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Saturday, June 14, 2008

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Hello readers,
You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?
Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.
1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.
Http://www.bloglet.com
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)
http://www.my.yahoo.com
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.
http://www.pingomatic.com
5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com
6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.
9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.
10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.
12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.
To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm
13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts
14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.
15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).
16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.
Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com
Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at
http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Denise_Wakeman
See you at the top !

Thursday, June 12, 2008

How to Use Small Sites to Sell Affiliate Products

Woww !

I want you to relax and enjoy the basic secrets of making money on line with small sites or blogs.

I sell a lot of hard products from these types of sites. (By hard products, I mean stuff you actually have to ship.) I'll set up a site for a particular niche, then write a lot of product descriptions. These are not just a quick line or two. I want my site to lend some kind of value to the process! But I do not include everything, and at the bottom of the description, I'll usually write something like:
"To get the details, see Amazon's description."
All or part of that sentence is a link to Amazon with my affiliate code in it. As soon as my prospect clicks on that link, I'll get credit for the sale--for the duration of Amazon's cookie.
Now that you know what an affiliate site is, let me warn you about something--not a big thing, but just something you need to be aware of.
Google doesn't like sites that are too thin.
If your site is merely a series of pages with affiliate links, or with bare bones product descriptions (especially if you cut and pasted them from the affiliate merchant's own product description), then Google tends not to like this.
Currently they have human editors who evaluate sites and if they meet a certain number of criteria, then they are flagged as "thin affiliate sites" (a pejorative in Google's eyes).
To avoid this, let me tell you what you need on your site so that Google feels like you have enough substance there to give your visitors a valuable experience.
Despite what I said about slipperiness, you don't want to just give the bare essentials. A little opinion of your own will go a long way toward keeping Google happy.
Having articles that discuss aspects of what you're selling are a good idea. You might want to compare one popular item to competitor's item.
As an advanced topic, if you can manage a price comparison chart, Google loves that. How to do that is beyond this article, but with a little work on the web, you can figure that out.
Finally, you need a contact page with a real address and phone number. I'm not sure if the address needs to be totally "legitimate" or not. I rent a box from UPS that I use as the address of most of my sites. Needless to say I don't use my own home phone number!
If you make your site useful, then you should be okay. I've not had any problem with Google discounting my sites, even though I have many, many of them that don't even have the bare essentials I mentioned.
When I build a new site, however, I try to keep it within Google's guidelines.
Let me just reiterate--I love thin affiliate sites. I've had great success with them. You can, too. Don't worry about Google too much. Just build the site and see what happens.
To learn more about how to promote your website, download my free ebook:
Five Steps to Web Profits!
Lee Cole is an successful internet marketer who can help you get your internet business up and running, and most importantly--profitable! To learn more, visit Lee's website!
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lee_Cole