A lot of time is spent by bloggers trying to get other blogs to link to them. A lot of traffic can be gained by doing this with blogs that are both related to your topic and blogs that have a lot of readers.
This can sometimes be very difficult for new bloggers because they do not yet have enough readers or page rank to interest the bigger blogs.
Talk to other bloggers who are in the same position as you right now and develop a lasting relationship. You link to them, they link to you and as both of your blogs grow those links will pay off for you.
Many people find a blog they like, then will take suggestions from that blog about other blogs they might like. So someone goes to a blog you have traded links with and likes them, then they follow your link and if your content is good, they add you to their reading list. The same happens in reverse for the one you link back to.
Sooner than you think both of your blogs will become ones that a circle of people read. The more blogs you do this with, the more your circle will eventually grow.
Don’t be too concerned with page rank. Many of the established blogs with good page rank are not going to link to you until you build up your readership at least a little. There is a reason for this and it isn’t arrogance, though it may feel that way at times.
The reason is that many people start blogs, but few people actually become bloggers. Blogging daily takes a commitment that many are not willing to make. The established blogs might link to you regardless of page rank and traffic issues if they see you are committed to writing your blog and becoming a blogger.
They don’t want to link to someone’s blog that may or may not be around next month. It is a disservice to their readers and a hassle to remove your link later or check and see if you are actually still blogging. They do not have the time to hold your hand on it.
If they check out your blog and you have been posting to it every day for quite awhile, say 6 months at least, then they might give you a helping hand and welcome you to the blogosphere.
Put it into your schedule to make a post every single day, even if it has to be a short one due to lack of time. When there is a time you know you will not be able to post for a few days, make a post for each of those days and if you are using wordpress you can timestamp the posts so that each one appears on the scheduled day. That is one way to keep your blog fresh for your readers every day.
Another tip is, as we post to our blogs daily, there are times when you have two or three things you want to blog, but if you are finding it hard to post daily, timestamp the second or third post for other days rather than posting them right now unless it is something time sensitive. Try to stay two or three days ahead so that if you miss a day, it won’t hurt you.
If you are using blogger or other blogging software that doesn’t have the timestamp feature, save them as drafts, then log in when you have little time and post your draft. If you have time to blog a post, then leave the draft there until you need it.
Don’t let yourself get frustrated if everyone doesn’t want to link to you right away. If you are blogging good content, you may find they are linking to you before you even ask!
This article will cover one of the unique methods of getting traffic to a blog that doesn’t work for regular sites. Remember that every blog is a web-site, but not every web-site is a blog. My top methods of getting traffic to a web-site are still my top methods of getting traffic to a blog. Those include: article marketing, link building and content creation/ranking factors.
But blogs are a special breed of web-site. There are additional methods of getting new visitors to your blog that are very effective. The first one I played with was linking to others. For your blog marketing efforts to work, you must understand that bloggers are part of a community. Those of us old-timers on the ‘net remember when the entire ‘net was a small, close-knit community… when it was OK to send an email telling others in your topic area that you just set up a site and would like a link on their site.
That isn’t what I’m suggesting with the blog community. The days of sending even a personal email to someone you haven’t met are nearly over. The spam problem has made that more and more difficult. However, it is still OK and still rather expected that you introduce yourself when you come into a community. It is also a good idea to let your new community know that you are a friendly guy and are willing to help out in the community.
This post will tell about one way to do that when you enter the blogosphere. First, you should find your neighbors. The Alexa toolbar is going to help you find out who the leaders are in your new community. Start by searching for “______ blog” on Google, Yahoo or your favorite search engine. Fill in the blank with the topic of your blog. Take a look at the blogs you see.
Do you like them? Good; these are leaders in your new community. Link to them in your blog roll. Read them daily to find out what is going on in your community. Do you not like them? No problem. Don’t link to them then. Don’t read them. Don’t introduce your visitors to them. It isn’t required that you like everyone in your new community, but you do want to be a part of the community you now live in…
Now as you read those blogs daily, notice their blog rolls (links they have to other blogs in your community). Go visit them. This is where the Alexa toolbar comes in. You will find some new leaders (those with blogs showing less than 100,000 on your Alexa toolbar). Check out their blog and if you like it… add it to your own blog roll.
I recently moved to a town of about 300 way up in the top of the Utah mountains. It was a new community. I had never lived in a rural area before, so it was critical for me to go through this exact same exercise as I became a part of my new community up here in the mountains. Sure; it didn’t involve Alexa or linking to others… but the concept is the same. When you enter a community and want to be a part of that community, get out there and get to know people. This is one way to do that in the blogging community.
I now have a hundred or so links from those in the blogging community after just a couple of months. From those links, I have over 600 daily visits and over 100 loyal readers who come to read my blog almost every day.
Did I ask for any of those links? Nope. Just like they didn’t ask me for the links I gave them. Do I have 100 outbound links? Nope. A lot of those links came in without me linking to them. As I get the chance, I go and check out their blog and if I like it… I give them a link. If I don’t like that blog for whatever reason; I don’t include it in my blog roll. It’s not always a tit for tat link exchange.
Some of you may be confused at this point about how my outbound links became inbound links without any other action. You may be confused about why I called this article “Getting Blog Visitors” when I have only talked about how to send my visitors to others by linking to them. OK; let me go into why this uniquely works very well on blogs, but not on other web-sites.
First, of all… I use Wordpress. It is the fastest growing blogging software out there. I’m not sure of the features of other blogging software, but I know the follow applies to Wordpress. When I log in to my control panel to write a blog post, I am given a page that shows a number of blog stats. One of the most prominent parts of those stats is the number of inbound links… AND a list of those who recently linked to me.
When you see that a blog called “Mattress Cleaners” just linked to you… can you ignore that? I can’t. I’m immediately distracted… and what do I do? I click on it. I go and check out that Mattress Cleaner blog. They just got another reader (at least for that day). If they were a quality blog that was actually relevant to the blog community of my own blog (and they aren’t)… they would get a link in my blog roll so that I could check them out periodically.
The same thing is possible with non-blog web-sites. When you link to a site and send them traffic, that shows up in their referrer logs. However, a lot of webmasters don’t look at their logs or stats. Those who do may use stat software that doesn’t even show referrers. They may only focus on traffic and not where it comes from.
However, most bloggers DO see when someone links to them. It is right in their face when they login to make a new post. All you need to do to let someone know that you have moved into their blog community is to link to them. BTW, it not only introduces you… it lets them know that you are friendly and you like their part of the blog community you just entered. Don’t be surprised when they link back or even write a post about your blog.
It’s that simple.
So you’ve got a website ready to go and you want to get the word out to either make money on it or promote it so it’s the most popular page of it’s kind. Now what?
Well, the first thing you should do is double check to make sure the site is as search engine friendly as possible. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Done? Perfect. So, now it’s easy for the search engines to find and categorize it once they do find it. Time to get that website where it can be seen.
One of the most common ways to get a site’s pressence known in through Pay-Per-Click campaigns. They will assure you that the most qualified and targetted visitors come to your website. Keep your keyword and phrases as relevant as possible. If you keep your bids low it can be a profitable campaign when it targets the right audience. Keep track of the keywords people are clicking on to go to your site as well. This can tell you if you’re targeting the right people or if you need to change your ad approach. Yahoo and Google are two very popular websites to do PPC campaigns on. There’s numerous articles on the benefits and banes of PPC, and though it’s not the focus on this one, it’s usefulness to site promotion can’t be simply disregarded.
Posting on forums is another way to promote your site. Do it specifically on forums with a topic relevant to your website. Check the TOS and make sure you can do it there first though. Simply placing our web address in your signature can create clicks through the forum, as well as create backlinks for your site. If the forum has a high Page Rank in Google it will work out even better for you. The main benefit of this is the backlinks your posts create which some search engine “spiders” deem gradually more important as they find your site linked more and more in different places on the internet.
On the idea of linking, reciprocal linking is another way to promote your website. This just means trading links with someone by putting a link on your website to them and they put a link on their website to you. Websites like Link Market and SEO Link Exchange are designed for just this purpose. As long as you keep the sites linking to you and from you relevant to your own site it should be just a matter of time before the search engine spiders find your site. The old fashioned way of emailing the webmaster of the site’s can do it for you as well, but web services like the aformentioned ones, get rid of smaller steps that might make it harder to get linked using simple “Accept”/”Reject” buttons.
I hope this helps get your site to the top of the search engines.
In this article I’m going to give you six ways that having a blog helps your website. There are a lot more reasons to start a blog, but this article has to do with the benefits to your website.
1. A blog on the same domain name, (as part of your website like yourdomainname.com/blog) can help you add fresh content to your website without having to know html. Fresh daily or even weekly content can keep the search spiders coming back more often. Writing your blog posts on the topics or search terms you want to be relevant for helps as well. Each blog post becomes another webpage targeted for your keywords.
2. A blog on the same domain name will also help you increase the number of pages that are included as part of your website. Content is king and having a ton of relative content will increase your chances of drawing visitors to your website.
3. A Blog on the same domain name or on a subdomain of your domain name or even one that is on another domain name can help you reach out to potential and existing customers with special offers, information, surveys, and more. You can add sales offers on the fly without having to call your web designer to add it for you.
4. A blog on a subdomain like blog.yourname.com is another way to go. Subdomains in most cases are treated as a separate domain name, yet can bring yourname.com more traffic as well. Here link popularity also kicks in a little. You of course link to yourname.com from blog.yourname.com but you can also trade links with other blogs but have them link to yourname.com instead of blog.yourname.com. Those links will be treated as one-way-inbound-links and that helps your page rank, but also brings you more traffic.
5. A blog on it’s own domain name can do that as well, but the link from it to yourname.com is going to carry more weight.
6. Getting the spiders to find all of your new websites. I find that because I have several blogs, if I want to get my or a client’s new website crawled by the search engines I can do it faster by adding a link to my blogs than I can by submitting to the search engines. Because I update my blogs daily, the spider crawls the blog a lot and follows the links there. I have seen this work for getting a website crawled within 3 days. This only works for a blog that has been regularly updated for awhile. (around 6 months or more).
As I said above, these are only the benefits you get from blogging as it applies to your website. What I haven’t mentioned is that by building up a steady readership on a blog, you will gain a lot of new customers. They get to know you and trust you by reading your blog every day.
I welcome all comments and suggestions. There are a lot of other advantages to your website, but the six I have just mentioned should be enough to get you started blogging right away!
1. Review your goals and markets for your site:
a) Are there clear business goals and desired outcomes behind your Web site, and for each major page or section? How will you evaluate your success?
b) Have you defined all the target audiences for the site, and the “languages” they speak? Do you have compelling benefit statements, testimonials, case studies?
c) Does your home page appeal to each of your target markets and audiences? Does it effectively direct them to appropriate areas of your site?
d) How compelling are the “calls to action” on each page?
2. How can you take your online business to the next level?
a) Is your site making the best use of available technologies? How will you stay on top of online developments in your field? Are all appropriate staff involved?
b) Does your content effectively position the expertise of your business? Are there media or public relations outlets that you could tap for wider promotion?
c) Are you taking full advantage of “real-world” opportunities to promote your site?
d) Does your business offer other services or customer support functions that you could provide online? Are there further efficiencies that you could achieve?
e) Review your contact databases and your use of e-mail to support your marketing. Do you have clear opt-in and privacy policies?
3. Review your Web traffic reports:
a) Are there any obvious patterns in your traffic, or the paths your visitors follow that you could capitalize on, or need to change?
b) What are the top exit points from your site? Where are you losing conversions?
c) Which external sites link to you? Are these appropriate? Are you generating sufficient return on investment for paid online advertising?
d) Do the search phrases for your site suggest ideas for new areas of business development?
(c) 2005. Philippa Gamse.
More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic in the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.
One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic into websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.
Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.
This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any website would greatly benefit that viral marketing.
Tell A Friend Script
One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell a friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to the programming of your website. Generally, tell a friends script are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.
The basic concept of a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.
Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.
With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.
Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.
Tell A Friend Script Availability
A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.
In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.
With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.
It is imperative that you have patience in using a tell a friend script. If your chosen media doesn’t get the mileage that is expected of it, it may take some time before it gets spread or shared. But surely many people will see your ads and there is great probability that they will visit your site increasing your traffic flow.
Ever wondered what people think when they visit your blog? If you’re like most bloggers, you get a few comments but not enough to know whether most people like your blog or not. Maybe they read it, love it, and you never know about it. Or maybe they see something they don’t like and are off browsing before you have time to shout “hey, there’s good stuff here!”
To make matters a little worse, what turns people away is often a small thing. It might be a bad color scheme or the lack of a clear title so people know what they’re reading about. It might be too much text and not enough pictures. Whatever it is, you can lose readers fast.
How do you solve this problem? Simple &ndash just test your blog. And there’s an easy way and a free way to do it. Just visit the BlogExplosion site (.blogexplosion), sign up for a free account, and add your blog. Then visit a feature of the site called “Battle of the Blogs.” It’s a free game where your blog competes against someone else’s. Just choose a challenger and click on “Accept Challenge.” Now, the fun part starts.
Members will visit your blog and the blog of the challenger. Then they’ll vote on their favorite blog. The battle normally only takes 15 minutes or so to be completed. As soon as it’s over, you have a clear idea of how many people like your blog. If 15 out of 15 vote for yours, don’t change a thing. If 10 out of 15 vote for yours, make some improvements. If 0 out of 15 vote for yours, make some big changes.
Then go back and enter a few battles after you’ve made changes. That’s a good way to constantly improve. And there’s nothing better than improving your blog and being able to see the results in less than 15 minutes. That’s got to be better than waiting days to see a difference in your visitor statistics.
And while you’re waiting the 15 minutes to see the results, review the other blogs battling and vote for your favorite. As you do, think about what makes you like a blog instantly or dislike a blog instantly. What catches your attention? What is it that makes one blog likeable and another one boring? Take note and you’ll figure out even more ways to improve your own blog.
Before designing your website and putting it online you have to first plan it all out. For example, you will need to think of what topic your site will be based on. For example, will it be a free stuff site like .1freebieseeking.com or will it be a more larger general site like .simplysearch4it.com with online games at games.simplysearch4it.com a product search at products.simplysearch4it.com and more. You will also have to think of how your site will make you money and also how competitive the market is, which you will be approaching.
Once you have done all of your planning your will then need to design your site. There are many good tutorials around on the web that will help you in designing your website. Once you have designed your website you will then need to consider, which web hosting provider you are going to use for your website. There is a large amount of different type of web hosting providers across the web. Some are very good and reliable and some are not so good or reliable.
So one of the best places to start when looking for a web hosting provider is to us a web hosting directory like .1hostseeking.com just so that you can search for the best web hosting plan for your sites needs. Once you have narrowed down your search and have found a handful of web hosting providers that will be right for you, the best thing to do then is to go to an online forum associated with web hosting. You can then ask others what they think of your chosen web hosting providers so that you have other peoples opinions, which will then give you a better idea of whether they are reliable web hosting providers or not.
So now that you have chosen your web hosting provider you will then need to add something to your site, which will make you some money. One good thing to do is to sell your own products, but if you can’t do this then you can always join affiliate programs and use them on some pages of your site, if not all. To easily find some affiliate programs for your sites topic it is best to use an affiliate programs directory like .affiliateseeking.com . When adding the affiliate programs to your site you must incorporate them so that they look like your own content and are not just a list of affiliate programs links. Doing it this way will more likely result in clickthru’s to the affiliate programs site and also result in more sales.
Now once you have done all of the above, you now need to think about your advertising. One of the best ways of getting visitors to your site is through using the major search engines. To do this you will need to work on your websites seo (search engine optimization). Once you can do seo well enough, then your site will rank a lot better in the major search engines, which will then result in you getting a lot more unique visitors to your site. If you can’t do seo that entire well, then you can also get traffic to your site using other techniques. Some of these include:
1. Adding your site to free web directories and specialty directories
2. Adding your websites link to your signature in the forums that you use
3. Exchanging links with other websites that are on a similar topic to yours
4. Pay other sites so that they can include your link on theirs
5. Use Pay Per Click Search Engines include Adwords
Once you have done all of the above you will then need to keep working on improving parts of your site that is under performing and also finding out ways of doing things better to increase your sites visitors and earnings even further.
Webmasters and newsletter publishers all over the world are constantly searching for new quality content. There are many websites that fulfill this need by providing pre-licensed articles. The requirements for using pre-licensed content is that the publisher must leave the author information and any links intact. Publishers are not allowed to edit the articles.
Many webmasters (publishers) will go to the free content sites to look for articles that they can use on their web sites, blogs, ezines, or newsletters.
How can this benefit someone who needs to promote their website?
If you can write an informative and useful article and publish it on a free content site you are well on your way to increasing traffic and popularity for your website. Every article that you write will have your own author information at the end. This author information will include a link to your own web site. When appropriate you can include a link within the body. Use the links sparingly as you do not want the article to be viewed as “spam”. Most free content sites will not allow affiliate links to be used within your article. As a rule try to write articles that are informative and interesting. Do not write an article that is simply a “sales pitch”. Publishers will not be likely to use an article that is written only to sell a product or service.
The more well written the article is, the more attractive it is for other webmasters and the more it will be used. That means more and more back links to your website. This is of course an excellent way to increase traffic to your website. This makes article writing an ultimate marketing tool.
A major factor in determining your page rank and search engine rankings is link popularity. Link popularity refers to the relevancy and number of links that point to your site from others. Basically speaking, the more inbound links you have the better your ranking will be. This is an important benefit to writing articles for content. Every time your article is published on a site you will automatically have an inbound link! And since publishers try to choose only those articles that match their subject matter and audience then most of those links will be coming from relevant sites.
To take full advantage of the link popularity factor it is important to use relevant keywords in the text links that you use. This is an important part of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. For example, instead of using “visit my site” as a text link use something like “Learn more about Writing Articles to Increase your Website Traffic and Link Popularity”
When I first set out to quit my job and make money online it seemed like a very big task. Everything out there tells you how easy it is. They tell you how much money you can make in a month, or a week, or even a day depending on what you’re looking at.
The money won’t just fall into your lap, but I can tell you what you can do to make the steps to getting there much, much easier. I’ll skip the part of long hours, time put in, how you seem to think about it even when you’d think yourself “off work” and the like, as you probably are already familiar with that stuff before you even thought of trying an online business.
First, KNOW exactly what you want to sell and/or what service you want to do. This will save you lots of time just in trying to make your website or sales page correct. The rest of your website will make sense around it as well and your web page will look and feel complete. You need to know as specifically as possible what goods or services you’re offering. A subject that is too broad will not only make your site hard to find, but hard to update and keep track of as well.
Second, is get familiar with Search Engine Optimization(SEO), even with a finished site and a product ready to go, if noone can find your site you won’t sell anything or get no visitors. You don’t need to know it in the expert sense, but you should know what aspects search engines look for and adjust your website accordingly. Research the keywords and phrases common to your website’s topic to find what people are searching for to properly optimize your page for the right traffic you want to go to your website.
Third, promote your site in as many different ways that you can think of. While it’s not normally recommended to directly submit your website to the biggest search engines, taking out a few seconds to do it can’t hurt. You can do so many things to promote a webiste, and as you work with one way, you’ll often discover another way to get the word of your site around. From posting on forums to email advertising to Google Adwords, try and do as much as you can. Not every person surfing online will use the one or two ways you started promoting your site and may not see it. Get your hands dirty and experiment with as many as you can to give your site it’s best chance of being seen.
This will hopefully help tweak and refine your site so when you follow the steps after it visitors will see what they were looking for and keep coming back or buy from you.