Building traffic on this blog

Darren Rowse at Problogger is running a series called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. I've been following it regularly, there's no point in doing something like this if you aren't going to improve it whenever possible. He's asked people to supply tips on blog topics, such as traffic-building, so I thought I'd write up the things I've done that have led to big increases in traffic on this blog.
The first big jump in traffic came at a time when I was struggling to get ten to fifteen readers a day, or even a week. I was posting irregularly, often only three times a month. I met a girl at a bookstore, and wrote up an entry about her. Then I went back and told her what I'd written, gave her the URL. She told her friends, and even selected the entry as her away message on her instant messenger account. My visitors jumped to about forty a day, dropping back to a steady twenty. More importantly, with regular visitors that I'd never met, I felt the pressure to publish daily, knowing that otherwise I would lose this new traffic.
The next big surge came when I posted an ad on Craig'slist DC. As I often review Craigslist missed connection ads on my blog, I felt comfortable putting an ad on their missed connections section that linked back to an entry on my site. Wonkette picked up the parody, and linked to me. That day I got a surge of 1,200, a number which trailed off, but permanently raised my overall visitor level.
Only two weeks later, I noticed Tony Pierce, (who I actually worked with at the Daily Nexus in college) had gotten himself into some kind of strange photo contest, having to do with another blogger and an "I'm too sexy" picture. Other bloggers were doing a parody of the picture, soI had a friend pose, posted it, and sent a note to Tony. Somehow I got listed on other blogger sites, and got another traffic spike.

posted by dan @ 10:49 AM