Stirring the Pot

I have people all the time ask me how they can get more traffic. If you look closely at this blog then you’re looking at a basic how-to. I don’t claim by any means to be a blogging expert, yet in the last month I’ve had 1,988 unique visits to my blog in the last 30 days and 4,165 individual page views.

How do you get people to read your blog – WRITE SOMETHING INTERESTING. Sometimes what I write is very tame but useful and sometimes when I write I know I’m going to tick-off a bunch of people. I’m OK with that because if you feel passionate about something you can’t worry about whether you’re going to offend someone. In all likelihood if you write anything interesting you will annoy someone. Are there people that will stop visiting my blog because they don’t like what I say – yes – but those that do come back with be more loyal because they know I don’t candy-coat anything.

I even leave up negative (not abusive) comments because leaving them up makes my blog more interesting. My last post Is Your Art a Business or Hobby? has generated a lot of comments. Most positive, some negative, but all interesting. I fueled the fire by posting on Twitter that my last post was generating some interesting debates. I originally wrote “interesting comments” but then I realized debate is a much more interesting word. In my post To Stand Out You Have to do Something Outstanding, well it holds true with blog post also. You can’t be interesting if you sit on the fences worrying about whether you will offend someone.