How To Make Money With Your Wedding Blog (Part Four)

Today's topic is:

1. Blogging 101.
2. Creating an attractive wedding blog.
3. Writing posts that people will want to read.
4. Directing traffic to your wedding blog.
5. Profiting from your wedding blog.

Part Four: Directing Traffic to Your Wedding Blog

Now that we’re in the fourth part of the How To Make Money With Your Wedding Blog series, we’re getting into the more nitty-gritty computer geek type stuff. Last week we focused on writing quality posts, which is the fun/creative part of blogging. This week we’re going to talk numbers. Most bloggers would agree that more is better when it comes to blog traffic. You can be writing the greatest posts in the world, but if nobody but you is reading them…

I won’t lie. I think this part of blogging is pretty annoying and because of that, I don’t spent a lot of time trying to generate blog traffic (readers). Honestly, I got very lucky when I found online Disney communities, because that’s where most of my readers come from and then I got another break when I was contacted by Weddingbee, because my short stint as Miss Flip Flop led to another pool of readers. So, mainly I just coast along, content with my readership, even though it makes me a very, very, very small fish in the world of blogging.

If you’re also fine with small fish numbers, some of these tips might still interest you because they include creative ways to publicize your blog among the people you already know. If you’d rather be a big fish, definitely keep reading. The honest truth is that being a big fish means that only 20% of your effort will be spent on writing blog entries. The rest is all business.

The Business of Blogging

Profit

Next week, in the last part of this series, we’ll talk about profiting from your wedding blog. Therefore, I’m not going to talk too much this week about earning money. That being said, it should be pretty obvious that more blog traffic = more blog profit. If advertisers are paying you to put ads on your blog, they’re paying you based on how many people are reading. If you’re using your blog to promote goods or services, you want to reach as wide an audience as possible.

Finally, from a non-financial standpoint, you’ll profit a lot from the community who gets involved in your blog and you want that community to be as big as possible. I cannot even tell you how much good advice I got because of this wedding blog. So many brides stopped in to share their two cents and little tips/tricks, that I think I literally saved thousands of dollars. Remember, profit doesn’t only mean the money coming in…it also means the money you’re going to save that you wouldn’t be saving if it wasn’t for your wedding blog.

Numbers

Let’s talk numbers. This wedding blog gets around 700 readers a day in one form or another. Some people might see that number and feel discouraged if their blog is only reaching 30-50 readers per day, but you have to remember that it takes a while to build up a site. There are so many blogs out there (Technorati is reporting 7.4 million blogs posted in the last four months) that it’s really hard to try to attract readers if you don’t have a lot to offer yet. If people come to your site and see that you’ve only posted once or twice, they’re likely to assume that you won’t be a long time blogger. Since they aren’t going to want to keep coming back to read those same two posts, they won’t plan on coming back at all. Continually adding quality content is a great way to improve readership numbers over time.

So, I average at 700 right now…but, like I said earlier, that number still makes me a very, very, very small fish. If you want a size comparison, the big fish pull in hundreds of thousands of readers every day, with the really big fish pulling in over a million visitors every 24 hours. A lot of these people make six figure incomes just from blogging and many do it as a full time job. Nuts? Yes. But also true.

Moment of total honesty: your wedding blog will not pull in a six figure salary. It just won’t. Some day, there might be a person who reads that sentence and proves me wrong, but since there is just one of you and I’m such a small fish that you probably aren’t reading, I can confidently say to everyone else: It Will Never Happen.

That being said, it isn’t too hard to pull your blog readership into the hundreds. Here are some tips and tricks…you can choose the ones that seem interesting and try them out. Don’t feel like you have to do all of these at once, though. I’m a firm believer in not spending more than an hour on your blog per day…max! Being on the computer too long is bad for your eyeballs.

Get the People You Know

You know people. Friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, that guy you facebooked after that one party and then never saw again…all of these people are potential blog readers. Never underestimate how interested people can become in stalking you through your blog, even if you aren’t close friends. People are bored out there. (And kind of stalkerish. Yay!)

Facebook, Myspace, and other social networking sites

If you have a profile on a social networking site, it’s easy to publicize your blog. Most of those profiles have an option for a homepage URL and they all have places where you can post messages or update your status. Putting a link to your blog draws traffic in from people trolling around for ANYTHING entertaining and the next time you add someone to your friend list and they comb through your profile for interesting things they didn’t know about you, they’re sure to click on that link. You can also join clubs and groups inside social networking sites to make new friends who share your interests (and consequently will be interested in your blog).

***Warning***: Posting on your friend’s walls to let them know that you just wrote an awesome post that they need to read immediately is obnoxious unless the blog post is actually about them. Don’t be obnoxious.

Twitter

I’m terrible about Twitter, but I’m determined to get better at it. For those of you who don’t tweet, Twitter is a service that lets you micro-blog (140 characters or less) and then send those little blogs out into the world for all your friends to see. If you’re already on Twitter, using the service to send out a quick link to your blog post is an obvious way to spread the word and pull in traffic. People can then retweet your links if they want to and pass them around to their friends. Just try to keep your blog post titles short and obvious if you’re going to use Twitter to publicize. That 140 character limit is a good thing to keep in mind, especially if you want people to pass your link around later.

People Like You

If you want to bring in readers from the internet world at large, it’s a good idea to start by trying to target people who share your same interests. Not only are they more likely to stop by your blog, they also are more likely to become repeater visitors and contributors.

Online communities

I found most of the readers who subscribe to the site through online communities of Disney fans, brides, and Disney brides. Even if you’re not a Disney bride, there are a ton of wedding communities out there, so plenty of opportunity to make new friends and bring them to your site. It’s easy to find online communities through Google by coupling the words “community” or “forum” with whatever you’re interested in. Once you start getting to know people in the online communities, you’re likely to learn about other communities you haven’t discovered. I was invited to disneybrides.com (my favorite wedding resource) by Allison after I “met” her on Disboards.com, which I found through a Google search and as a result I have a number of readers who are also Disney brides.

Other Bloggers

Another great way to find people who share your interests is to find bloggers who are already blogging about them. Commenting on other people’s blogs is beneficial to everyone. It gives them important feedback and input and it shares your name and thoughts with the other people reading those blogs. If you comment regularly on popular blogs (and you’re sharing good/interesting information), you can “borrow” readers of that blog who start to recognize your name and want to learn more about you by clicking through to your site.

***Warning***: Spamming, or sending out lots of comments that just say things like “Great post! Awesome!” without really reading or being interested in the content on the blog is a good way to get deleted, kicked off of a site, or at least a reputation as an annoying pest in the blogosphere. It’s obvious when you’re just trying to steal readers from another blog without participating. Case in point? On the last post about the wedding, “Jamila” posted a really vague comment that suggests that they didn’t even read the blog entry. If you click on the name, you’ll be taken to a commercial wedding site. Don’t click on it…I’m only leaving it up for this example. In a couple of days I’ll take it down, because I find spam to be offensive and annoying. I’m all about people using this blog to connect to potential customers, but only if they’re actually reading!

Any Readers, Anywhere

If your goal is to just get anyone at all to stop by your blog (the warm bodies approach), you can expand your publicity by posting the link to your blog all over the place. You’re likely to get a traffic increase, but you may also find that you have more people stopping by to leave nasty comments or comments that link to commercial/adult websites and have nothing to do with your blog. If you have the time to delete the spam and negativity, you might as well try a couple of these…

Wallpapering the Web

It’s easy to put your web address all over the place. Post YouTube videos and put your URL in the comments (or the video) so that viewers link back. Add the URL to all of your photos on photosharing sites like photobucket or flickr. Leave product reviews that include a URL to your blog. You get the idea.

I don’t know about you, but none of that stuff strikes me as fun. It’s a lot of work and only god knows who it will bring in. Sadly, this is the approach that people seem to take right off the bat and then they’re frustrated when it doesn’t pay off. Truth: there’s a lot of crap on the internet. Just throwing your URL around wildly is the equivalent to whistling during a hurricane. Yes, you’re making noise, but it’s likely to get lost in the chaos.

Using Computer Geek-ish sites to Reach the Masses

Because most bloggers want to attempt to bring in at least some traffic that they don’t actively have to bring in, the majority of bloggers use sites dedicated to connecting readers to info they’re seeking. You’ve probably heard of some of these sites before, especially the big ones like Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, del.icio.us, etc.

If you want to get in on some of this action, but you don’t want to run around and set up an account at all these different sites, I strongly recommend using Feedburner, which is now a Google program. Set your site up with Feedburner and then use their “optimize” and “publicize” options to pull in traffic. You can also set up subscription options so you have a better shot at pulling in repeat readers. There are a lot of services that do things like this, but I’ve found that Feedburner is the easiest to use, especially for beginners. If you’re planning on making money with your blog, this is absolutely essential.

And that’s how you create traffic. Well, that’s the quick and dirty, anyway. Like I said, I don’t spend too much time on traffic and, if you’re still in the first 0-4 months of your blog, I’d mainly focus on creating good content and getting it up there.

Even without focusing on bringing in traffic, however, you still need to make sure you’re not driving it away. So, remember:

• Write quality posts and post them often. If your readers feel deserted, they aren’t going to come back.
• Be careful with your layout. You may have noticed, but I changed the layout again…the change I made a couple weeks ago just wasn’t sitting well with me and I noticed that my traffic dipped a little. It might have been because I was in California, but it also might have been because the site was looking pretty cluttered and overloaded. I launched a newer, easier-to-read version of the blog last night and I’m already loving it.
  

For those of you reading me in your email or through your feed readers, let me give you a little visual history of the blog layout:

As you can see, the blog layouts got more advanced and interesting as the year progressed, but I think the last tweak was a bit too much. So, I moved a lot of the content to the side and the bottom of the page and opened up the blog entry area so that people could read easily. It’s only been a day, but my traffic numbers are already a lot higher than they were for yesterday…

Hopefully today’s post has been helpful. Experiment will pulling in traffic and next week we’ll talk about turning traffic into profit. If you want to show off a new blog design or “borrow” some of the readers on this blog by telling them about yours, feel free to leave a comment. Don’t worry if you’ve already commented with your blog link before…this series is getting a lot of traffic from people Googling “How to make money with your blog” so there are likely to be a lot of readers who haven’t seen your link before.

Next week: Part Five – Profiting From Your Wedding Blog