I was asked recently how to get a 1000 visitors a day to your blog network.  If you have a network it is quite easy.  The more blogs you have the more content you have, and more content you have the better chance you will get hits from search results.  Here is my quick list of do’s and don’ts.

• Content isn’t enough.  You need content with good keywords and for that material to be indexed.  If you run a wordpress blog the Google XML Sitemap Plugin is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for getting indexed.  If you want to be properly indexed it is highly important that you use good content specific keywords and tags.  I generate specific keywords with Wordsfinder and use the Calais Tagaroo Plugin to generate Semantic tags, both of which appear as meta keywords to search engines thanks to my theme.
• Write about popular things.  If you follow the first rule of good tagging and and getting regularly indexed, writing about popular topics is going to greatly increase your traffic.  While it goes without saying that writing about football in the off season isn’t going to bring you a lot of traffic for those posts, when I say popular I mean really popular.  The Google Trends page is your friend if you learn to read it correctly.  At any given time these are the 100 most popular search terms on Google and they all have links to recent blog posts through Google Blog links.  Incorporate something from here and your search traffic will go up.  Mention sixty or seventy of them over a couple of relevant posts and you are search gold for as long as the trend continues.
• Write something worth shouting about.  If your posts are pretty good there is always someone willing to submit it to the Social Media outlets.  Promoting yourself is held by some as being tacky and rude, but I don’t think so under some circumstances.  if you aren’t the only one you are promoting.  if you submit, comment, stumble, and rate hundreds of pages a week a little self promotion isn’t a bad thing.  Once a page has been submitted by someone else there is no reason not to jump on the promotion bandwagon.  If you put up a couple of stumble worthy pages a day your traffic can easily exceed a thousand hits a day.
• Comment on popular blogs in your niche.  I can’t begin to tell you how many thousands upon thousands of visitors this can bring to your blog.  This is a long term strategy that has to be cultivated and worked over time.  You need to leave relevant comments on these blogs and do it often.  One good comment will likely get you some traffic, but a hundred comments on a popular blog a year or more is golden.
• Give people a reason to come back.  Unless you are giving your people a reason to come back they likely aren’t going to.  There are lots of good sources of the same information you are providing so you need to give people a reason to return.  I use CommentLuv, KeywordLuv, Nofollow Free, plugins and interact with the people that comment.  Some of my blogs I offer an integrated forum so readers can interact with each other.
• Make it easy for people to come back.  Not only do you need to give people a reason to come back, you need to make it easy for them to return. (I need to do a better job of this on this theme.)  You can do things like put a Del.Icio.us, Technorati,  Yahoo as well as rss feed or many other buttons that make getting back to you easy for people to return.

The biggest means to increasing regular readership is involving your occasional readers through a better comment experience.  These five pugins will do just that if you do it right.

1) Nofollow Free:  Without going nofollow free few small blogs have a hope in hell of drawing lots of comments straight out of the box.  You will get some spam, but nothing worth having comes without a little bit of work.  there are easy ways around this too.  Akismet will block most spam.  Moderated comments will hold all of them until you can look at them.  You can also moderate them so regular commentators can post without moderation. You can also set it so the nofollow doesn’t kick until you have X number of approved comments.  At the very least the  plugin writes “Comments links could be nofollow free” to the end of the comment form, and this is a popular Google search phrase.

2) CommentLuv: This is one of the best ways you can reward your visitors.  CommentLuv will give a title and link to the latest blog post of the commentator.  This deep link will help them in the Google rankings.  It also makes you a popular destination spot.  Once again you can get some comment spam, but that is trivial as having a link directly to their website paints them as an asshole should you choose to publish it.  The same rules for moderation apply with CommentLuv.  This plugin also adds “Enable CommentLuv which will try and parse your last blog post” which is another popular Google search phrase.

3) Brian’s Threaded Comments: This plugin requires a little bit of work.  You have to replace your themes comments.php with the provided comments.php before activating the plugin.  This is a simple matter and you will likely want to edit the plugin itself through the WordPress Plugin Editor.  I find the default border color and width too light to really stand out and show the threads, but it is an easy fix.  This plugin also moves the trackbacks and pings to the bottom of the post rather than intermingling them with actual comments.

4) Quoter:  With Quoter you and your readers have the ability to both quote article text, but other comments.  If you run a hotly contested blog like politics or other charged subjects you almost certainly will want to use this with some sort of comment moderation.  It is powerful, and like the others has the power to be misused.  This is just one more instance where you need to actually work your blog rather than thinking you can sit back and do nothing.  Quoter is another plugin that will require you to add a bit of code to the comments.php.

5) Subscribe To Comments: This plugin makes it easy for people to track new comments by email of posts they care enough to comment on.  “Subscribe to comments via email” is another Google search phrase popular with people looking for blogs to post on.

All in all you have to ask yourself do you want people who are searching for places to comment?  My answer is most definitely.  There will be some assholes who leave spam, but most people are going to read the article and post something relevant to avoid linking their name and blog with spam activity.  Not everyone who searches for these terms will comment on your blog if it isn’t interesting so you must have good content.  in the end you really have to decide what level of commitment you your blog and its readers you want to have.  If the answer is very little you probably should just quit blogging.

Those were the words I heard often enough at as kid when I was being cautious. I heard them from friends who tried to goad me into trouble making either with or for them. I heard them from many a male relative who simple mistook caution for timidity and didn’t really know what else manly they could say.

Now that I am older and wiser those words keep coming back to me. No, they don’t pertain to my blogging for the most part. When they do I shudder with revulsion and take action. This time though they apply to a lot of my fellow bloggers. So I say unto many of you, “Quit Being Such A Pussy!”

Most bloggers want their blog to be a source of income, a business if you will, but they won’t treat it like one. Almost every time Firefox highlights a comments section with nofollow tags, I shake my head in wonderment. These people just don’t get it. They are letting timidity or laziness get in the way of their business’s goals. The most often heard response of why they won’t turn it off is they don’t want the hassle of dealing with comment spam.

If you are getting a few hundred comments you don’t need to remove it, because some other part of your business model is working really well. That is a different story altogether, they are offering such high quality or value that they can get away with offering nothing else to their customers. Everyone else, that claims they want to make money, need to quit being pussies and take off their nofollow tags for comments.

Here is why you need to do it from a small/new business perspective. If you keep the nofollow tags and aloofly say “I don’t want to deal with comment spam,” this screams you are just lazy and don’t care about your customer. It also puts you in the arrogant beyond belief category thinking you are so important you will spend more than a few minutes cleaning up spam a day. Your blog readers are your customers. They might only come to browse, but if they comment they are leaving the store with the crap you are selling.

If they leave a botted comment that akismet picks up, they shoplifted and your auto-theft system picked them up and hauls them away no trouble for you. If they left a “Hi, this was interesting,” comment they bought the cheapest thing they could. Maybe they meant it or maybe they didn’t. Nofollow tags on those mean you took their money, scowled, and didn’t bother to even say thanks with a smile. In fact if you are moderating your comments you probably said “Fuck You!” and hit the spam button. Whether they meant it or not you have alienated them, by playing king of the sandbox and acted like a six year old bully.

Then there are the customers who really mean something to your business. These are the ones who give good relevant comments. You don’t have to remove the nofollow links the first time. You can use Nofollow Free or some other plugin and make it several comments if you like. You should of course have a page marked Nofollow-DoFollow Policy and let them know your posting policy. It is no different from a brick and mortar store posting the return policy or “we will prosecute shoplifters” sign. By removing the nofollow tags you are saying: “I thank you for making my blog better. I appreciate your comments and am willing to do a little work in the area of spam control to keep them coming. Here is your reward.”

If you want your blog to be a business, then you need to start acting like it is a business and treating readers like paying customers. Put out quality merchandise. Post your store policies. Say thank you to all of your customers. Honor the really good customers. Last, but not least, don’t be a pussy when it comes to doing a little work.

Link Note: The links on this post all go to good people who have the nofollow tags removed. They understand the value of doing this, so don’t screw with them by leaving spam.

Every blogger wants a reaction to their posts. Whether or not everyone will admit, this is the whole reason we do what we do it. It is no fun talking out of your ass if everyone ignores you. So ask yourself what are you doing for those people?

I have put a lot of thought into this of late. I know how to get a lot of diggs when I want, and a lot of traffic too. What I was missing though were lots of comments. I read what the big guys were saying. Then I realized many of them were just talking out of their asses, because if it were really great advice they would be doing it themselves.

When big name Blogger X loses a lot of credibility by saying remove the nofollow from your comments, but doesn’t do it themselves. I am taking a stand. Nofollow is gone from all my comments as of now. I am not stupid enough to not moderate my comments, but I am going totally nofollow free in the comments. This is step one. I recommend the nofollow free plugin for WordPress. I also recommend using the nofollow from home and nofollow those dupes to keep Google juice flowing the right direction from there.

Secondly give back to your commentators. I not only have I made the link to their blog nofollow free, but using CommentLuv and KeywordLuv the link to their last post is nofollow free. This will pass along some serious Google juice when you are indexed.

The third thing I am doing is providing subscribe to comments by email. Your commentators will know when someone else posts a follow up comment. Last but not least I am using Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin. Commentators will be able to respond to each other. If you run a political or religiously minded blog you will probably want to be careful how many levels deep you let that one run though.

Lastly I intend to do a better job than most of the big guys when it comes to interacting with you. This is another area you see top name blogging gurus telling you to be social but never have anything to do with the people commenting on their own blogs. I can promise you this if you comment and leave your site I will at the very least give your site a visit, which usually will translate into an ad click or comment of my own if your subject interests me. Also be sure to check out the weekly CommentLuv Link List posted every Friday at Blogging For Noobs.

• Akismet This is the best in spam control there is hands down.
• Ultimate GA (Google Analytics) You can use the Google Analytics services without this plugin, but frankly why would you want to. It makes the service so much easier to use and, even better will write a lot of the code into your blog for you. This is a 5 star plugin and a must have.
• HeadSpace 2 is the best all around meta tool there is. It is a little harder to get setup than the All in One SEO Pack but it is a far superior plugin. Mani at Daily SEO has a really great post about getting it set up right using one of his themes, but the principals are the same no matter what theme you use.
• Google XML Sitemap Generator is the best tool you can have for getting indexed quickly and efficiently.
• CommentLuv by FiddyP is a sure fire way to get your readers involved by providing not only a link back to their site, but assuming they have an accessible feed it will post a link to their latest post too.
• Auto Social is a sure fire way to make sure your posts get to Del.icio.us Every post you makes gets submitted with your post tags. If you couple this with the post thingy that will put all your daily tagging into a single post auto post it to your blog, then you are in good shape to have a daily wrap up of everything you are doing online. See The Other Blog for an example of how I aggregate this feature.
• Simple Tags This is a plugin that has been around a long time, but one that is rather new for me. It is in a word complete tag management and may eventually displace my use of Technorati Tags once I learn to use it to its fullest extent.
  
• ShareThis Bloggers are foolish not to include multiple ways for people to add their posts to their favorite social bookmarking sites. I like Share this because of its tiny footprint, just a small green square that expands when clicked on. If you use Socialize which is probably the other one you have seen a lot of I suggest keeping the number of sites manageable and fixing the plugins ss so you have 100% opacity.
  
• Technorati Tags When set up right will use WordPress’s native tagging feature to create Technorati tags and provide the appropriate links back to Technorati.
  
• TinyMCE Advanced Last but not least getting a hold of this dynamic plugin will help you control your content far btter than the native posting interface. it is like going from MS Wordpad to the latest and Greatest version of Word in terms of features.