Aaron Crowe

I’m no expert in how to attract traffic to a website, but a writer friend of mine, Amy Yannello, who recently started her own blog, asked me how I try to get traffic to this site.

My answer: I don’t. At least not much. The original and continued goal of this blog, which I started shortly after being laid off in June 2008, was to write about being an unemployed dad and what it was like raising my daughter while my wife went back to fulltime work. I wrote about my job search and found that other unemployed people appreciated the honesty and stories I had to tell.

I’ve since changed the subtitle to “Tales of an Underemployed Dad” after finding various freelance work, mostly for AOL’s WalletPop.com blog on personal finance. I’m still looking for fulltime work with benefits, but expect being underemployed is going to be a way of life for awhile.

It was this blog, in fact, that led me to AOL. It’s a story I’ve told here before, but in short: I found a college friend on Facebook, told her of my job hunt, she told her editor, who read my blog and hired me as a freelance writer. I now edit for the site also, and write for a few other AOL sites.

My best advice for getting traffic to your blog: Be sincere and write about what you know best and the readers will come. I do Search Engine Optimization work for AOL and while I could use that in writing posts in this blog, I don’t think that will get me anywhere and prefer to stick with writing about the continued job hunt while underemployed. The site is also meant as a way to showcase my work so potential employers can read it and contact me, as well as public relations executives for stories I do for WalletPop.

As far as getting someone to pay you to blog, and move traffic from your site to theirs, I think that if you can show them what you can do on your blog and then reach out to sites on the same subject, it could lead to some work. But first you’ve got to find a muse, which I’m constantly working on.