?
So far we have e-mailed all of our family and friends that we could find e-mail addresses for. We have set up a Facebook page (Feel free to send us a friend request. Look for Berts Blogs). Now, I have taken out Craigslist ads advertising each site.
Please understand that the number one thing driving visitors to either of these sites is the quality and the quantity of my sons posts. But, all of the above mentioned things that we are doing does send a few visitors each day to each site. I must admit, however, that Facebook has sent us the most traffic of any of these.
So, what are you doing to drive traffic?
Friday, October 22, 2010
Submit Your URL to Search Engines
If you have a blog set up, and you are writing every day, you want people to come and read it, right? One of the the first things you are going to want to do is submit your site address to search engines. You can tell all of your friends and family (which I hope you have done) about your new venture but, that will not be enough to drive the volume of traffic needed if you ever want to make any money from your blog. You need strangers to be able to find you as well. Search will hopefully help find you some more readers. Submit your url to the following:
http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
It will take some time for you to get noticed by the search engines, but eventually you will start to see some visitors showing up at your site because of something they typed into a search engine.
http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
It will take some time for you to get noticed by the search engines, but eventually you will start to see some visitors showing up at your site because of something they typed into a search engine.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
I'm Not an IT Expert
We had a mini crises a couple of days ago. My son had gone to see Jackass 3D and was anxious to get home and make a posting to http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/ . He is pretty particular about how he wants his site to look. After all, what's the point in writing several times a day if the site is not pleasing to look at or you can't find your way around to the information you may be looking for? I think he has done a great job. The site looks great. The catagories in the sidebar are easy to figure out. So, all in all, the site has a nice crisp and professional look to it.
On Tuesday he posted his review to the above mentioned movie and something happened. We are still not sure what happened but, but articles were bleeding in to the sidebar, the catagories were pushed to the bottom of the page. All in all, it was not very pleasing to the eye. We had advertised the fact that there was new post up, a post reviewing the number 1 movie of the week no less. And when you went to the site, only half of the post was visible. And visits went up and up and up.
We were a little embarassed and panicked over the whole sitiuation. What do we do? How do we fix this? I had no clue. My son is a little more computer savvy than I am but, he was stumped as well. It's not like we are a big company with an 'IT' department or anything. We're just a couple of guys having fun with a blog or two. At least we didn't think we had an 'IT' department but, it turns out that we did. After a bit of time on the phone with our hosting company, HostGator, we were back in business. The level of 24/7 technical support that they offer is outstanding. We would have been dead in the water without them. Thank-you Hostgator!
I know you probably came here today to find out what I am doing to drive traffic. If you don't have some good, inexpensive tech support and your site goes down, your daily visitors will go down with it.
On Tuesday he posted his review to the above mentioned movie and something happened. We are still not sure what happened but, but articles were bleeding in to the sidebar, the catagories were pushed to the bottom of the page. All in all, it was not very pleasing to the eye. We had advertised the fact that there was new post up, a post reviewing the number 1 movie of the week no less. And when you went to the site, only half of the post was visible. And visits went up and up and up.
We were a little embarassed and panicked over the whole sitiuation. What do we do? How do we fix this? I had no clue. My son is a little more computer savvy than I am but, he was stumped as well. It's not like we are a big company with an 'IT' department or anything. We're just a couple of guys having fun with a blog or two. At least we didn't think we had an 'IT' department but, it turns out that we did. After a bit of time on the phone with our hosting company, HostGator, we were back in business. The level of 24/7 technical support that they offer is outstanding. We would have been dead in the water without them. Thank-you Hostgator!
I know you probably came here today to find out what I am doing to drive traffic. If you don't have some good, inexpensive tech support and your site goes down, your daily visitors will go down with it.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Are you on Facebook? We have received more external link visitors from Facebook than any where else this month. I started it by posting a link to http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/ to my Facebook status. Now, I don't know if you would call me anti-social or what, but I only have about 95 friends. The day I posted the link in my status, we got 5 visitors to the blog. My son thought that was pretty good so he posted it to his status. We got 5 more visits from that. Then, he created a Facebook page called Berts Blogs http://facebook.com/bertsblogs . In the first week he has almost 200 friends of the page and this has turned out to be a nice, steady source of traffic. The last time I checked, we had around 50 visits this month clicking over from Facebook.
Lesson: Advertise your site on Facebook.
Lesson: Advertise your site on Facebook.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Post Every Day!
I have done a few different things to get the word out about my blogs, but so far it does appear that the best thing that I am doing is trying to post on each site at least once and often times more, every day. For http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/, it is harder to post every day because I don't always have time to take in a movie. When I started the site, I only wanted it to be movie reviews. The challenge that I am facing is going to see four or five movies a week, so I have amended the purpose of the site to include any relevant movie or celebrity news. This has allowed me to post two to three times a day.
With http://bertsboobtubeblog.com/, I have been able to give a little jump start to site traffic using this knowledge. I think I am finding an audience. Posting once or twice a day, every day, has lead to about 7 more visits a day than the box office blog was getting in its first week or two.
Lesson: Post AT LEAST once or twice or a day.
With http://bertsboobtubeblog.com/, I have been able to give a little jump start to site traffic using this knowledge. I think I am finding an audience. Posting once or twice a day, every day, has lead to about 7 more visits a day than the box office blog was getting in its first week or two.
Lesson: Post AT LEAST once or twice or a day.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
I'm Back!
Hello and welcome (back) to my blog. As you can probably tell, I got a little side tracked. Let me give you a little recap.
A while back, December 2008 to be exact, I started two blogs. One was a site called "backwardfuture" and the other was called http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/. I was writing backward future and my son, who lives in Hollywood due to his love of movies, was writing http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/ . In addition to writing backwardfuture, I was also responsible for marketing the sites. I found all sorts of information available on how to drive more traffic to my blogs. I started this site in the hopes of maybe being the guinea pig for other would be online entrepeneurs. I would sort through the volumes of ideas available online regarding increasing site traffic, put into practice what I thought to be some of the better ideas, and post my progress (or lack there of) on this site.
And then life happened. I was unemployed when I started this venture. In the spring of 2009, I took a job in radio as a media buyer. I am working close to 50 hours a week but have finally settled into a routine that will allow me a bit of time to invest into blogging. My son didn't think things were growing fast enough and lost interest. But, it was actually him who reignited my interest in blogging. (Thanks Bert!)
And so here we are. When I bought the domain names in December 2008, I bought "backwardfuture" for a year and http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/ for two years. I don't know why I did it that way but, in my defense, I didn't have a clue what I was doing. Needless to say, the "backwardfuture" name was gone but we still owned Bertsboxofficeblog. After a call to Hostgator, who I have used since day one for hosting, we were back in business. http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/ went live again on September 27, 2010! Every bit of content since its inception is still there. And on October 9, 2010 we added to the family by creating http://bertsboobtubeblog.com/ .
The goal is to reach 10,000 visits a day for each blog and I intend to use this blog as a diary for how we are doing with that goal and what we are doing to achieve it. I invite you to follow along. Maybe we can all learn a few things along the way.
A while back, December 2008 to be exact, I started two blogs. One was a site called "backwardfuture" and the other was called http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/. I was writing backward future and my son, who lives in Hollywood due to his love of movies, was writing http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/ . In addition to writing backwardfuture, I was also responsible for marketing the sites. I found all sorts of information available on how to drive more traffic to my blogs. I started this site in the hopes of maybe being the guinea pig for other would be online entrepeneurs. I would sort through the volumes of ideas available online regarding increasing site traffic, put into practice what I thought to be some of the better ideas, and post my progress (or lack there of) on this site.
And then life happened. I was unemployed when I started this venture. In the spring of 2009, I took a job in radio as a media buyer. I am working close to 50 hours a week but have finally settled into a routine that will allow me a bit of time to invest into blogging. My son didn't think things were growing fast enough and lost interest. But, it was actually him who reignited my interest in blogging. (Thanks Bert!)
And so here we are. When I bought the domain names in December 2008, I bought "backwardfuture" for a year and http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/ for two years. I don't know why I did it that way but, in my defense, I didn't have a clue what I was doing. Needless to say, the "backwardfuture" name was gone but we still owned Bertsboxofficeblog. After a call to Hostgator, who I have used since day one for hosting, we were back in business. http://bertsboxofficeblog.com/ went live again on September 27, 2010! Every bit of content since its inception is still there. And on October 9, 2010 we added to the family by creating http://bertsboobtubeblog.com/ .
The goal is to reach 10,000 visits a day for each blog and I intend to use this blog as a diary for how we are doing with that goal and what we are doing to achieve it. I invite you to follow along. Maybe we can all learn a few things along the way.
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