7 Tips to Gain Traffic

Here are 7 blog help tips that are well known to work for driving traffic to your blog.

Blog Help Tip 1) Start a newsletter / subscription club on your blog that people can join. You’ll be surprised by how many people will opt in for this. It’s a great way to stay in touch with your readers and reach out to them long after they’ve left your site. There are many free tools to help you with this blog feature. When you send a newsletter or other notification, make sure you include a link back to your blog in the email.

Blog Help Tip 2) Submit your RSS feeds to directories. Do a quick search in Google for rss directories. There are tons. This will help your blog greatly because the spiders read rss feeds. They are well structured for robot consumption and therefore are indexed quickly. Make sure you have search engine friendly links in the rss feed. If you don’t understand the rss feed process, there are many forums you can turn to for help.

Blog Help Tip 3) Submit to blog directories. You will find many people claiming that these don’t work. However, I’ve built a blog directory and have studied the traffic patterns in detail. Believe me, there is plenty of traffic you can get from blog directories. They are link mini search engines. Why wouldn’t you want to be listed in as many as possible? Additionally, they are another source for back-links, which will drive up your page rank. Finally, many of these directories of PR 3, 4, 5 and 6 themselves. This means they are crawled by the search engine spiders at a much greater frequency than your blog. If your url is in the directory, or better yet your rss content is on their site, this will get pulled into the search engines faster and provide you with traffic.

Blog Help Tip 4) Read and comment on other people’s blogs. This seems easy, but it’s also easy to do poorly. Don’t spam peoples blog. Help them by really reading what they have to say and make meaningful comments that really show some thought. Many places allow you to put your hyperlink with your comment. Again, this builds back-links. But this also helps you sharpen your reading, critical thinking and writing skills. With enough participation, you may also make contacts with other bloggers.

Blog Help Tip 5) Submit your blog url directly to the search engines. This one is really straight forward. You need to make sure your url has been registered at Google, Yahoo and MSN at a minimum.

Blog Help Tip 6) Write frequently and write well. I can’t stress this enough. You need to create solid content if you want anyone to read what you’re posting. Nobody can help a blog that has poorly written or uninteresting topics on it. Proof read. Then proof read again.

Blog Help Tip 7) Write articles on similar topics for submission to online articles directories, such as this one. Don’t publish everything you write, just the things that you think are most helpful or attention grabbing. Include a link in your submission so that people can find more of your work.

WordPress Or Blogger?

Let’s start off with the easier of the two options because this is where most people start. I’m talking about going with a service like Blogger.

Blogger is a piece of cake. You go to the site, sign up, choose your template and you’re done. The only thing left is to post your blog entries. You can literally be up and running in a manner of minutes. It’s free and they handle all the maintenance. It doesn’t get any easier than this. Hard to imagine there being any downside to hosting your blog with a service like Blogger. Well, there are some negatives that you need to be aware of.

The first is probably the most important. When you host a blog through Blogger, you have a page that has a URL something like this…

homebizhelpcenter.blogspot.com

This just happens to be one of my blogs. You will notice that the last part of this URL is blogspot.com. The reason that this is important is because your individual blog is not going to get indexed by the search engines as technically the site isn’t yours. It belongs to Blogger. So all your hard work isn’t going to move you up the search engine ranks. You’re just a cog in a long line of cogs. So if you really want to build an online presence, this isn’t the way to go.

The next thing about going through Blogger that isn’t so great is that because it is technically their site and not yours, they can yank it out from under you at any time that they want. You have absolutely no say in the matter. If they think it’s a spam blog, that’s it, you’re history. So you have no control over what happens to your blog. Also, there are only so many looks you can choose for your blog because they only give you so many templates. In addition to that, the functionality of a blog hosted at Blogger is also limited.

Now, with WordPress, you can pretty much do anything you like. You get your own domain, can choose any themes you want, can add as much functionality to your blog as you want and ultimately end up with your own web site. Sounds perfect, right? Almost. There are downsides.

For one, you need to get your own domain, which costs money. So WordPress is not a free option in that sense. Plus, you have to install it yourself. Oh sure you can get somebody to do it for you but there is still more work involved. Plus, the learning curve for really putting up a WordPress blog that is second to none is quite steep. My first WordPress blog is still primitive in relation to what you can do with it.

So there you have it. The good and bad, pros and cons to having your own blog using WordPress or going through a site like Blogger.

It all comes down to what’s more important to you. Ease of use or having your own web presence.

Some choices are easier than others. This is one of the tough ones.

Is Technorati Worth It?

I know a lot of bloggers around the world seem to think technorati is one of the top or if not the top blogging tool for exposure, but to me it seems like a mostly one sided affair.

Technorati get much more out of your service than you do out of theirs, for example if you use their in-text keyword or linking service – How exactly does this benefit you? To my knowledge few people use technorati as a search engine to actually find blogs or content. It now seems to be dominated by webmasters rather than users. It’s rather the case that people are referred TO technorati from people who use their tools and then those people find other blogs than people going to technorati first hand to find content and blogs.

It could be more of a traffic losing tool than a traffic promoter. Sure you will be listed on their database and keywords will be stored – Wow! that’s it? The probability that you will get traffic from them is very low. The probability that you will send them traffic is very high (especially if you use keywording).

As for SEO I doubt technorati adds anything to your sites popularity, indexing returns nothing on google and other top search engines.

So why do people continue to use what seems like a ‘one way’ service. I’m afraid the ‘name factor’ is in effect once again. Similar to other social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, simpy, flurl etc, submitting to these sites is not likely to bring you any traffic and do very little for your websites popularity. The fact is you are doing more for them than they are doing for you. Digg is the exception where their indexing system seems to be much better for search engines and this could do some good, or over-exposure, bad, for your sites popularity.

So why do people continue to submit to these sites? Because everybody else does, it seems. What I like to call a ‘web trend myth’, where a service is so hyped and well known (hence the ‘name factor’) that bloggers and webmasters think that the service must do something good for their website whereas in reality webmasters and bloggers are doing more for the ‘myth’ sites.

Jimmy McGrath of Affiliate Programs Cash has been an Internet marketer / advertiser for the last 5 years, working for various companies and now freelance. In the last year he has been researching the advertising and marketing strategies of internet entrepreneurs. He is also a cross-culture educational expert and has lectured at several universities across Canada and the USA.

3 Tips To make Amazing Blogs

Here are 3 time-tested tips to create amazing blogs:

1) Be unique, or controversial

Unique and controversial blogs are the most talked about in the online world. However you don’t want to cross the line and discuss anything religious or sexual (unless of course, a pornography blog is your intention). You can create a blog in a competitive niche, but put your own spin onto the topic, so no one else has a blog like yours.

2) Invest in some awesome graphics

While the standard templates in most blogging platforms are good enough for most people, they shouldn’t be for you! Invest in some professional graphics so that your blog is more visually appealing. It’ll pay off in the end and your readers will love the fact that you have made things easier for their eyes!

3) Google-boost your blog

Boost your blog in Google’s search engine rankings by educating your genius marketing mind on search engine optimization. Most people use the search engines to search for information. Because of this, it’ll be beneficial if you write your articles and entries so that they are optimized for the search engines. Think of what keywords you visitors might type into Google, and use the best ones in your entry titles and sprinkle them in your copy so that your blog is relevant to Google…

What Makes a Good Blogger?

list of 5 traits that a good blogger should have.

Be Personal
A good blogger should provide insight and a touch of their personal side while writing. The information offered should not be recycled, but fresh and informative (especially on a marketing blog). A blogger should be responsive to their audience, be easily accessible, respond to comments and provide dialog that’s easy to make sense of.

Have a Personality
The blogger personality is a huge key when it comes to having your audience like you or hate you. This is where it gets tricky – you want to be somewhere between ‘liked’ and ‘hated’. You want to be hated enough to cause a little controversy and discussion amongst your readers, but likable enough that even those that hate you will come back to read more. Make sense?

Be Passionate
If you’re not passionate about what you’re writing about, it shows and your readers will know it. You shouldn’t have to struggle when writing a post – it should come naturally. If this isn’t the case, you’re writing on the wrong subject. Have fun while writing and don’t force yourself too much.

Post Pictures
Every now and then post a photo to go along with your post. It doesn’t have to be a photo of yourself (although you could do that too), but a photo related to whatever your post happens to be about. For example, I try to post at least one photo along with each post I make, but sometimes I don’t post any. I like to switch it up a bit.

Stay Focused
If your blog is about detailing cars, don’t write about your political opinions – it’s pretty straight forward. Most blogs I visit like to freestyle on the weekends and break a few of the rules. This is good because it gives the reader a chance to see what else you can write about. But remember, 99% of the time your content should match your title. Your readers were attracted to your blog in the first place because of its subject; try to keep their focus (and yours) as much as possible.

kajal

Sraddha Arya