Multiply your blog hits this way

“I wasn't looking / but somehow I found you”

Carly Simon, clearly discussing blogging in her 1977 number 1 hit single, Nobody Does It Better

Are you a blogger?

Twitter user?

Facebook user?

Did you answer yes to all of the above?

Good. Recently I added Blogger.com's Popular Posts gadget to my site. 

You can now click straight to the entries getting hit on the most.

I mentioned here about tweeting my most-viewed posts to optimise blog hits. 

Pretty simple really. Roughly half of my stats come from Twitter. I tweet links to new posts, being shown to 160 followers and whoever else stumbles across it in Twitter searches. Roughly half again comes from Google hits, with a few other hits coming from referrals from comments that I've left on other blogs. So I figured, why not combine the top two sources and tweet my top posts?

I also linked these posts to Facebook for a further 500-person exposure.

And seeing as I have an open profile, there's potential for more people to stumble on the blog that way. In theory. Nearly 200 hits were referrals from Facebook.

Well- this little experiment seems to have worked. For the last month I've been throwing up links to these two sites. I've gone from getting around 50 hits a day to around 100 a day. To put it into perspective, I opened this blog in 2008. Since then I've had 11,000 hits. Not amazing in the bigger scheme of things... but 2000 of them came in the last month. So I must be doing something right.

The experiment has doubtlessly helped my blog to get exposure. The majority of hits in this time- nearly 600- were still Google searches, meaning that people weren't specifically looking for my blog and they randomly landed on content I was covering.

Or maybe not so randomly. I've been brushing up on SEO- Search Engine Optimisation. If you have a blog and want hits, you need to know about this. In recent posts I have littered my blog with key words that people are searching for- references to Family Guy, celebrities and- kind-of accidentally- advice on whisky-drinking. All of this has helped me smash through the 10,000 views mark and beyond.

If you don't have both a Twitter and Facebook account, and you do have a blog, you're missing out. Both are free to set up. If this experiment works for me, you'll have success too. Let me know how it goes for you. As Carly Simon would doubtlessly say, it will keep them from runnin' but just keep them comin'...