Advertising my blog

Once you start writing a blog you get into a phase where you want to increase the number of people that are reading your blog. So I started to put my blog into a number of so called blog catalogs hoping to increase viewership of my blog. (See the end of this post for a list of sites where I put up my blog.) What I have realised after almost 2 weeks of putting my blog there is that there is hardly any traffic that came from there (courtesy Google analytics). Even the few users that came to my blog from those catalogs did not spend time on the blog.

I have found that my traffic comes mainly from Google searches. What I have realised is that when the traffic comes from googles searches the user tends to spend more time on my blog and I think the reason for this is because the user is reading about something that the user searched for and is relevant to the information that they are seeking. Some of them like it and subscribe to the feed and some of them come back. The traffic has steadily grown starting with about 5 users each day about a couple of months ago to about 30 users each day now. I find it quite comfortable to deal with this gradual increase and I think having too many visitors too soon will only put them off due to the lack of content on the blog.

Seth Godin in his blog Who are these people ? talks about the same thing. I think it is really important to build a readership slowly and talk about things that you like to write about and that the readers like to read about. There is no shortcut to fame.

Catalogs I am listed on

http://www.blogadda.com/
http://www.topblogarea.com/
http://topblogs.gotoscience.com/
http://www.blogtopsites.com/humor/
http://www.blogrankings.com/
http://www.bloggernity.com/
http://www.blogcatalog.com/
http://www.blogsrater.com/
http://www.ipings.com/
http://www.blogmad.net/
http://www.globeofblogs.com/

Catalogs I thought of listing on but changed my mind after the response I got from the few that I listed on

http://www.bloghub.com/
http://www.blogtoplist.com/
http://www.blogdirs.com/
http://www.bestblogs.org/
http://www.blogarama.com/
http://www.weblogalot.com/
http://www.bloggernow.com/
http://blogs.botw.org/
http://www.bloggeries.com/
http://www.blog-directory.org/
http://www.bloggingfusion.com/
http://www.totalblogdirectory.com/
http://www.blogoozle.com/
http://www.bloggapedia.com/
http://blogannounce.info/
http://okayblog.net/directory/
http://www.blogadr.com/
http://www.submitblognow.info/
http://www.bloglisting.net/
http://www.addurlblog.com/
http://www.bblogd.com/
http://www.quickblogdirectory.com/
http://www.bloguniverse.com/
http://www.blogdire.com/