Do You Digg?

OK I know I lied, I just wanted to add one more post to my Create Blogs Traffic Series!

So here it is - Social Bookmarking sites (and also Social networking sites) have found huge popularity at the moment and therefore have huge amounts of traffic, including returning traffic.

It’s only recently that I have come across these sites through reading about them on other blogs, and decided to give them a try. Although it could be a bit of in the right place at the right time with the right subject, as obviously some topics are more popular and have a wider audience than others. But you never know who could be reading your blog and bookmark or digg it.

It seems the 2 most popular sites at the moment are:

• digg.com
• del.icio.us

digg.com

Briefly, you can share, bookmark and promote whatever is important to you and the digg community can then vote on it (digg), the more diggs your story gets the more popular your story becomes and the further up the page (in your topic) it appears.

del.icio.us

Again briefly, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where you can keep all your bookmarks in one place and see what other people are bookmarking, it’s a lot of fun.

These are only 2 sites there are many more, and I’d imagine by looking at the sites if you did start to be noticed, it would have a snowball effect. So you can see if your blog became popular through one of these sites it could transform you traffic results. So if you like my blog, you might like to bookmark it!

Create Blogs

Want a bit of Link Love!

Link Love!

I am coming to the end of my blog traffic series for creating blogs, and I would like to point out that they have not been posted in any particular order, and that there are obviously a lot more ways to get traffic to your blog. It’s just these are the main ones that I have come across on my travels and use.

It’s been very interesting to write, as I realise that recently I haven’t used some of the techniques as much as I should, and links is one of them.

Don’t be an ‘insular blogger’ , you will hear a lot about this from experienced bloggers - participate in the blogging community and spread a bit of ‘link love’ (and the does and dont's), and they are right. I should do this more, I don’t do enough, but it’s just been finding the time! I think that’s more a call for me to be more organised.

So what is ‘link love’. Well, when you join in on blogging message boards or forums then you can leave a link at the end of your message taking them to your blog. Or when reading another blog and you decide to leave a comment or join a blog roll, then again you can put in a link to your blog. Now I always try to think about my comments and try to do it when I have something constructive to say, rather than spamming my link all over the place, because you’re not going to get thanked for that, and remember they’ll know your blog address!

Now, there’s 2 chances to get more traffic to your blog, and if you happen to link on higher traffic blogs than yours, then those chances start to look even better. But don’t abuse it, comment and link with respect and you’ll have a good name in the blogging community. Blog to help each other out and you’ll get the most out of blogging. And I will make sure I join in this great community more!

Creating Blogs

Get Traffic from Emails!

So how can you get traffic to your blog from emails?

Add your blog address to your email signature like we did with forums. You can add a message to the signature, inviting your recipient to pass your information on to a friend if they enjoyed your blog.

Then every time you email your list (if you have one) or family or friends, then your blog address is sent with it, giving you more exposure. And hopefully if they do enjoy your blog and pass it on, then it can become viral and bring in traffic for your blog over some time!

Creating Blogs

Drive Targeted Traffic to your Blog using Google Adwords

Google Adwords is a great tool to drive targeted traffic to your blog. You can target specific keywords from your blog that you know people will be searching for. You’ll know the keywords from having done your research on search trends and competition when you set up your blog. Which obviously means you are putting your ad in front of a hungry audience (the best kind!).

Now there’s a lot of free and paid for information out there for Adwords. I started out by using Google Cash, it was recommended to me by a writing newsletter I subscribe to (Google Cash 3 has recently been released). I also subscribed to any free courses that I came across (they are after your email address but you can always unsubscribe afterwards).

But don’t forget Google itself! adwords.google.com explains exactly what adwords does and the best way to utilise it. It also has a help centre that’s crammed full of information, demo’s, guides, troubleshooting and FAQ’s. The information is useful and they take you through each step in producing an adwords ad. It’s all free to use, just sign up for an account and have a look around.

If you would like to see more then click on the Google Adwords button on the left.

Create Blogs

Classified Adverts - Online or Offline?

Just because you work online doesn’t mean all your promotion needs to be done online! So why not try an offline method, and place a classified advert in a local newspaper to drive traffic to your blog. Depending on where you live and which newspapers you pick, the fee can vary a lot from free to big money, so pick wisely!

Or you could place classified adverts online. Now if you searched in Google for classified ad sites I’m sure you would have a huge list. So I would like to talk about 2 sites for classified ads that already receive huge amounts of traffic every day. Craigslist.org and Ebay.com.

Craigslist
It’s a free classified ad site that’s world wide, and in the top 10 most visited sites in the world (= lots of traffic). You just pick a city and place a free classified ad promoting your blog. It doesn't really have to be near where you live, as your directing them to a blog, so they won’t be collecting something they have bought (depending on what you are selling!). The only problem I see with this, is you have to submit per city - rather than countries (as with Ebay), so you would have to submit to a few cities to help get traffic - I presume. It also defaults to the San Francisco Bay Area site, so you have to pick a city from there.

Ebay
Again another site in the top 10 most visited sites in the world. You can place a classified ad on Ebay ($10 for 30 days). Now it’s not an auction, you’re not selling anything, but you can promote your business or blog in them and hopefully drive traffic to your blog. I know this service is available in the US, but may not be available on all of Ebay's sites, so use ebay.com (it gets the most traffic).

And that’s 2 ways to get your links onto high traffic sites and hopefully drive even more traffic to your blog.

Create Blogs

Creating Blog Traffic with Forums

To be honest I have only recently started to use forums for creating blog traffic - and realised their potential. They are more than just somewhere to post your news and articles to, to enable you to generate traffic. They are communities that you can tap into, and interact with a wide range of people, make friends, ask questions, learn more and even make deals. All on top of the basic fact that they can drive traffic to your blog.

You can find a forum (or message board) on pretty much any subject you can think of. Search for ‘[your subject] forum’ and see what comes up.

I’ve recently joined the Warrior Forum which is an Internet Marketing forum. It’s really helpful and motivating reading the different threads. There’s the chance to see how other people do things, and the ability to network with a lot of people in your chosen field. When you start to post don’t forget to add your signature, where you can place links to your blog or any other site you would like to send traffic to. So every time you ask a question or reply to a post your signature is added and also the link to your blog, giving you more exposure. So the more questions and replies you make the more traffic you may be able to generate. The potential of forums is undeniable.

I was going to add another list here of forums, but I’ll let you explore on your own!

Creating Blogs

Search Engines - Get Yourself a Homepage!

Obviously there are loads of Search Engines that you can submit to. But I would like to concentrate on the top 3 that will bring you the majority of your Search Engine traffic:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. MSN

You submit to Search Engines so that they will go and crawl your site with their ‘bots’ and add you to their index. The time it takes them to do this varies, Google takes the longest, with MSN generally the quickest and Yahoo somewhere in between.

So can you speed the process up at all?

Well here is something you could try. Just remember it’s not guaranteed but the Search Engines won’t guarantee you get included even when they find you!

Get yourself a homepage

At Google go to google.com/or .co.uk and sign up for a personalised homepage - there will be a link to ‘get started’ with a personalised homepage. Once set up you will be able to add content to your homepage (your blog) using it’s feed, so every time you update your blog it will be updated on your homepage.

MSN and Yahoo are very similar to set up. You have to create a free email account, and after doing that follow the link to My MSN or My Yahoo and that is your homepage where you can again add content to it using the feed for your blog.

So the Search Engines will hopefully pick you up and index you quicker from seeing this activity.

Another way of doing this with MSN: just type your url into MSN search bar, when it doesn’t come up they will provide a link to ‘send us an address’, click that and submit your feed, easy!

Create Blogs - blog traffic series part 3

Are Articles the Best way to get Traffic?

Article submission is said to be one of the best ways to create traffic for your blogs, and also backlinks to your site (which helps with rankings). I think it is a really good method to use, although not the quickest. You basically open an account, which are generally free and submit your article for approval, which can take anywhere from a couple of days to a month, to be approved and posted depending on the site. Due to the fact that they are approved by humans!

There is software available to help you submit your articles, it’s not fully automated though, you have to login and pick categories etc. But they generally have lists of over 100 sites and do help speed the process up, it takes a bit of time to start with but it is well worth it. The article sites see automated submissions as spam and will not approve them.

The best part about article submission is that it is long lasting, each article can stay live on a site for up to 6 months (depending) and obviously the more you submit, then the amount of backlinks to your site keeps growing. You place the backlink which is anchor text for your site, in the authors biography box which is posted with the article. If your article is downloaded by ezine providers or other websites looking for content, they have to add your bio box as well. So you can see the potential.

Here’s a list of the more popular sites to get you going:-

• www.articlecity.com
• www.goarticles.com
• www.ezinearticles.com
• www.articlealley.com
• www.searchwarp.com
• www.usfreeads.com
• www.articledashboard.com
• www.a1articles.com
• www.ideadmarketers.com
• www.contentdesk.com
• www.isnare.com
• www.articlehub.com

Create Blogs - blog traffic series part 1

Creating Blog Traffic

Do you want to be seen?

So what's the next step? It’s getting seen, now it’s a great experience creating blogs and I love doing it, but it is so much better if you have someone to talk to, you need traffic and hopefully lots of it! Talking to yourself is not always good...

So what is the best ways to get traffic? Well there are 100’s of different things you could do, but here are a few I use:-

• Article Submission
• Blog Directories
• Search Engines
• Forums
• Classified Adverts
• Adwords
• Emails
• Links

Now to do them justice I am going to write about them as a series tackling one at a time, simply because they are that important and if I did them as one post it would be ridiculously long! So more on the subject soon...

Create Blogs