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Ultimate Tips To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

Dotcom Note — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:36:38 +0000

A Blog is a stepping stone for many newbie internet marketers. It is easy to set up than a regular website. Blog platforms like Blogger and WordPress provide a mechanism for instant publication without spending a dime. Google’s Blogger platform goes even one step further by proving a monetization means through their AdSense platform. All you need spend is your time to write contents. All barriers to publishing your contents are gone. However, many people find their blogs sitting alone in the vastness of the Web. Nobody is coming to read what they have published in their blogs. The concerns about “how to drive traffic” ultimately lead to frustration and abandonment.

But before you give up your blogging and call it a day, you must understand that there are a few tips that you can easily implement to drive traffic to a blog. Try these tips for a month or so before you quit. I can assure you that you’ll get a few hundred visitors a day easily if you follow the tips outlined in this blog post.

I know you cannot afford a big budget like a corporate blogger. So, paid traffic through a pay-per-click campaign is ruled out. Also, banner advertisement in the top blogs related to your niche is out of reality because the top bloggers are demanding insane amount of money to display a tiny banner that may or may not get any real visitors. Why shouldn’t they? A lot of financially challenged people are paying them big bucks.

However, you don’t have to do so. I searched the blogospehere to find the best article on driving traffic to your blog for free. I was also looking for information that is easy to implement. Tips that does not require you to be a tech wizard. I’m happy to report that I have found such an article at performancing.com. Performancing.com provides effective tips and tricks to bloggers to succeed. If you’re not a subscriber of their RSS feed, I urge you do so immediately. With any further delay, I’m producing their excellent tips to drive traffic to your blog below.

Write content and publish consistently. It’s easy to come up with a plan, even create an editorial calendar. It’s much harder to actually stick to a consistent schedule. This is a common area of difficulty for bloggers, but important to master. Let’s just say that search engines and readers both love consistency of frequency. Unless you’re running a news site, you don’t necessarily have to publish tons of content daily.
Tweak your content to searches. You don’t want to cater entirely to site visitors’ searches, but do focus on search keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche. If visitors are reaching your site via a particular search but the “bounce” (leaving) rate is high, then they probably didn’t find the content they were seeking. Mine your site metrics for the most popular search terms for the recent past, then see if you can write content to match, while staying within your site’s niche.
Build up your posting frequency. Start small, build up your content as time, resources or budget permits. Additional content will bring additional readers, especially if you’re leveraging your social media channels.
Build your social networks. There are a variety of social networks, including social bookmarking sites (Stumbleupon, Delicious), social voting sites (Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller), Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, other blogs, forums, media sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare) and so on. Don’t forget to factor in the time it takes to build your social networks, so work at it daily if possible. Of course, having these networks is useless unless you leverage them to promote your content.
Promote content on at least two social media sites. There are a variety of ways to promote your content, including the social media sites mentioned above, as well as a variety of non-social profile pages that are free for use. These methods differ in the amount of Web traffic they each bring, though collectively they can make a tremendous difference to your site. You don’t have to use all of these methods, especially when you’re starting out. Bloggers differ on what they feel is most important, but if you have to pick just two to start with, a few of my blogging colleagues have variously suggested the following pairs as being “most” effective, in their experience:
- Stumbleupon and Digg.
- Stumbeupon and Twitter.
- Twitter and Facebook.
- Twitter and Digg.
Personally, I’d pick Twitter and Facebook, but it really depends on your content and your social networks. Promoting content successfully online really is about who you know and whether they’ll share your content. If you can get them to do it regularly, even better. Your Facebook Wall or a Fan Page serve as great reminders. Just don’t overdo it, and learn to balance promotion and social network building tasks when you’re not writing.
Deep link to your older content. For each new post that you write, you should try to link to at least two older posts in your own site’s archives. If your post is sufficiently long, you can link to more than two. Remember to link with appropriate keywords in the anchor text. The cynic might say that this is a cheap way to get more page views for your site, but linking to your own existing content from each new post serves multiple purposes
- Keep readers on your site. Yes, that gets you more page views, but is there really anything wrong with that if you’re giving readers what they want, possibly in your archives?
- Expose older content to readers who might have missed it.
- Build authority for your site for the keywords and variations used in link anchor text (more on this in a later post). From a search engine perspective, keep in mind that they all want relevant links to give to search users. If your site happens to have relevant links, why not emphasize that by deep linking? This potentially helps to reduce the waiting time it takes to rank in search engines.
- Throw a whammy at site scrapers who grab your content. They might steal your content but having a link to your own posts means you’ll at least know who did it and be able to take action, if desired.
Use target=”_blank” in your hyperlinks. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry for now. If you do know, then use it for any links that go outside of your sites. This way, the main browser window/ tab stays on your site, hopefully keeping readers there longer and potentially building traffic.

Original article 7 Tips For Bootstrapping Your Traffic

Memorize these seven tips to drive traffic to your blog. Or better yet, create a mnemonic to remember the tips. If you’re busy to read the tips above, just remember the 7 points below:

Consistency
Search
Frequency
Social network
Promote
Deep Link
Use target attribute

Image credit: rich jorgemejia

Three Busines Models To Make Money And Help Underprivileged Children

Dotcom Note — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:19:21 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

I hate when a promotional video starts playing as soon as I land on a page and there is no way to stop that f..ing thing. And that is what happened when I landed on this site that promises to teach you three business models to make money and live a dream life style. The three business models are

1. Opt-in. You collect email addresses of people and start sending offers almost everyday hoping at least 1% people will buy something from you.

2. Blog – Make fake blogs stuffed with links to affiliate products.

3. Review site – Pretend to be an impartial reviewer who reviews products and gives fair recommendations. However, all your recommendations will be to affiliate products you are promoting.

I got this info in my email from Mark Ling who has his own affiliate teaching program. Apparently, he also promotes other offers where he takes a commission.

Ok, now to this course. Of course the promoter is using one of the business model mentioned earlier. The loud f..ing video will ask you to sign up using your email address. And we all know why they need that email address. So that they can flood your inbox with other offers.

But this guy has a new twist to his email collection model. He is appealing to your charitable nature by telling you that when someone signs up for his course, he will donate $1 to some fund for underprivileged children. Supporting a great cause. Who can say no. It does not cost you anything to sign up.

But I don’t understand why he simply cannot donate the money? Why he need you to sign up for donating money. What your signing up with his teaching of how to make fake review sites has to do with donating money for the underprivileged children?

So, if you want to sign up for his course and help him donate money (I still don’t see the connection), please do so. Oops, I forgot to give you the URL. Just ask for the URL in the comment section.

We Create Your Business – Make Money Using Fake Blogs

Dotcom Note — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 13:36:27 +0000

: Image by affiliatesummit via Flickr

This one is offered by Liz Tomey and it is called We Create Your Business and you can go to the site by adding .dot com to the name. Are the online marketers running out of attention grabbing names? I don’t know. But I am sure they are running out of domain names and coming up with all sort of creative names to convince you that you subscribe to their mailing list, watch their videos, buy their products, etc to start on line business and make six figure income.

The secret: Find a good product. Get your affiliate link. Create your promotional model. If you can successfully combine these three elements you can make mullah. The promotional model is to create a fake blog to make money using affiliate programs. If you can create hundreds and hundreds of these types of blogs and each blog is made only to promote your affiliate programs, you will on the path to becoming a millionaire.

These blogs should not contain any valuable information. They should be stuffed with three products and you give false recommendation as to the best one. It is called review blogs. You become an expert reviewer. Of course it does not matter which product your visitor clicks on. You always make money.

Of course she is also into it to make money. So, she is asking for $997 to enroll in her class where she is going to make a blog for you stuffed with affiliate products. The regular price of the course is $1997 but today only (today can be any day) she is generous enough to teach her make money using fake blogs formula for half the price.

After the blog is made, you need to market it to attract visitors. If you have $997 to enroll in her class to learn how to make fake blogs stuffed with affiliate products, go ahead and enroll in her class. If still have no clue where to go to sign up for her class, post your desire to do so in the comment.

No More BlogRush for Traffic Exchange

Dotcom Note — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:17:21 +0000

BlogRush is dead. I had written about BlogRush traffic exchange math when it came out in Septemeber, 2007. My take on this pyramid style traffic exchange program was that the a few first movers and popular bloggers will mostly benefit from this scheme.

A lot of this type of traffic exchange programs popped up during the Porno Web days (1995-1998). Of course, those programs did not use widgets but the concept was the same.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwp-roger/2704952143/

Lots of big time online money making and marketing blogs opined how great the program was and consequently it spread like wild fire. I will not name any name but you can easily find out those blogs easily.

The reason of its demise, according to John Reese, the founder of BlogRuch is

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

You can read Jeff Chandler’s take on the death of BlogRush at Performancing.com and what others are saying about their experience with BlogRush in the comment section.

How to Create Quality Contents for Blogs and Article Marketing

Dotcom Note — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:26:51 +0000

Writing quality articles for your blog and article marketing campaign is essential to establish yourself as an authority in your chosen niche. Every day, people post tens of thousands of articles in blogs and article directories. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to start producing authoritative and resourceful articles that others will read, bookmark, and promote using social media sites.

A quality article provides benefits to its readers. Neither it should be detailed and lengthy to put readers to sleep, nor it should be a laundry list of items for others to scan and forget. It should have enough information to put the written words into actions, but not more.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/1510017912/

Before you start writing an article, make a list of all the non-textual contents that you will include in the articles. Non-textual contents may be images, videos, sketches, links to other resources, etc. Collect all the non-textual resources in one place, preferably in a folder in your laptop.

So, where do you go to find all the resources you need before you start writing your article? People who churn out low quality articles rely on Google search engine and article directories. While Google search engine may be a source, you should never use an article directory as a resource for your article-writing project. Finding a good article in an article directory is like finding a needle in the haystack.

Start with your own online bookmarks. You should have already developed a habit of using an online book marking service like delicious to store links to interesting contents. These online bookmarking services allow you to tag your bookmarks for easy organization and later retrieval.

Also, check out the marked articles in your RSS reader. In your RSS reader, you should always mark quality contents that you may use for your own articles later. In the Google reader, you can use the star mark and get to those marked articles later with a click.

Use blog directories like Technorati and Goolge blog search. You will find more recent articles in the search results of a blog directory, compared to a web search using Google. Use keywords like best, top, and reasons in the search query. You will find what others have said about the same subject. For example, if you are writing about benefits of eating apples, search for top reasons to eat apples.

Use Flickr for your image search. Click the search box to go to the search page and than click the advanced search link. Scroll down and check the creative commons check box. The Creative Common license allows you to use Flickr images in your blog, provided you credit the original source with a link.

For videos, use Google video search. It will find videos from YouTube and other social video sites like Metacafe, etc. Please review the licensing requirements of each site before you publish it in your site. You don’t have to download the video. You should get the embedded code for the video and embed that in your page html.

Locate a niche database using Google search. For example, if you want to find nutrient values of banana apple desert, search in Google using key phrase food database. You will be able to locate the USDA nutrient database. Similarly, you can locate movie database, etc.

If you want to build your blog readership or people who will specifically look for your contents in an article directory, quality article is the only way to go. Search engine optimization techniques on poor quality articles will not benefit you in long run. People will lose trust on your materials. In the future, trust will be one of the most important factor in generating sustainable online incomes.

Kindle – Can Bloggers Sell Subscriptions to Amazon?

Dotcom Note — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:45:11 +0000

Amazon has launched an ebook reader called Kindle. Here is a Newsweek article about this latest gizmo that Amazon is positioning as a service rather than a device.

Unlike Sony’s eReader, Amazon’s Kindle will have wireless Interent connectivity using the cell phone data transmission technology.

Kindle has a six-inch screen and it uses e-ink for sharp readable pages. The battery lasts for 30 hours and you can fully recharge it in two hours. With a weight of around 10.3 ounces, it will be easy to carry it around in your backpack.

Image credit: engadget

You will be able to go to Amazon site and download ebooks and reviews from there. You can also subscribe to newspapers and magazines and download them to the reader.

One interesting thing mentioned in the Newsweek article is about blog subscriptions. For $1.99 a month, you will be able to subscribe to one blog from some type of Amazon’s blog subscription service.

Back in September, Engadget had posted two pictures of this device. To me, it really looks ugly. I don’t know if it has a color screen or not. Without a color screen, I am sorry, I can’t use it.

And who is going to pay $1.99 a month for a blog subscription? I will not be paying $1.99 a month to read a blog.

A blog should be available for free. However, if Amazon bundles unlimited blog subscriptions via full RSS feeds for $1.99, it may be an attractive deal for me.

How Google Helps Bloggers Improve Their Rankings

Dotcom Note — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 06:34:19 +0000

After punishing the text link advertisers with a reduction in their page ranks (PR), Google is going after the PayPerPost bloggers and dropping their PRs to zero from whatever PR they had before. An IZEA blog post by CEO Ted Murphy has this to say:

Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising.

Murphy also went after TechCrunch for their sponsored posts and suggested that Google did not punish them because they were silicon valley insiders. Duncan Riley at TechCrunch has posted a rebuttal to Murphy’s claims.

Image credit: PageRank

Every business wants to increase their market share to achieve monopolistic strongholds. No business person will say, “Gee, you know, I have too much market share. I will decrease my market share so others can compete.“

The question is, does Google misuses their monopolistic stronghold? And the answer is we don’t have any evidence so far.

PayPerPost (or any such service provider) should not charge the review rate based on a site’s PR. The review rate should be based on the actual traffic the site receives and PayPerPost should provide that information to their advertisers (people who are seeking reviews).

When Google reduces the PR of a site, another site gets a fair chance of ranking high in the SERP. So in a sense, Google is helping sites who don’t participate in PayPerPost. And what is wrong with that?

When a site reaches a higher PR and a higher ranking in the SERP, Google expects it to show some responsibilities. Just because the site has a higher PR, it does not mean that the site has a higher quality than hundreds of other sites that are slightly lower in PRs. And Google knows this fact.

Google’s actions will help sites, that don’t participate in PayPerPost, improve their rankings in the SERP.

Hot off the Press Linkbait Article – Top 50 Bloggers

Dotcom Note — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:00:06 +0000

Create a list of top 10 science fiction bloggers, top 10 celebrity bloggers, top ten humor bloggers, etc. That is what NxE has done with their top 50 most influential bloggers.

Topping the list is Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media that owns popular blogs like Gizmodo and Lifehacker. He also owns the porn blog Fleshbot. Fleshbot’s Alexa ranking stands at 5,000.

The most popular political blog in the list is Zuniga’s Dailykos, a progressive blog under attacks by conservatives. Ariana Huffington and Michelle Malkin also sit on the top 20 list. But they are better known as columnists and commentators rather bloggers.

Listed on the 20th position is one of the oldest blogger on the Net, Jason Kottke. Jason writes about anything and everything and he is doing it almost daily since 1998.

The list includes authoratative Google voices by Matt Cutts. Webmasters analyze Matt’s writings to glean information about Google and search engine optimization.

I was glad to see one of my favorite blogger Steve Pavlina in the list. He is a personal development blogger but his 2006 article “How to make money from your blog” has inspired thousands to try out their writing skills.

I like the list and some of the blogs I subscribe to are mentioned in the last. The list is a good one in the sense that it covers bloggers of a wide variety of topics. It is a kind of Who’s Who of the blogging world.

Technorati Annoys with Topics

Dotcom Note — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 13:03:31 +0000

Technorati, the internet search engine for blogs, added a new feature called Topics. The homepage shows a frequently refreshing list of new blogs. A tabbed view shows blogs categorized into six topics: Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life. You can tab to a different category of your choice on the homepage and review blogs in that particular topic

It is a kind of annoying. By the time you zero on a headline, the page is refreshed and you have to look for it again. A better idea would be to use a digg like feature for the homepage.