Advice On Blogging/Website Popularity?

[Maikel]

Have to agree with the above, Content = King! That should be your main focus. I can vouch for using an SEO plugin for on page SEO.

Next there are a few things to do off page to increase your popularity:

- Blogs: Find other blogs about your topic (poetry) and leave comments linking back to your website. These comments as well as your link MUST add value to the conversation for it to be effective. Which means no spamming.

What you could also try is contacting the owners of some of the blogs to ask if you can guest post for them. You will provide the content and if it's any good you might get people willing to post it on their site. You usually gain exposure through an author bio at the bottom of the article.

- Forum marketing: Try to join one or two forums in your niche and use them to help others. Share your knowledge, answer people's question. Be as helpful as you can possibly be. Also make sure that you have a link in your signature that links to your blog.

- Social media: This is a great source of getting people interested in your blog. I would personally focus mostly on Facebook and Google+. I'm not a big fan of Twitter, but that's just me. I would start out by getting a fan page on Facebook (to keep business and personal separated). You can have one designed at Fiverr.com for $5, off course this isn't the highest quality, but it'll do.

Next you need to get people to follow you on these platforms, for starters I recommend groups (communities in Google+). Engage in discussions, answer people's questions, share useful content from your site. You will see people start to follow you and come to your website. The first day I started doing this I more than double the average visitors I was getting per day.

I'll stop it right there, it's starting to become a freaking novel. Anyway I hope that helps.

Maikel Michiels