Ten Top Web 2.0 Sites For Generating Free Blog Traffic!

©2009 Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved.

There’s no doubt about it – you can’t be truly successful online these days without your own blog, or blogs. While websites are still viable, blogs are much more quickly indexed by the search engines, have a greater number of places to be found in, benefit from interaction with your blog readers, etc, etc.

But of and by itself, a blog isn’t necessarily successful. As with any virtual real estate, you have to get targeted traffic to it – that is, you must attract an audience of people who want to know the information you’re sharing, and who want to buy the resources you’re promoting.

Fortunately, there are a number of new Web 2.0 technologies in use at various Web 2.0 sites to make that easier these days. Armed with a bit of knowledge, you can flood your blogs with traffic at little or no cost!

Here are our Top 10 Web 2.0 sites for driving blog traffic:

StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon is a sort of hybrid site – it has all the value of a search engine, and many use it that way. But it also has a random site feature – users can hit the link in the StumbleUpon toolbar and be shown sites they may not know about, sites that match the keywords set by that individual surfer. Personally, I’ve had as many as 550 visitors in one day to a blog post I had told StumbleUpon about. Ranked by any SU user who visits the page, results vary but can add up fast! Doug Champigny at StumbleUpon

Technorati: Think of Technorati as a great big search engine for blog content, organized by tags instead of ‘keywords’. Really, the tags ARE keywords, but content here can include your posts, your photos, your videos, etc. Here’s an example of the content users can find at Technorati about any given blog: My Internet Marketing Blog Listing at Technorati

MyBlogLog: In some ways MyBLogLog is similar to the other sites, but in some ways it’s vastly different! Yes, it lists your blogs, and automatically displays your last few posts. But then it goes so much further! It tracks not only your posts, but displays the comments you leave on other blogs too. Visitors to your site can choose to follow you through a widget on your blog, and you can message those following you at any time. Unlike other services, though, those direct messages not only go on their website, but get e-mailed to your followers as well. Use it sparingly for this, so you don’t get disabled for spamming.

For about $25 a year you can upgrade to pro there, and then access great stats for your blog – how many people visited each day, where your traffic came from, what pages they visited, and what links they followed to leave the site. That information lets you fine-tune your traffic generation, spending more time on what’s driving traffic to your blog and less time on the less-effective methods. Check Doug Champigny at MyBlogLog…

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a professional networking site where you complete your profile and then connect with others you know or know of. While not specifically designed to drive traffic, you do have live links to your blog from your public profile there, and a small area to update what you’re currently working on, recommending, etc. Also, your connections there can see a synopsis of your most recent blog posts, bringing more traffic in through there as well. Doug Champigny’s Profile on LinkedIn

iTunes: Yes, this is the same iTunes your kids get their music from – maybe even you yourself load your iPhone apps from the site. If so, you probably know they have a major podcast directory there, so if you’re using audios on your blog (podcasting) you can have them appear there for the 4 million+ users of iTunes to find should they search for your subject. Here’s our Affiliate Marketing Podcasts in the iTunes Directory.

Squidoo: Squidoo is an information site built by the online community, who create pages called ‘lenses’. You can create one on any topic you like, and add articles, photos, links, etc. By building a strong, informative lens on a related topic that links to your blogs, you can drive a lot of traffic that keeps building over time as you update and add to your lens – and again, you can have your most recent blog posts linked to from your lens automatically. Here’s our PLR lens on Squidoo.

HubPages: Similar to Squidoo, HubPages also let’s you create our own pages – but they prefer you do more linking to a variety of sites and become a true ‘hub’ for whatever topic you’re covering. Our PLR Hub at HubPages.

Google Knol: My favorite of these types of sites is the Google Knol – Google defines a Knol as ‘a unit of knowledge’. Readers can comment on your knol, review your knol, etc, so it becomes a community unto itself in some ways. Recently we were awarded a ‘Top Pick Knol Award’ for our Internet Marketing Knol.

FaceBook: One of the biggest and best known Web 2.0 site, the FaceBook community is huge and can bring a lot of curious people to your blog once you start interacting and building a community there. Be sure to use the FaceBook Updates regularly, as they show up in TweetDeck for those who are connected with you at FaceBook. Here’s Teri’s FaceBook community…

Twitter: And speaking of TweetDeck, it’s a free tool you should be using for marketing on Twitter. Twitter is my favorite Web 2.0 site these days, a micro-blogging platform that lets you post ‘tweets’ – notes, comments and/or links of up to 140 Characters per posting. I’ve left Twitter til the end of this list because I want you to sign on to follow Teri and I there, and watch what we do and how we do it. There will be some additional posts on here about Twitter, and an Advanced Twitter Marketing report will be forthcoming in the coming weeks. For now, be sure you’re following these 3 accounts:

- @Champigny
- @SuperAffil
- @CaptnAffiliate

There’s so much more you can do to drive Web 2.0 traffic to your blog, but time will always be your limiting factor. For now, concentrate on those above, and after every blog post be sure to ping the directories – use iPings after one post, then Pingoat after the next one, and Ping-O-Matic after the third posting, then repeat that sequence with each set of posts you do.

All 3 are free to use, so bookmark those three pages and hit the next one in the sequence after each post. Each does some the others don’t, with overlap on the bigger sites, so don’t use more than one for each post, but don’t skip any in the rotation either.

The 10-site recipe above will flood your blog with free, targeted traffic over time – but please, take a moment right now and leave a comment to let us know what you thought of the list, and of other Web 2.0 sites you’ve found helpful. We do follow, so the link is spidered back to your blog for a bit of PR love!

Technorati Tags: Blog Traffic, blog traffic from Web 2.0 sites, blog traffic strategies, Web 2.0 strategies, Web 2.0 sites, Google Knol, Twitter, FaceBook, HubPages, Squidoo, iTunes, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, Technorati, StumbleUpon

Tags: blog traffic, blog traffic from Web 2.0 sites, blog traffic strategies, FaceBook, Google Knol, HubPages, iTunes, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, Squidoo, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Twitter, Web 2.0 sites, Web 2.0 strategies
Filed under: Advanced Traffic Building, Advanced Traffic Generation, Big Dog Traffic Tips, Blogging Tips, Targeted Traffic, Traffic Tips, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Traffic, Web 2.0 marketing, blog traffic, traffic building