10 ideas to liven up your blog

So you’ve set up your web application and have been consistently posting for a couple of weeks/months. Visits have grown, but you seem to be stuck at a few dozen visitors per day, or 100 visits on a good day. Here are a few ideas how you could bring your blog to the next level:

1. (Minor impact) Use social bookmarking - self-promotion is frowned upon in social bookmarking; adding social bookmarking buttons however facilitates your users to bookmark your pages.
2. (Major impact) Ensure easy syndication of your feed(s). In a future post, I’ll have to write an article on feedburner, a one stop source of promotion tools for your blog, which can save you a lot of time and trouble.
3. (Minor impact) Comment on other blogs: something that you should do anyway (provided you have something to say). As an added benefit, most blogs allow you to specify a link to your blog when commenting.
4. (Minor impact) Register your blog on various blog directories - a huge effort to become one in a large crowd.
5. (Major impact) Establish contact with like-minded bloggers. I don’t mean ‘add them to your blogroll’, but become a regular reader and commenter on their blogs, inviting/offering guest editorials, performing interviews, …
6. (unknown impact) Organise a blog marathon (at an appropriate time). Doing this too early, and the effort may be wasted. A marathon is also a great means to increase the content on your blog. The marathon does not need to be 24 hours blogging. It might as well be spread out over a week - a couple of hours per day.
7. (Major impact) Write a few pillar articles, i.e. longer articles of about 500 words than can act as a reference on their subject. Typically, these articles have a much longer lifetime than the typical blog article.
8. (Major impact) Set up a top 10 of most popular or most voted stories. This tends to bring in 1000s or 10,000s hits for the most popular stories over time. Consider also a bottom 10.
9. (Major impact) Send out a monthly digest to a permission based e-mail subscription list. Or include the digest as an article in your newsletter.
10. (Major impact) Add pictures, provided they are functional.

Applying these tricks consistently over a period of time, while continuing to write premium content is a sure recipe for success, but easier said than done.