Lessons from a Celebrity Blogger

The following blog case study was submitted by Derek – a celebrity blogger. In it he reflects upon 7 lessons he’s learned in building his blog from 50 to 1500 uniques per day since March.

Derek Hail – stealing celebrity dignity and fame was launched on March 13th of 2006. The first two weeks the Derek Hail.com staff focused on producing content. The only promotion for our blog was through our friends. We would ask our friends for feedback on our writing. After the two weeks were over we decided to start aggressively promoting our blog.

The first two weeks, Derek Hail.com received on average 50-60 unique hits per day. Now, as of April 23, 2006, the past two weeks we have received 20,000 unique visits which averages to around 1500 hits per day.

Here are lessons I have learned along the way while trying to promote blogs:

1. Blog Traffic Exchanges are worthless.

The amount of time spent surfing to earn credits is not worth it. Instead of wasting 3 hours a day surfing for credits, write content. Most people surf these blogs for credits and they do not read anything. They are only at your blog for a credit.

2. Collect a list of all the links possibly available in your niche:

This was originally mentioned on Darren Rowseâ•˙s Blog Promotion tips post which can be found here.

The list of links was the blogs I would regularly attend during the week to leave insightful and funny comments. This was successful because the less popular blogs would make the author of the blog interested in viewing my website. On the more popular blogs that received a significant amount of traffic, some of the readers from the popular blogs would then stop by my blog

3. The reader of a related blog can be your reader as well

I discovered that most people who comment on blogs in a particular niche, usually have their own personal web log which is not necessarily related to the niche they are reading about. I decided to start going to each of these peopleâ•˙s blogs and leave insightful comments on their blogs as well. This would then help me to attract someone who was already interested in a particular niche to my blog because I was taking the time of my day to comment on their blog.

4. Submit articles to popular web-sites in hopes of getting picked up

I have been linked by several popular websites in the short period of time I have been blogging. This did not come easy because I actively sought people to submit to. I started perusing places like Fark and other humor sites that dealt with writing. After several submissions to these web-sites, naturally some of my articles were picked up. This helped build my traffic to what it is today.

5. Sell yourself and your blog

Make the blog worth while to read. My blog has focused on entertaining our readers with humor. We write about celebrity gossip and add twists and jokes at the end of each of our articles. This was our selling point of our blog. There are other ways to sell yourself, but we chose to do it in a humor fashion.

6. Ask for Link exchanges the right way:

I mainly collected a list of links of approximately two hundred blogs that were in the same niche as my own. I originally started emailing these bloggers with informal emails. My successfulness with informal emails was limited. I decided to create formal email messages that included proper greetings and format. My success with emails went up drastically. The moral of the story is, present yourself professionally and people will take you seriously.

7. Create a community

This is self explanatory and has been hammered to death by several different bloggers. I created a community a little bit differently. It is not uncommon for other bloggers to plug each other when they find something they find interesting. Instead of relying on luck, I set up a community of a few bloggers who would exchange plugs with each other a few times a week.

This is significant because we would be sending each other targeted traffic.

These are the lessons I have learned over the past month and a half and helped me grow my blog from the minimal 50/60 visits a day to a much more significant 1500 visits per day. I hope this helps everyone in promoting their blog as well.