And we have a buddy (Hey Buddy!) at Kinko’s who cranked us out a box of nice glossy business cards once again featuring our logo & URL. We hand these out constantly. And I post ‘em on just about any bulletin board I come across.

Sure, these are only likely to attract local visitors, but those just might be some of the best folks to attract since some of the content on our site is regionally relevant. And word of mouth can sometimes do wonders!

Anyone who has been in sales knows the funnel: to get 10 new readers you need 100 interested people which means 1000 relevant people which means touching 100,000 people at random. Get real. the only thing these techniques achieve is to allow you to show off to others that you are a blogger (oooh cool.)

There are so many small businesses that are hungry for free marketing and advertising. Internet cafes’, hair salons, spas . . .

Local visitors are not not worthless if you have a LOCAL business and target to them. They are the bigest asset for you, but otherwise they worth the same as much as the rest of the crowd so you should not be spending more efforts in bringing them in.

I agree with the part that if you do things dailty – you do it anyway, but dont adopt a mindset targetted for this.

Agreed every new user added is a success, but it is not when you could have added a visitor with much less effort.

The fact is that most of these techniques are just “things I do in the course of everyday life”. Check my Blackberry. Wear shirts. Talk to people. The SSId is, like you said, a 15 second change.

These items are low hanging fruit. No they won’t turn anyone into an instant success-a-meter. But they might just get a handful of new readers. Those are readers that might not otherwise read.

Any new reader is a success in my book. And these are just dead easy to do with no real output on my part.

I call bullshit. How are local visitors less worthwhile than visitors elsewhere? What if your neighbour writes for the city paper? What if they have a blog of their own and link to your? That’s worthless?

Who you reach, particularly when building an audience, is more important than how many people you reach. Why? Because reaching the right people is the easiest route to reaching a wider audience.

And as for ‘forcing your energies on something that produces little packets of output’, I’m not sure what kind of router you use, but mine takes approximately 15 seconds to change the SSID.

If you’re going to be contrarian, I definitely suggest you have some better reasoning behind it.

Thanks, Alex ()