Blog Azeroth

I'm going to agree with what Matticus said, he always have all the right answers.

How to attract people to your blog?

I started blogging almost a year ago now. When i started blogging it wasn't for readers. I was blogging for me more like a journal. Whether i had blog readers or not didn't matter much to me. I never worried about comments. I was just enjoying what i was doing blogging and learning how to blog. But i was a reader and still is avid blog reader. I read blogs all over the place learning how to play my class well from people playing my class. I read their blogs. I commented on their blogs with thoughtful comments or even asking questions to things they wrote. I always take time to write comments thats thoughtful or helpful with insights. It didn't bother me i didn't have noticable commenters on my blog. Any good blogger is a reader of other people blog. Thats how you find interesting ideas or learn things.

When people like your blog they link to you for their own reasons. But it helps to be a good commenter or provide useful information. Often i backtrack and find out who commenters are. Often i find out they have a blog. Often i stop by and say thanks for commenting on my blog at least they know i was there and read something they had. Some people i backtrack to their blog and read the entire thing back to the first post and then left a comment. It helps to comment than just to lurk around. People find you in time.

More of the same

Write good stuff. Get people to read it.

If you can stomach it, go to the official Wow Forums and watch the threads in your favorite class forum. I did this for a while on the Paladin forums and then realized that "What gear do I need to start healing in Kara" was a question that came up about every other day. It helped that I was just about to 70 and was interested in getting that gear list for myself.. so I compiled the list and it's now my #2 most popular link on the blog. I get about 8-10 visits to that post every day. (http://chicanery.fibergeek.com/2007/08/ ... ling-gear/)

I made the list of gear and then the next time "what gear do I need..." came up I posted the link. I did that a couple of times.. and eventually it got to the point that others posted the link when the question comes up.

The forums are a great source for blogging ideas.

Every post I put on the forum is one less troll post on the forum. Every post I put up has my name and blog URL in the signature. I get quite a few links from the forums to my blog.

If you, in your comments on another blog or forum, seems like a good source to read, chances are you'll get 1-2 more people to look at your blog.

Search traffic is nice.. but really search traffic doesn't stay around. You want to appeal to people who will put you in their bookmarks, add you to their blogroll, and add you to their RSS reader. To do that you have to be worth listening to, have something to say.. and be at least vaguely entertaining.

Matticus mentioned stumbleupon here. Stumbleupon is HUGE. However, although it may provide hundreds of visits, its not necessarily going to be wow people. The results is that they are unlikely to stay, unlikely to subscribe, and although yo will get bumps to visits, unlikely to grow as part of your community.

Im experiementing with blogcatalog and myblog log. These sites may be more community focuses in the structre of how people use them, although the majority of the warcraft blogs on them are crap goldfarming "blogs".

How to attract - get quality content. Nothing else.

How to get traffic - wait a week or so I'm writing a pretty big piece on that

Crosslinking - blog roll works quite alright for getting traffic.
Be visible, be active, and have interesting content to get people coming back for more.

A lot of good suggestions here. Commenting on other's posts, participating in forums (like this), using free services like Entrecard and BlogRush.

To make card-dropping/commenting easier I created a bookmark folder in Firefox and bookmarked all the good blogs I've come across that are related to WoW and gaming. When I have time during the day I can right-click on the folder select "open all in tabs". Then I can quickly drop a card, read the latest entry, see if it's something I have anything worthwhile to comment, comment, close the tab, move on. I find this method is much more efficient than using an RSS reader.

Also, don't forget free blog communities like MyBlogLog.

Other things to look into, hosting blog carnivals, participating in meme's, and running contests.

Amen to that. I read some of the SEO blogs, and they make me sick. They dont care 1 second about content- they just want to drive their technorati ranking, page rank, rss subscriber rank up as fast as possible.

Those are TOOLS. You need good consistent original content - and THAT IS HARD. You can get burned out, become a stats whore, etc.

Just put out good, original stuff on a consistent basis (notice I didn't necessarily say write ALL THE TIME.) and people will come to you. I'd be willing to bet people like BRK hold that mantra.