The common question for bloggers: How to boost your blog views?

Seeing the social media panel ad, it just kinda reminded me of a question I got asked a few times before by my friends:

friends: "Hey, man, your blog sucks, there is no sexy girls and you talk about crap every time, how can you get so many views?"

me: "Thank Edison..."

friends: "...??"

Certainly, reputation is the most important. If you're Andy Lau or Stephen Chow, everyone would like to check out what you are saying, you don't really need to do anything to get tons of visitors, as long as you keep the blog active by entering some entries regularly, no matter what the content is about, people will come and comment on your posts.

As for the rest, content is without doubt the most important. If you want your visitors come back often, you need to always have something interesting to show, be it a video blog or some funny articles, pictures etc. Content wise, the easiest way for busy artists is probably to upload as many pictures as possible, it takes less time than writing a thoughtful or funny articles, and much less time than filming and editing a video.

There are many small tricks you can use to boost your views a bit, but most of these methods can be found on the web already, just search something like "how to boost my blog views" and you can get tons of results (yet most talk about similar strategies, or simply copy and paste content each other), so I'm not going to talk much about that.

If you really don't care about retaining your visitors, but just to boost views, you can always buy clicks from others, in fact I notice there are a growing number of companies in this business offering "real person" clicks for your blog or youtube video. I dunno how it works, but I really don't think it is a good idea since the one time boosts doesn't really help for long term development... however if the amount of views is critical to other part of your big plan, perhaps it is something that is worth a shot (depending on your budget).

Going back to my experience, if all you care is views, the easiest and cheapest way to do it is still the old traditional way: meta-tag. Just tag the key words of all the hot topics recently, and you can see its power. so below is a demonstration, hopefully it will work:

 tag: oscar 2011, jay chou,  周杰倫 何鴻燊 video 足本, TVB, 絕密 解碼 爭產 艷照門 Egypt, Mubarak, 埃及 facebook, google 演唱會 lady gaga

oscar 2011 - http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/83/nominees.html 二房讓步 何鴻燊同意四房人重新分產http://www.aastocks.com/chi/News/newstext.asp?item=NOW.423784&source=AAFN 名模賽中國區冠軍裸照網上傳 http://news.sina.com.hk/news/94/1/1/2007266/1.html