Friday, November 28, 2008

800,000 pageviews

I recently met my goal of reaching 1 million page views. I have to admit that I am shocked I met this goal in only 18 months, especially when you consider the fact that I had less than 200k page views less than 9 months ago. A few people have asked how I was able to meet my goal so I thought I would share a few useful tips in this article. Whether you want to increase the page views on your blog or website, these suggestions are sure to help you.

Bookmarking Sites:

Once I was able to keep track of my page views, I started using bookmarking sites. For the most part, I use Propeller and StumbleUpon. Both of these bookmarking sites are easy to use and have several categories. I also sometimes use Digg, but most of my content doesn't really fit into their categories so I don't use Digg very often. The bookmarking sites you should use to increase your page views will depend on the type of content you write. The important thing is to only put your content on sites where your content has a nice fit. This will attract more readers and more readers mean more page views.

Newsletters:

Another way I've increased my page views is by writing a weekly newsletter. Since most of content is food-related I chose to start a group at Yahoo Groups. The newsletter is called Content for Foodies and gives a brief description of each article along with a link to that article. I also include other pieces of advice that my readers may find useful, such as websites that deal with the articles that were posted in the newsletter. For example, if I wrote an article on Southern cooking, I may include links to sites where readers could buy cast iron cookware. If you choose to do a newsletter to increase your page views, it's best to choose one category. You can always do more than one newsletter to cover the different topics you write about.

Blogs:

Another way I try to make my work more visible so that I can get more page views is to use a blog. With my blog I sometimes post individual links to articles along with descriptions. Other times, I post my Content for Foodies newsletter on my blog. Either way, my blog does help to bring in more page views.

Proper Placement:
Probably one of the most important things you can do to increase your page views is to make sure your articles get the proper placement on Google. By making sure that your keywords range from 3 to 5% throughout your article, you have a better chance of getting your article on the first page of Google when people search for those keywords. A great example of this was a Harry Potter article I wrote. The keywords were high enough that the article showed up on the first page of Google. When the last Harry Potter book was released people went online and entered the keywords I had used and I received around 60,000 page views for that article in only one month.

Helping Your Fellow Writers:

One of the easiest ways to increase your page views is to seek out fellow writers that write similar content. Read their articles and leave comments. Not only will you learn something new about the topics you enjoy, but the writer may return the favor. I'm not saying you should read content you don't enjoy just to increase your page views. This should be fun and should be articles you enjoy.

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