Last Sunday I went a little crazy getting the site and excerpts of my posts out on to social networks (Blog Catalog, Delicious, Feed Burner, Friend Feed, Multiply, My Blog Log, Post on Fire, Stumble Upon, Twitter).  Prior to Sunday, I saw only a few new visitors per day.  Anywhere from 1 to 3.  Not bad in my opinion giving the site has only been live a little over a week.  On Sunday alone, the number jumped to 9 unique new visitors.   Here’s the interesting part, it stayed around 5-7 per day over the next 3 days and then dropped back down to the 1-3 per day.  The trick will be to find a happy medium for getting my blog’s existence out on the web and increasing quality back links.

For my (more established) other site, Loquacious Magpies, I have been steadily seeding the Internet with three specific forms of publicity; Facebook page and advertising, Twitter and My Blog Log.  This is a more established site and sees an average of 20 unique visitors per day.  The most effective of the three has been the advertising (capped at 3 clicks per day), followed closely by MyBlogLog and lastly using Facebook to share the link and use post excerpts to gain interest.

It seems as though a consistent routine of sharing your work on social network sites will really help get your word out and create credibility with readers.  After some time, you will have connected with enough people that become consistent visitors, you can slow down your publicity. 

What have you seen from your efforts?  Please feel free to share.

Happy blogging!

• MyBlogLog-  Yahoo! owned community of bloggers looking to share their site among other bloggers.  I saw some quick vists from joining this site.  I’ll have to wait to see longterm impact to traffic.
• Twitter-  Everyone knows this site…I don’t think it needs explaining.  This can be a powerful resource to reach people on a regular basis.  Since Twitter only allows short status updates, if they want to read more, they will have to come to your site.
• Technorati-  Another community of bloggers.  After signing up with them, you need to claim ownership of your blog.  This appears to be a lengthy process, 6 hours and still no verification yet (I’m still wating for my other blog, Loquacious Magpies, to be verified).  There is alway the chance I’ve done something wrong.  I will have to wait before I can make any other judgements about this site but it definitely looks promising.
• Google Analytics- Fairly easy way to submit your sire to Google and get free tracking of visitors.
• Bing Webmaster Tools-  Mircosoft’s search engine and traffic reports site.  Again, like all of them, some knowledge regarding where to copy and paste the validation code is necessary, but there are help guides the take you throught he process.  (If you need some personal assisatance, I will try to help you out too)
• Yahoo! Site Explorer- You will need to get a Yahoo! login first and then you can go to the site explorer to submit your site to Yahoo! search engine.  Not nearly as robust as Google Analytics, there are some traffic reports.
• I know I said that I’d cover plugins later, but there is one that you should note and install ASAP-  Google XML-Sitemap Generator.  This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.  This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.  This was a huge help in getting the site to come up in the search engines.

I will tell you that just signing up for these will not lead to traffic overnight.  I have seen first time visitors on a consistant basis though.  If you can keep new people coming in, eventually you are going to find some that will become repeat visitors. 

Happy Blogging!

      Don