How to Make Your Website Insanely Popular
You've put in all kinds of work to make a bright, shiny new website. Problem is, it's about as popular as a Chevy Chase Show Reunion Special (that means it's really unpopular for those that don't remember the short lived ratings bomb that was the Chevy Chase Show). Certainly you could spend money advertising, but unless you have deep pockets, it's really not worthwhile (I've personally wasted a couple hundred dollars trying this route and while I saw a temporary traffic increase, it dropped back to normal almost as soon as the run of ads was over). I'm not going to lie and tell you it's easy to make a popular website, it's not. You need to put a good amount of time and energy into it if you want to have a popular site, so hopefully you're passionate about the site you're trying to popularize. If you're not passionate, then just stop reading now. Your site isn't going to be a success so save yourself the trouble.
For those of you who are still with me, I've been working on one website or another since the mid-1990's. This blog is rather new (and not yet brimming with popularity) but I have ran or been a part of several much more popular sites at one time or another throughout the years. Here's a rundown of many of the things I have learned that can help make your website a popular one too.
1. Updates updates updates
The single most important thing you can do if you want to have a popular website or blog is to update regularly. I've had times in my life where I simply do not have time to update websites I have worked on and every time the traffic numbers take a serious nosedive. And it's a lot harder to get users back once you lose them than it is to keep them in the first place. When you post often, people will check back to your site often. If all you have is the same content, people might check a few times and then figure you've given up on the site and you'll probably never see them again.
Plus the more articles you have, the more places that will link to your articles and the more often you'll appear in search engine results. One of the websites I run has over a thousand articles (six years worth of work) and it gets literally hundreds of hits each day from search engines and people clicking on links to articles from random websites and blogs.
One caveat to updating frequently is that your updates must also be reasonably good. If someone comes to your site and your article/news/blog is terrible, there is a good chance that they'll have no desire to come back (after all, who wants to keep visiting a terrible site?). And also when you write good articles, there is a lot better chance that someone else will link to them (more on that coming up).
2. Get linked
When you're a new site (or just an unpopular one), you're not going to have much of an audience to pull from. Unlike a new store in the mall, you're not just going to get random people walking by that stop in. You need to have your site linked somewhere so people can start finding it. A good way to do this is using the different link submission sites out there. Sites like Fark, Digg.com offer more general link submissions but they're also a more general audience and it's often hard for your articles to get notices admin the thousands of other submission they receive.
Do some searching for link submission sites in the same genre of your site. Chances are, there is something much more specific than those I previously mentioned. For example, if you run a humor website you could try get onto a site like HumorFeed or if you do any sort of development, you might try DZone.com. Posting on such a site will yield better results long term than the general sites since you're posting links for an audience that is looking for just those sort of links. You're much more likely to attract visitors that will frequent your site this way.
Often times when you post on such a site (and your article is good, which I am sure it is because you took my advice to write "reasonable good" material to heart), someone will enjoy your article and subsequently post it in their blog or submit it to a different link submission site. I usually keep my eye on my referral traffic for this sort of phenomenon. When I see a lot of traffic coming from a site that posted a link to my article, the next time I update my site there is a good chance I'll do something to notify that site of my updates in hopes that I can get linked there again.
One of the many things a search engine ranks websites on is how many sites link back to them. For instance, if you've got an article about dancing gophers and that is linked on twelve other dancing gopher websites, you're site is going to appear higher in the results for a search on dancing gophers than some other site that is only linked in one or two places (assuming all other things are equal).
3. Syndicate your site
Syndicating your website with an RSS/XML news feed allows people to be notified as soon as your website is updated (you can see mine here). When someone subscribes to your feed, you can be assured they won't forget about you since each time you add something new, details about that item will be pushed down to them. Most blogging somewhere includes a way to syndicate your news and I suspect many news/article posting scripts do too. If not, you can certainly write your own, which is not terribly difficult (that's what I did).
While it's not going to really help your site too much, a useful website I discovered recently is FeedBurner. To use FeedBurner, you create an account with them and then you point it to the URL of your news feed. Now when you share your news feed, you will use a URL like http://feeds.feedburner.com/krissteele/ that points to a FeedBurner copy of your feed. Now that you have done this, you can add a nifty little counter on your page that says how many subscribers you have. It's just a nice way of keeping track of how many people really, truly love your site.
4. Comment on other similar sites and forums
Find some other websites that are doing something similar to what you do and post/comment on them. The audience on these sites will be the same type of audience you want for your site. If you say something smart, viewers just might visit your page to see what you have to say. And if you say enough smart things, the webmaster of that site might even throw a link up to your site on theirs. Which brings me to my next point...
5. Interact with your readers
If someone leaves a comment on your site, make a reply or even take it one step further and visit their site and reply there. If you get an email from a reader, reply back in a timely fashion. They took the time to say something to you (even if it is derogatory, which in my case it often is) and you should do the same. Readers of your site will appreciate this and be much more inclined to visit and comment again as a result.
If you get enough visitors commenting on your page to foster some serious dicussion on your articles, you might even get the bonus of having people come to your site to see what others are saying about your material. It's almost as if you're getting free content!
6. Be timely
If you're writing about things like news, sports, or politics, make sure you're timely about it. Viewers would rather read something relevant than something dated, so scrap that Michael Dukakis article and write something about Barack Obama or John McCain instead. If you write about happenings in the news, you've got a good chance that a site like Google News might pick it up too.
7. Pick A topic and stick with it
It might be fun to be scattershot and do a little of everything, but overall, if you expect to develop an audience that continually visits your site, you need to have some kind of overriding theme to your page. The likelihood that there is a big market for people that all like curling, Abraham Lincoln, and heavy metal is slim, but certainly there is a market for each individually (okay, maybe not curling).
Also make sure that you're passionate about the topic you ultimately decide to make your website about. The Internet is full of half-assed websites that are rarely updated (I know, I run several of them). The one thing all these sites have in common? No one visits them (unless they have a cool URL like TastesLikeChicken.com). You need to be passionate about your website if you expect to maintain it for any extended period of time.
8. Trade some links
It's a big Internet out there. Chances are, you're not the only one doing what you do (unless you run a curling, Abraham Lincoln, and heavy metal website). Find some other similar sites, say hi, and ask if they want to trade links with you (assuming they have either a links/referrals/friends page). A standard links page probably won't get you much traffic directly, but it will help your page rank in search engines. You'll get the most benefit if you can trade links that are on each page of another site (often called referrals or friends or favorites).
Though not on this particular site, I often setup some sort of referral tracking page too. I have a referral page that links all referrals for my site but then I also display the top ten referrals (the sites that send me the most traffic) on the main page. This gives other sites the incentive to place my link in some place that their readers might actually click on rather than burying it in their links page.
9. You can have ads, but not too many
You don't want your website to look like Times Square at night. Feel free to place a couple ads here and there, but don't overwhelm your readers with them. If it is hard to determine where the content of your site is amidst all the ads, you've got too many. People like aesthetically pleasing sites and nothing (other than blinking text and automatically playing music) ruins the experience quicker than a barrage of ads.
10. Don't make people register
You should always try to make your site as easily accessible as possible. One way to do this is to not force registering to view or interact with your site.
If your readers need to register to view your content, most of them won't. If your readers need to register to comment on your articles, most of them won't. Certainly giving them the option to do so isn't a bad thing (and you can include some features that give them an incentive to do so), but you are going to turn away a lot of people if you force it.
11. Good spelling and grammar
I can't explain it, but people online seem to absolutely hate any spelling or grammatical errors. It makes your page seem unprofessional and cheap, and people don't like to visit websites that are unprofessional and cheap. So take the extra time to proofread and spell check everything you post. And if someone points out an error, don't be too proud to fix it.
Conclusion
Follow these basic steps and you'll be well on your way to Internet fame and glory. Certainly there are other things you can do to help out along the way, and if you have suggestions I encourage you to leave a comment about them. The process is long and you must be patient. It takes time for people to learn who you are and search engines to really discover you. But if you keep at it, one day things will pay off with untold riches (or at least a small sliver of self-satisfaction).
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