How To Make Your Blog More Poupular

Let me ask you,

How do you know when a blog is popular?

The obvious answer is…

Lots of traffic and lots of comments.

Now there’s nothing wrong with using a free blogging platform like Blogger. In fact, I’ve used them myself and have found that is possible to get traffic and make sales with a totally free blog. However, if you’re serious about using the full power of blogging for your business you need to invest a little money to get your own domain name and host your own Wordpress blog.

And once you have your own Wordpress blog you’ll find there are thousands of free plugins that allow you to customize it and make it search engine and visitor friendly. In fact, I’m using nothing but free plugins on this site to provide things like the opt-in form, the invitation box at the bottom of this article, and the blog article and comment information found at the bottom right of every page of my blog.

Today however, since we’re talking about popular blogs, I’ll tell you about 2 of the free plugins I’m using to show my blog visitors which articles are the most popular (get the most traffic) and which articles have the most comments.

The first plugin is WP-PostViews. It’s a free WordPress plugin/widget that enables you to display how many times a post/page has been viewed. You can pick it up at Lester Chan’s site and install it yourself. I will warn you that the installation instructions are intimidating and that’s why I used the Expert Wordpress Installer. However it’s a great plugin to show you and your blog visitors which of your blog posts are the most popular.

And if you’d like to show your blog visitors your blog articles that have received the most comments there’s a free wordpress plugin, Most- Commented, that you can use. The instructions say to put 1 line of code in your theme template however I put the line of code in a text widget on this blog and it seems to be working just fine.

Now I will warn you that getting comments is not all that easy since less than 1% of those reading blogs will actually leave a comment. Still, getting comments is good because it does make the blog more of a virtual community, adds content to your blog and makes your blog look popular.

So how do you get the traffic to show your blog visitors your blog is popular?

The short answer is, you have provide good content that’s easy to read, have a good title and use the right keywords correctly. Now there’s a vast amount of information readily available an just about everything so providing good content shouldn’t be a problem. And there’s tons of free information on how to format that information to make it easy to read. And of course your article title needs to grab people’s attention. The easiest way to grab the attention of your potential blog reader and the search engines is to use your keyword or keyword phrase in it.

The hardest part of getting enough traffic to make your blog popular is knowing which keywords to use.

Travis Sago (the Bum Marketer) has created this free video that shows how he does it.

Click here for more information about instacashkeywords.

After you’ve started getting traffic to your blog you want to get people to add comments. There’s a good article on “10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog” on the ProBlogger Blog.

Number 9 on his list of things you can do to get blog comments is, “Reward’ Comments.” And as he says, “There are many ways of acknowledging and ‘rewarding’ good comments…” That’s why today I’m testing another no cost plugin for the first time. The plugin is called comment maximizer and it gives me the ability to actually bribe you with a gift for leaving a comment.

Did you notice I used the words “no cost” as opposed to free?

That’s because unlike most free Wordpress plugins where you can simply download the plugin, the creator of comment maximizer actually designed this plugin to do two things: get comments and build a subscriber list and he is using it to do both. So to get a copy of this plugin you must both leave a comment on his blog and confirm your request to join his list before you can download the plugin. When I downloaded the plugin on November 11 he had both received over 200 comments and new subscribers in less than 24 hours!

Want to have your own popular Wordpress blog or website?

Simple leave a comment on this blog and I’ll send you:

1.  Your own copy of “Wordpress Website Secrets”, a “how to” primer on installing a WordPress blog – as well as turning it into your highly optimized static website!

2. The location where you can get the no-cost Wordpress plugin I’m using today to bribe you to leave a comment.

To Your Success,
Susan

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