Sorry for the lack of updates on osWorld recently - it's been quite a busy time for me and this blog is the one that feels it the most!

Most of my time has been spent setting up a new (online) business with a couple of partners (more details to follow in due course).

As well as sorting out a house move (along with all the associated hard work that goes with that).  After a few more weeks I should be able to start posting again properly.

I also set up a new blog with the intention of getting to 200 visitors (on average) per day and 50 posts.  So far I've been able to get an average of about 200, and I'm on about 20 posts.  I've been concentrating on finding ways to get visitors without having to spend any money…

For starters, it's always best to set up a new site when you KNOW that you can get targetted traffic.  In the case of my blog, there is a massive "official forum" with about 180,000 members.  If I can get 5% of those people to visit my blog often, that'd be a good success.  The forum is all about a piece of software called osCommerce…

So. let's find some traffic; 

• I find it easy to answer a few questions on that forum each day, and make sure that my blog URL is on my "profile".
• I am finding that videos get linked to by lots of other sites (though these sites are usually just using video site making scripts) in other words they are worthless sites.  But links, is links!  So, I make sure to make a couple videos per week!
• Yahoo Answers.  I've been dabbling with answering questions on Yahoo Answers.  Not seeing an awful lot of good from this if truth be told.
• Social Bookmarking.  The likes of digg, delicio, stumbleupon and so on.  I make sure I have the little buttons on all the blog posts.  Every digg helps!

Of course, all of these are fairly low level exercises in getting traffic.  The main areas where I have made good success are;

• Search Engines.  Goes without saying that if you can get some good keywords in your blog posts, you'll see lots of visitors from the SE's.  Google and Yahoo supply the most traffic.
• Making freebies.  I made a couple of freebie scripts for osCommerce and these are producing a vast number of eyeballs on the site.  I made sure that in the "readme" for the freebies I stated that advice/support will only be given on my blog and nowhere else!
• Answering Reader Questions.  This is something I've done for some while on a few of my blgos and sites.  It's always good to answer reader questions, as they are giving you free content!
• Comment Relish.  This is a truly excellent Wordpress plugin - it emails a message to a first time commenter (it only emails when you set their first comment live, which is excellent).  I email a message saying "thanks for your comment, please check the post (and give the url) as there are probbaly more replies already"…this is working particularly well.  In the emai lI also ask them to spend 30 seconds submitting the post to "digg" or "stumbleupon" etc.

I then decided I would have to do something a bit more "viral".  As most of you know I came up with a "Top 100" script some while ago.  Unfortunately I never reeceived much feedback on it, only from 1 good guy who couldn't use as he had no PHP5.  For those who never bothered getting back to me with feedback - thanks a bunch.

Anyway, I put a "osCommerce HOT 100" voting script in a subdirectory.  I then spent a bit of time getting a list of some of the nicer looking osCommerce sites.  The script has the ability for people to vote up/down their fave site(s) etc.  It also allows people to add sites as well, which can then be authorised by the admin.  This is working great as it's getting some good links from myspace, blogs etc etc.  The only downside is that store owners can cause problems when their site is not authorised - normally because their site looks crap.  Ah well

There you have it - a way to get 200 visitors per day to a new(ish) site.  Easy as 123, well sorta

Got any good tips for getting eyeballs on pages?  Feel free to share here, or at your own blog.  Thanks!