I spent a full eight hours yesterday trying to make this website easy for people to find. I knew it was going to be an uphill battle because I share my name with a blues singer who has a lot of YouTube videos, go figure.

When I googled myself yesterday at 8 am NOTHING came up. This morning, I googled myself and I was the number one suggestion! How do you like them apples? I like them apples. I like them apples a lot! So what exactly did I do?

I did a little research. I am reading The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing by Marilyn Ross and Sue Collier which has many marketing tips.  I also read WordPress tutorials on how to increase traffic to my site.  Then, because I am not very technologically savvy, I read more tutorials on how to actually do the things suggested in the WordPress tutorials.  –But by reading and  following the instructions in this post, eight hours of work can easily be condensed into one.

In The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing, Ross and Collier suggest some free websites that will register new blogs with dozens of search engines for (drum roll, please) FREE.  http://www.addme.com is one example.  It took me less than five minutes to fill out their online form. Ross and Collier also suggest that I go to the search engines themselves and register with them.  This will get a blog recognized more quickly. WordPress suggests this too, so I’ll discuss exactly how to go about doing this in a minute.

WordPress wants its bloggers to succeed.  They give many great suggestions for how to increase traffic to new websites. Here are the ones that I found most useful.

1.  Check out blogs similar to your new site.  Leave comments, like their posts, and follow some of them. This is a great way to let people know your here.  I did get some traffic from this and a few followers to my blog.

2.  Create tags and categories for your posts. It is incredibly quick and easy to do.  Just follow these instructions:  http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/tags/

3.  Register your website with Google, Bing, and, Yahoo. Here are some links that will help you with this process.  It took me two hours to do this, but using these links, it should only take a few minutes.

http://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/

4.  Create a Gravatar.  I don’t know why this is important, but it is.  Here’s the link on how to do it: http://en.support.wordpress.com/avatars/gravatars/

5.  Link your Facebook account and Twitter accounts to your blog.  This is also very easy.  Just follow the steps suggested in this link provided by WordPress:  http://en.support.wordpress.com/facebook-integration/

I hope these suggestions help you like they’ve helped me.  I literally went from off the radar to number one on the search list over night.  If any of my readers have any other tips, please post comments so I can share them!!