Drive Traffic to Your Blog Via Memes

When I started my first blog a few years ago, I faithfully posted for weeks, no months, before anyone left me a comment. I had readers, but oh were they shy! Granted, it was a personal blog, but still - I was blogging and if I wanted to write to myself, I would have just bought a spiral from Wal-Mart and called it good.

Then, one fateful day, one of my oh-so-shy readers who happened to also be a blogger herself, tagged me for a meme for the very first time. I was beyond thrilled!

Now, you might be wondering what it means to be ‘tagged for a meme’. Well, actually, it can mean a few things. In this instance, what it meant was she had posted a list of questions along with her own answers, and at the end, listed people from whom she’d like to see the same. So, to participate, I had to post the same list of questions on my blog along with MY answers to the questions, and then choose other people to ‘tag’ (as in ‘tag, you’re it!’) to continue the meme.

Another kind of meme is where a blogger will ‘host’ the meme and invite other bloggers to post their own version of the meme at their own blogs and come back and leave a comment at the host’s blog to let others know they had participated. All participants are encouraged to visit the other participants’ entries and leave comments, as well.

Either type of meme is a great way to introduce your blog to others and build traffic. They’re also great writing prompts, too, which is invaluable when you’re ’stuck’ trying to think up a meaningful blog post. Thursday Thirteen is a meme of the second type mentioned here. It’s a great meme to participate in because it’s simply a list of 13 things of your own choosing that you post on Thursdays, so you can tailor your lists to your blog audience and gain new visitors to your blog at the same time! To find other memes that might be useful, simply enter ‘blog meme’ into your favorite search engine, and follow the links in the results provided.