Archive for the 'Increase Traffic' Category

New Year’s Resolutions drive me crazy. Every year around this time I notice a few dozen new faces at the gym, it becomes crowded and difficult to get into your regular routine. Don’t get me wrong I give credit to all of the “resolutioners” who attempt to bring fitness into their lives for the new year, unfortunately by the time early March rolls around there are only a few of them left standing. The point is resolutions don’t seem to last long, follow through is lacking.

So what can you do to set yourself up for the new year with a sure bet at success, continuing to follow through long after the resolutions have faded to the back. Set yourself a few achievable blogging goals.

Create a list of short and long term goals complete with milestones meant to keep you on the right track. These are not resolutions, these are real and entirely possible business goals for you blog. Chances are if you are realistic in your goal creation you will achieve the majority if not all of them by the end of the year.

Start by creating a 3 month goal that is entirely within reach and relies solely upon your efforts. For example: “ I will commit to writing 2 posts a week by mid march.”

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Bloggers Resolutions Goals for 2010

The world of online content is all about the Google PageRank, at least it is for those of us without really well known websites or blogs. So how do you get a higher pagerank?

You get some strong backlinks from other sites.

But you need to know what backlinks are strong and what links aren’t, especially if you’re going to be doing recipricol link exchanges. The better the site that’s linking to you and the stronger the sites backlinks are the better that link will count towards your overall PageRank.

So, in order to utilize your time wisely as a blogger, especially a part-time blogger, you need to use an all-in-one service to check those backlinks. I found just that service in a free website at backlinkwatch.com. It checks all your links in all the search engines out there and then looks at those links as well.

You can easily see and compare possible link exchanges by using Back Link Watch and determining which exchanges will yield higher quality links.

I am now contradicting myself with directory submissions. I previously said that if you want to maximize your money and your time (and we all know time=money) you should look at paying someone to submit your blogs to directories.

Well that’s a great idea and can maximize your directory submission numbers very quickly and easily. However, you have to be careful with who you go with, how you submit, and how much you’re paying.

With people who run automated submission services, or semi-automated with the advent of captchas, you can’t be 100% certain that they are submitting the correct links and descriptions for your site. You also can’t be 100% certain that the links are even going to be approved. You may get the emails for submission, but if these services are blasting 200 directories with 200 sites each, some smaller directories may begin to block their IPs from acceptable submissions.

So what do you do know?

You start the submission process yourself. It’s a long process, but this way you have complete control over what you submit and when you submit it. You’ll also know exactly what you submitted and when you submitted it so you can contact the directory administrators to find out when your links are going to be added, or why they weren’t.

While doing mass submissions to web directories you need to streamline your process so that you can be very very efficient. You need to know that your links are going to be accepted or have a very good chance of being accepted and you need submit your blogs efficiently.

First thing, finding web directories that will almost guarantee acceptance and quick acceptance, isn’t as hard as it seems. If you head over to the Digital Point Forums section Directories – Solicitations and Announcements you’ll find lots of people trying to either start their directories or build their web directory listings. Just about 5-10 directories that say they’re offering free submissions and open them in a few tabs.

Next you’ll to make a word file with the following information:

• Site Title
• Link URL
• Site Description

Make this for as many sites as you have. Now open the submit pages on each of the web directories. (I suggest the directories that offer the choice of categories on the submit page, it’s quicker) Next copy and paste the all the information into the site description section of the submit for for every directory you have open. Then cut the link from the description box, and paste it into the URL box. Then finally cut the site title from the description box and paste it into the site title box.

Choose your category. Hopefully your left the option to allow your browser to remember what you’ve filled into boxes before and you can just click on the Name and Email boxes to fill those in. Fill out the captcha and done.

This is really helpful when you have multiple sites to submit. I have 16 sites I’m submitting to directories, so I do one site at a time and submit that one site to each directory. That way I don’t have to go back to my word file and copy and past all the time.

If you do 5 of these each day, it should take you only 30 minutes to an hour to do and you’ll have 100 directory submissions by months end.

I recently wrote about my new experiences in Link Building and website promotion over at my business blog. The gist of it was that link building and website promotion takes time, a lot of time. I thought writing posts took time.

Ever since I began hiring an editing team to blog for me and Blogtown Press, I’ve spent a lot of time link building. It takes time and patience to find blogs willing to exchange links, build a rep in forums and build a reputable site that people are interested in exchanging links with.

I was digging around Digital Point Forums and found a great post that some generous folk put up linking to a great SEO link-building article. The article is over at SEO Book and is from the SEO consultant Andy Hagans.

The article is packed with 101 tips to link build and some things you shouldn’t do. There are of course ones that take more time than others, but reading through all of them will spark ideas that you can apply to your particular situation.

A quick way to build backlinks is to join a webmaster related forum and post or respond to posts about link exchanges. Most of the top forums related to running or buying websites have link exchange subforums that will make finding backlinks much easier.

By just posting a thread in a forum you’ll be able to reach a lot more people much quicker than if you were to search through tons of blogs and emailing their publishers about getting backlinks and exchanging links. If you post about what type of blog you’re looking for you’ll be able to get more relevant links to your site and maybe from some good PR link sites as well.

You can also try getting some permanent links from blog posts on other blogs by posting for an exchange. This can help get you some great content related incoming links.

Also another option you have is getting one-way links by doing a “3-way” link exchange. You do this by one of the persons involved in the exchange having two sites related to each other and linking to one site while the other person links to the other site, therefore not having any single blog link to each other but rather to a different blog.

One of the best places I’ve found for good link exchanges is Digital Point Forums. There are more out there, but start here and then search out other ones that you like.

Most of us can remember at one point or another getting or hearing of a chain-letter. One of those letters where if you write this out 5 times, or make 5 copies of this and pass it on to 5 of your friends you’ll have something great happen to you.

They were all the rage when I was in middle school, then fell out of popularity in high school, and then back into popularity with the email blockbuster about how Microsoft would send you some crazy amount of money for every person in your in box you told about some letter going around that really didn’t even mention a product. That one always intrigued me, but come on, did anybody believe it? Some lawyer from Texas was quoted in it so we should all believe it. Do people believe lawyers in the first place?

Anyway, an new form of chain-letter has surfaced with the popularity of the blogosphere. It’s basically a letter telling you to do something and then link to 5 other people that you’d like to do the same thing. One of the most recent ones I’ve taken part in is writing 5 things you didn’t know about me and then asking 5 others to do the same. Hopefully my traffic will intrigue them to see what this post is that sent visitors their way and get them to write about it.

Now that one asked for me to do something. I was to write 5 things that I thought might be interesting for people to know and then ask 5 more people to do the same. One that was started back in March was similar only it didn’t need you to do anything. It just asked you to spread the indie virus and see the links fly.

See they can be simple or complex, but the key is that it gets more bloggers involved and knowing who you are, and will hopefully return some link love back to you by giving you credit either in the person that you directly link to, or maybe 2 or 3 people down the way that actually track the links back to see who might have started the whole thing.

It’s a great way to increase awareness of you blog, become an active member of the blogosphere, and maybe get a backlink or two.

There are lots of people out there who swear by commenting as their form of advertising and marketing their blogs. They just wait for a new post on a popular blog and bam, their the first to comment and hopefully gain some attraction and traffic back to their blog.

Now as a part-time blogger you may not have all the time in the world to be both commenting and blogging, especially if you don’t know if commenting works. Does it really drive traffic back to you blog?

Yes and no. It all depends on the article, the amount of people that will read the article and the order in which your comment pops up from the top.

Some articles and blogs are better to comment on to get your blog traffic it’s plane and simple. Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be active in the blogging community and stop commenting on someones blog just cause it won’t send you traffic. That’s not right, you should comment where you have opinions because comments are really to open up a community like feel and a public dialogue on the bloggers articles.

However, if you are limited in time, you should focus on new articles at popular blogs related to your content. This will get you the most traffic back to your blog and help your SEO out the most (although it’s unsure how much a link in a comment helps, if that person has no-follow disabled). If you stick to similar material blogs you’ll drive the most traffic with commenting because when a reader of that blog passes over your linked text in the comment header and sees that your blogs url as golf in it, if it’s on a golf blog, chances are the reader is looking for golf related sites. But if you’re on a knitting related blog, you might not do as well.

With little time just remember to keep it similar to your blogs topic and go for new posts on high traffic blogs. Those are the most efficient places to comment.

Unless you don’t want your friends to know that you blog a great way to promote your blog without any extra effort is to put a link in your email signature.

If you have a blog you probably send an email at least once a day. That adds up to a lot of emails over the course of the year. If on every email you have a link back to your blog you’ll have one more link for people to click through and visit your site from.

It’s free advertising that’s subtle but effective. Of course you can be and should be selective to who you include in this form of free advertising, you might not want everyone to know your obsession with little toy trains, but every little bit of traffic helps build a more reputable blog and will help you build your readership.

Heck you might not even know that your good friend Larry has a blog of his own and might be interested in sending some of his readers traffic your way. Free promotion without any time or extra effort.

One way to keep you blogging is to think of you blog as a learning tool. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to others. The process of figuring out a way to explain your topic to others helps you better understand whatever it is you’re teaching.

Sometimes though, you don’t really have anyone to listen to your teachings. That’s where a blog can be very valuable. If you think of your blog as a teaching tool you will not only learn your topic but you’ll help your blogging because you’ll think of many more topics to write about.

I’ve used sports blogs before and will use them again in this example. If you need more to write about than just reporting the latest scores from your sport, write useful tip articles to help your readers out. You’ll be building your content, building your traffic, providing something useful to your blogs readers and also learning about your topic.

 

One of the easiest ways to build traffic without spending any time promoting your blog is by utilizing the trackback, which is sometimes called the pingback.

When you write about another blogs blog post you can and should link to that post to give credit where credits due or to provide your readers with new and interesting content. If you link to a blog that has pings or trackbacks enabled you have just helped yourself out as well.

See when you link to someones post that has this feature enabled on their blog your blog will automatically ping them and then in their comments section up will pop a link back to the post your just wrote about with a little excerpt from your article. It allows readers to see what others are saying about a post and is a great way to get people back your site.

Simple yet very effective. You don’t even have to solicit those bloggers for a link exchange, the blogging software does it automatically.