BlogDoofus

Last Saturday a guest poster on MaxBlogger Stories wrote an article called "Unique Way To Drive Traffic". In this article they listed fifty nine things that they did over the course of a year to generate traffic to their blogs.

The first thing I have to say is that I didn't find anything "Unique" about this list of tips, many of which I've seen time and time again. Heck, I've probably posted several of them myself at one time or another.

I'm not going to address the entire list, which you can check the article on MaxBlogger for that. Instead I'm going to address the ones that just wouldn't leave me alone until I said something about them.

Yahoo and Google groups are, for the most part, useless as a source of traffic or links. Both use nofollow on links. Google groups is, in my experience, only fit for spammers, lamers and people who don't know that it used to be dejanews, which was an arhive of UseNet newsgroups, or that a lot of google groups posts end up on UseNet where anyone with sense will set their newsreader to block postings from Google groups because "Google groupers" don't even realize that they're spamming the daylights out of usenet with their mostly clueless, spam filled postings.

The author might just as well have said "China is here." At least then I would have had a really good response:

"What does that mean? Huh? China is here? I don't even know what the hell that means. All I know is, this Lo Pan character comes outta thin air in the middle of a goddam alley, while his buddies are flyin' around on wires cuttin' everybody to shreds, and he just stands there, waitin' for me to drive my truck straight through him, with light comin' out of his mouth?"

Almost nobody uses the word "pithy" anymore. Better to say something like "concise and to the point".

Unless you're certain that you've got tens of thousands of daily readers this is a waste of time because only with that many readers taking action with every post you write can you hope come close to breaking into the "A-List" group of bloggers even temporarily.

This is a good idea *IF* it doesn't slow your site down. Most eye candy like this only serves to load up a site and make it load slower. Slower loading blogs will usually lose readers quickly because nobody has any patience anymore.

I joined mybloglog, blogcatalog, bumpzee and a few others years ago and have found that they are seldom a source of traffic unless you devote a lot of time socializing and building relationships with people. Maybe it's worth it to some but I personally have never been able to devote that much time to sites like that because, for the most part, they bore the living snot out of me.

More than once I've given serious consideration to removing the widgets for those sites entirely.

This is only a good idea if the blogs in question are relevant to your blog's main topic / niche and even then you have to make sure that *all* of your comments actually contribute something instead of spammy looking "me too" style comments.

I don't know about making your stuff more useful, though linking back to your sources and sites or articles that inspire you can certainly help your credibility. It can also be a source of links if the blog you link to allows trackbacks / pingbacks with "do follow" links.

You need to take care with this one. There's a fine line between "persistant" and "nagging" that's different for everyone. If you cross that line, you'll never get anywhere with that particular blog.

Blogrush has been dead for a year or more because it was a miserable failure.

Triple Redundant. Technorati was already mentioned in both #9 and #30.

If you're not careful that can come across as begging which will stamp you as a lamer. You're much better off making sure that the digg button is one of the bookmarking options that you enable in the sociable plugin and let the readers decide.

Different from what? Without some kind of reference point, this is meaningless advice.

I assume this means include your link in forum signatures. Good idea as long as the forum in question allows "do follow" links in your signature. Unfortunately the author stated it in a way that doesn't quite make sense.

WordPress does this automatically. http://pingomatic.com/ doesn't work. The only thing I found on the page is "You are too awesome for Ping-o-matic"

It will also get you labeled as a trackback spammer. Any post with that many links is going to look horribly spammy. It's much better to use one or only a few trackbacks per post and make sure that they're relevant to the topic of your post.

Speaking strictly from an SEO / Traffic building point of view I don't see the point of this at all. To me it would only be worth messing with if flickr allowed users to include links in their descriptions and not saddle those links with "nofollow". Even then I think it'd be more of a P.I.T.A. than it's worth.

Good advice written by an author who very clearly does not have English as a first language, in which case "good grammar" is very often (though not always) all but impossible. Native English speakers however have very little excuse for not at least trying to use proper English grammar and punctuation.

Doesn't that conflict with #44?

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