How lateral thinking can boost your visitor numbers - with real examples from my blog!

[YoungDebbie]

Just wanted to share with you all a new tip that is working for me. I quite often blog about places I've been to and my personal response to them (not a travel guide - more whimsical than that) and I suddenly thought to send links to the posts to the places I was writing about. The first of these was the Anstruther Fisheries Museum (!), and lately the Roman Baths at Bath and the SS Great Britain. Each of these have then posted a link with a nice comment on their Facebook page, resulting in quite a few hits - my biggest ever response was for the Fisheries Museum one. I usually average 20-30 hits a day and got my biggest day ever with 81 after that. But this is nothing compared to my post about why I named my daughter Laura, which I sent to a Laura Ingalls Wilder page (author of the Little House on the Prairie books) - and my hits have just gone off the scale! 400+ yesterday and 200+ and rising today! Also lots of likes on Facebook (though sadly not left also on my blog itself). I know this is small fry compared with the visitor numbers some of you get, but bear in mind I'm not posting about a regular topic, or using a set group of key words over and over, so I don't get many from search engines - my visitors are usually people I know. So this is pretty amazing by my standards, and I hope it will help you too.

For reference, here are the relevant links:

Original blog post

On LIW's Facebook page

Fisheries Museum visit blog

SS Great Britain post

Roman Baths post

Good idea :)

I found your post on the LIW fansite!

I wrote my MA dissertation on LIW...so cute you named your daughter Laura, she's a great role model. Her daughter Rose was pretty amazing too; do read her novels and biography if you haven't already.

Great idea. I have done this a few times with differing results but it is certainly worth a shot.

I love your blog, btw and am following you on Twitter now.

That's an excellent idea!

thank you for an excellent idea! getting visitor numbers up is my bugbear at the moment - average about 47 hits a day - although did hit a high at 98 on Wed but mainly due to the fact that I advertised the blog on one of the Mumsnet weight loss threads, got kicked off and wrists gently slapped (hadn't realised we weren't allowed to do that - sorry) but did result in a hike in visitor numbers - pity it will only be a one-off - do not want to risk being booted off the forum!!

Thanks, everyone! Kensingtonkat - it was really interesting to see the responses I got from the LIW fanpage and I've made some fab new connections, including downloading a book called "My Life As Laura" about someone who re-enacted her books to find herself - really looking forward to reading it! Thanks for the follow, MmeLindor - I really must get on and write a new post, I've been so overwhelmed watching the stats the last few days that I haven't written another word!! Good luck with the strategy, everyone, and do tell us how you get on!

MmeLindor, just found you on Twitter and followed you there too now! And I love the Jump magazine site - will show it to Laura in the morning. She's teetering on doing her own blog and will appreciate Jump, I'm sure.

Thanks, Debbie. If she would like to write for Jump! Mag, then let me know. Could be a good gentle into into blogging.

I am going to write another blog post about how to blog, including more screenshots, as some of the readers didn't quite understand what they have to do.

Great Advice!

Great idea. Thank u so much!!