If you want to become successful with your blog, you need people that do actually read all your posts (and sometimes you weird thoughts ;-). In other words, you need to drive traffic to your blog, not only because that you want readers for it, but also because you can monetize your content better. Traffic is like the holy grail, especially if you want to make money online. Most adverts that show up on your blog rely on either page impressions or click through rates, the more visitors you have, the better those adverts perform and bring you money.

Because this blog is still very young, I don´t have the best traffic rates yet (I usually get around 30 to 40 unique visitors each day). Most of my visitors come from the free traffic exchange called Linkreferral, directly followed by Google Search and some backlinks from comments I posted on other blogs. Although I´m very happy with the actual traffic rates, I think there´s room for more. Therefore I searched for some new ways for giving my blog some more exposure in the online world.

Yesterday I found a nice free blog directory called BlogCatalog, which will hopefully help me in attracting some new readers. The basic principle of such a blog directory is simple, you submit your blog URL into a category that fits best with your content. You´ll get a backlink from the directory that points to your blog and therefore leads some visitors to it. The good thing about BlogCatalog is that there´s an active community behind it, meaning that everybody who´s a member there can rate your blog for example. If you have a good rating, you´ll be listed in a higher (and more “attractive”) ranking in your choosen category. You can also make friends there and join so called “neighborhoods” (groups of blogs that have related content).

I´ve joined BlogCatalog yesterday and I´ve just received some new visitors (not too many, but I hope it´ll grow). I´ve also implemented a badge in my blog that shows the recent viewers from Blogcatalog, you´ll find it at the bottom of the right sidebar. You can also rate my blog there (only high ratings allowed

This won´t be the last thing I´ll do for increasing my traffic rates, so stay tuned for more informations within my next posts.

Bye,
Querblogger